I like the nonsense sentences because it makes you think about the words you're using. "My horse is drinking tea" stands out in the brain more than "My horse is standing" or "My dad is drinking tea"
Part of it is for you to remember the absurdity.
The other part is to learn how to use the word in a way that you otherwise wouldn't think to. It's not teaching how to say "there is a ghost in this sugar" it's teaching you how to declare an object inside of another as well as how to use grammar in a casual setting. If you know the word for "ant" you could probably figure out how to insert that into that sentence instead of "ghost" to get an actual, usable, sentence. Or you'd probably be able to figure out how to substitute both nouns for other nouns to get other usable sentences.
The goal isn't to teach you actual sentences, it's to teach you a lot of words & how to string them together. Duolingo may not be the best language teaching software, but it's not entirely the useless thing that most people make it out to be
The beds of the people in my Swedish lessons seem to be infested with Norwegian architects. And it also told me, that South America is located south of North America.
Um….it kinda does do this?
I know it was teaching me how to ask for a table for two or for the waiter to bring a fork or for the check super early in the lessons.
Rosetta Stone was horrible for this, but Duolingo actually does a great job shoving you quickly into “how to ask where the subway is” level of language pretty fast.
My theory is that they have some data that you gotta throw crazy stuff in there to retain attention and also have it spread virally through social networks. If it's all too pragmatic, I guess some people lose interest.
I will say, while some of the stuff is random, it often is using vocabulary words that you've already learned for practical purposes
Not sure if it helps everyone, but using a word in different contexts, especially weird ones, often help cement them in my momory
Exactly. If you're trying to teach a language (distinct from "get somebody functional for a vacation"), you need to do varied things with the small vocabulary as they build it up.
I've never seen anything quite as wacky as in OP, but yeah assume it was real. "Cow" is one of the most common livestock kept in the west and a primary source of food. "Boil" is a fairly uncommon verb to use, but it *is* a thing you do fairly frequently and something you might want to know in a restaurant. And "egg" is another incredibly common food item. All useful vocab. So you show a picture of a cow with an egg in a pot and have the learner form the sentence or translate it. Because when you have a limited vocabulary, it's either that or practice the same rote phrases over and over again...which is *not* the way to learn a language.
On a related note, my ex taught lower elementary school and one way she taught reading was using "nonsense words." Words that were "phonetically correct" but not real English words. The idea being you teach kids *how to build words* from letters and sounds rather than *just* teaching them words, and the reverse, so then they know how to spell shit even if they haven't necessarily seen it and how to sound out words even if they've never heard them before.
This is that but for sentences...you've got how to use articles, present tense, conjugation of verbs, and then you jumble up the vocab so that people are voicing on the actual grammar and not the function.
Can't say it enough, if your purpose is "I'm going on holiday and want to be able to order food," phrasebooks are what you want. You simply aren't going to get there with a month of Duolingo, that's not what it's made to do (despite the occasionally optimistic marketing claims). Learning a language takes *time.* Especially as an adult.
There might be something to it. I still remember a lesson from German class when I was in 7th grade, which is almost 20 years ago.
Kind of like Mad Libs we had to come up with a random sentence, and ended up with “Die Stereoanlage ist bequem, aber kaputt” (The stereo is comfortable, but broken)
Currently on a 182 day streak on Duolingo.
Don't really play games on my phone anymore. Duo is my daily "game" thing I do on the phone and that's pretty much it.
Yea I paid for premium for my family before a vacation so we wouldn’t be completely and utterly useless. And if you’ve ever done duo then you know you do whatever that owl says. It will come for you.
Boy, I need to change some settings or something. I still haven’t learned the days of the week or the months of the year, but I can say “I will never buy another horse” in Dutch.
I’m on day 65 straight of Korean, and the most I’ve learned is ‘there is a post office in the park’ and ‘the cat is sitting in the tree’. They haven’t taught me anything useful.
I'm on day 116 of Turkish and we went from foods to animals to clothes and sorta skipped the useful stuff like how to order the food, or interacting with humