Anyone here have experience with language learning apps?

Looking for a recommendation. Im aware of Duolingo, Babbel, and Rosetta Stone but im finding it difficult to choose.

Duolingo isn't a tool for anyone who is actually serious about learning a language. It's either for people doing it casually for fun, or as a supplementary add-on when you want to do some easy drills. But using it without paying gives you an ad every 2 minutes so it's worthless even for that, and it's certainly not worth spending money on.

I loved Rosetta Stone but I've never seen another person ever agree, it is universally panned and most threads about it will be entirely people saying it's completely useless. It doesn't contain any english and is based on you figuring out meanings on your own using images and pattern recognition. (The idea being that it will stick in your head better if you make the connections yourself rather than just being told what something is equivalent to in english) If you think you'll become one of those people getting annoyed that it won't just tell you what the thing is, then I guess you should probably avoid it - though I think it's great.

I don't know Babbel.

I like Duolingo but yeah it's not great for most languages as a sole learning tool. It's great for giving you exercises to do consistently as practice.

Rosetta Stone when I used it is absolutely awful. Cannot anti-recommend enough. Huge waste of time and felt like I learned almost literally nothing from it. Admittedly this was like 10 years ago so maybe they've shaped up since but from what I've heard I doubt it.

I've never used Babbel.

In the half hour since i made this topic i downloaded Duolingo and did like 5 levels. i was assuming its so casual and easy because i just started out and theyd ramp up the difficulty and complexity. If its more or less the same format throughout just with added vocabulary i can see why youd shit on it.

im trying to learn a language my parents spoke around the house but i never learned to read or write, so being thrown right into it actually sounds a lot better for me.

Wow conflicting opinions my goodness.

Duolingo is more of a supplement then huh. Guess ill give Rosetta Stone a shot and see if i can see myself going the distance with it.

Or maybe mystery Babbel is the secret goat

I don't think Duolingo changes, but I'm not certain. I downloaded it at one point and said I already knew X amount and it threw me in a certain amount of lessons in and it seems to be all the same exercises that I see beginners do.

The silliest is when half the exercises are, like, "make this sentence into english" except its with set word options that you just have to put in order so it'll be like

Translate: P to english:
[dog] [in] [is] [park] [The] [the]

and its like, well, great, luckily I know english so I can just, like, not need to read the foreign sentence at all. but at least i'm learning english sentence construction!

I do think it starts throwing in more extra words in later chapters but yeah idk, multiple-choice anything is typically very easy mode for language learning and duolingo seems full of it

BrohanBlanco posted...

Wow conflicting opinions my goodness.

well i did say

Yeahhh the fact that its multiple choice makes it feel more like that Nintendo DS game i cant remember the name of instead of like, actually teaching me anything.

My brother used Duolingo a bunch and got annoyed they kept giving him sentences with "horse" when learning French and it was super dumbed down in general so he gave up

Rosetta Stone seems good for getting your first handle on the language and learning to think in it, but it starts to falter when things get more complex and it's harder to figure out the sentence structure

I used textbooks and several thousand Anki flashcards because I'm a madman.

There's also RATTATA, which in your case is probably optimal since it seems you can already speak it at least somewhat
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/2/285b5268.jpg

Thats funny

Seems sound too, really i just need to learn the alphabet and then i can put the rest together and practice more obscure vocabulary. i know common phrases and can get thru basic conversation and pleasantries. Obviously i can understand much better than i can speak, white-washed 2nd generation immigrants yktv. The written language might as well be the big rock carvings from One Piece.

i have no idea how rosetta stone teaches actual alphabets. i also don't really know how it'd work for someone who isn't starting from zero, i feel that's the target audience. depending on how much you know, it might take a really long to make you go through very basic sentences like "this is a boy" "this is a cat" "the cat is walking" for hours. idk if it has skips.

I have Babbel's lifetime membership. There are two parts, the automated lessons and the subscription live instruction that you have to pay extra for. I've stuck to the automated lessons because I'm poor.

I've had trouble sticking with it. I think they move on from some concepts too quickly (verbs, mostly), so you may want to invest in a notebook. They have a nice review option that's supposed to help you remember words more effectively, and you have options on how you want to review.

Dels posted...

i have no idea how rosetta stone teaches actual alphabets. i also don't really know how it'd work for someone who isn't starting from zero, i feel that's the target audience. depending on how much you know, it might take a really long to make you go through very basic sentences like "this is a boy" "this is a cat" "the cat is walking" for hours. idk if it has skips.

Rosetta Stone taught kana but not in a great way

Alphabets are easy though, just get a chart and practice writing words you know phonetically while bored at work until you've got the letters down

I've used both Duolingo and Babbel and they are fine for getting a basic understanding of the language, but they won't make you fluent. I'm currently working with a Portuguese tutor over Google Meet and it's been a lot more helpful.

No app is going to make you fluent. Duolingo is great to introduce you to the basics (grammar structures, basic vocabulary, common phrases), but you won't learn anything substantial until you invest on it. The only way to actually speak the language is by practicing speaking. For reading, start with children's stories or other simple media - playing a translated version of a game you're familiar with, for example. I used a Swedish translation of Pokemon Silver and it helped me a lot. Every time you don't know something, consult it. There are books (some for free, if you know where to look), as well as YouTube videos, that can complement almost any grammatical question you may have. We are in the age of Google Translate - don't know a word, search it. Watching TV series in English with subtitles of the language you want to learn is great, too. I used to watch American sitcoms in Sweden since they all had Swedish subtitles, and you would start picking up on words and sentences.

There's also very affordable online tutors depending on the language you're trying to learn. I learned some Uzbek before visiting Central Asia, and each lesson was the price of a cup of coffee.

Yeah I've been using duo more as a for fun hobby than anything serious. You can change it to not be multiple choice and instead be fully input from your keyboard, at least for mandarin, but that has the downside of being incredibly strict about things.

It can be a fun way to get exposure to a language but i feel like i was learning better when i was watching YouTube videos of children stories with simple words spoken slowly.

I've learned a bunch of languages (2 native, 2 classroom, 1 self-driven for a serious time, plus 3-5 very lightly/unseriously) and in general I'd say it's one of the things I'm best at in life. Here's how I see it.

#1 Above all else, everyone's brain is different. No one can tell you the best way that you can learn, you need to find it for yourself. That means trying a bunch of methods and seeing what sticks.

#2 You need to identify your goals. It's a completely different process to get a few phrases vs conversational vs business fluent vs fluent with family, etc. Different apps target different goals and different stages of learning.

#3 Contrary to popular belief, adults learn languages way faster than kids. You're expected to be able to string together some good sentences after just a few months of studying, and if you can't people will think you're an idiot (or that your teacher was terrible). So the process doesn't need to just work, it needs to be efficient. People say just read a bunch (aka comprehensive input) and yes that works, but if you can accelerate it with different strategies and apps, then why not.

In your case it seems like you can speak it already? That's very different from most people and thus many of these apps won't be very useful. Language is about speaking, so reading and writing is secondary and kinda academic. In that sense I do think a classroom is a pretty good way to learn those. I learned Russian in a class and handwriting was a huge focus, and I can still read/write it fluently today. I haven't had any success with handwriting apps at all.

If you don't care about handwriting, only typing (for example on a phone with autocomplete), then I think that falls into the same bucket as reading. You don't need an app at all then, just reading or watching things with target language subtitles. Train vocab with an anki-like if necessary (I like Memrise).

As for Duolingo, I have found it to be a critical but small part of learning from scratch. In general my learning process is:
Exposure > Produce basic sentences > Grammar > Vocab > Conversation

Duolingo is for steps 1 and 2 only, but it's SO important because that's the only way you can actually start learning. Dumb repetitive exposure is necessary, especially if it's a different script. It's also really boring, so the addictive gamification is necessary.

I used it for my self-driven from-scratch language (Japanese) and it was the only thing that worked for me after bouncing off many times. Overall I spent ~300 hours learning it over the course of 9 months, and only about 20 hours was Duolingo, but it was still the most important step. It went kinda like this:
Try studying character flashcards > bounce off for a few months > try character handwriting apps > bounce off > try vocab > bounce off > try Duolingo, which actually created a habit of exposure > finally did flashcards to memorize the characters with less exposure > after about 20 hours of Duolingo, switched to Youtube and blog posts for grammar learning > after about 100 hours of grammar, moved to HelloTalk for native conversation > added Memrise for top-500 words vocab training > continued regularly with grammar + HelloTalk + Memrise until the trip > dropped it all after the trip and got super rusty

hentai taught me how to ask for octopus

not sure if that helps

Well I was about to pay for Babbel to get better at Portuguese, but foolmo has kind of sold me on Duolingo...... now I'll probably try that first, since it's free, and I'm already kinda used to mentally blocking out ads

BrohanBlanco posted...

In the half hour since i made this topic i downloaded Duolingo and did like 5 levels. i was assuming its so casual and easy because i just started out and theyd ramp up the difficulty and complexity.

it pretty much keeps doing the same thing over and over again. you will very slowly and gradually be introduced to new vocab and stuff but
A. the format never changes
and
B. the amount of time it spends going over the SAME vocab is way, way too long and they never speed up the pace of learning. if anything it feels like it slows down over time.

for learning a language I'd say the best apps are the language specific ones, which make sense. whatever language you are trying to learn, it's best to pick an app that is SOLELY focused on the development and learning of language skills for THAT language. rather than a one-size-fits-all website like DuoLingo.

that being said I have had good experience with Memrise in the past. namely because it contains a library of user created lessons which means that if a user created a good lesson set for your language, you'll have access to that lesson set.

ultimately I still think the best option is to find an app that was specifically created for learning your language. think of it this way; if you wanted to learn baseball would you rather go to baseball camp or "sports" camp?

Omniscientless posted...

No app is going to make you fluent. Duolingo is great to introduce you to the basics (grammar structures, basic vocabulary, common phrases), but you won't learn anything substantial until you invest on it. The only way to actually speak the language is by practicing speaking. For reading, start with children's stories or other simple media - playing a translated version of a game you're familiar with, for example.

I also agree with this heavily. you need to pick up and learn from a variety of resources and make sure you work on all of your four major skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) equally. if you like DuoLingo, it's fine to keep using it as one of your language learning tools, but you need to show initiative and make effort into learning outside of just spamming DuoLingo lessons if you want to see real results.

If I can give any praise to DuoLingo it's that a lot of questions have a 'topic thread' attached to them which you can view after you answer the question. these user driven discussions usually give a LOT more detail and context which DuoLingo itself does not provide you.his can help a ton with learning. although essentially I'm just praising the people who comment in these threads more than I'm praising DuoLingo itself. knowing the rules for why something is a certain way, and the subtle differences between very similar vocabulary is super important and it's often glossed over by DuoLingo itself. t

Yeah I'm using Duolingo for Spanish atm. As foolmo said, the repetition and gamification of it is really helpful for learning some basic stuff. But also as others have said it has to be part of a larger effort, not the entire effort

There's basically no reason not to start with Duolingo, until it starts to feel too slow/easy.

Also I found the most addictive thing is climbing leaderboard ranks. I usually get to at least Ruby for a language.

I got a lifetime subscription for Babbel, though more out of just fun than anything. I'm not sure how good it is for actually learning languages.

I mostly got the lifetime subscription because I assume people will still speak French in 50 years.

Minor point, I got an ad from Babbel saying that they now have 1-on-1 tutoring available. Probably costs a lot, but it's something new.

foolm0r0n posted...

Also I found the most addictive thing is climbing leaderboard ranks.

I really don't get this, but I am aware that plenty of research + the apps being actually succesful show that this gamification works.

For me it was like, can I please just see the next exercise instead of getting YOU GOT TEN EXP, YOU LEVELED UP, YOU FOUND A GIFT every 20 seconds.

I can't get hooked on a reward system when they are literally meaningless. It's not like in a video game where it actually lets me fight stronger enemies or be more prepared for the boss.

Dels posted...

It's not like in a video game where it actually lets me fight stronger enemies or be more prepared for the boss.

It literally is though. Jump Here is the boss, and if you can't do it, you level up slowly through each increasingly difficult level. You can and should use Jump Here until you get to your comfort level though. I personally like to go beyond my ability (requires doing Jump Here over and over until you barely scrape by) so that I struggle more with the new lessons, since that feels more productive to me. This is all 100% analogous to an RPG game.

What's nice about the leaderboard is it's multiplayer and encourages more investment week over week, whereas the main content is all singleplayer and only encourages a steady daily 5 min to maintain your streak. I never cared too much about streak (even after getting over like 120) but the leaderboard works for me.

I can see it making more sense with that progress. I just downloaded it on a whim to check it out and placed myself X number of lessons in already so I had no stakes attached to my "progression" and didn't really intend to achieve anything with the app, so the notifications were just annoying. If I did a gamification app from the beginning it might have more of an effect.

Though my completionist nature would make me dislike the idea of skipping anything - I think my ideal app would need to have an appropriate progression baked in, because seeing every level get a checkmark or whatever is my own form of gamification that works for me...

They've tried like every permutation of exp, checkmarks, badges, awards, etc over the years. Every time I open it up the design is wildly different. I guess they are optimizing for some lowest common denominator person (or rather, the kind of person who actually pays). But there's always levels with checkmarks, and skipping does give you all the checkmarks too afaik.

There was a design a while back where beating a level did NOT give you a checkmark. You had to "master" it by doing it 5 times, then you got the checkmark. That was truly horrible, I stopped using it immediately.

B8 fr ong look at all this thoughtful discussion whyd i stop coming here

ill be fluent by november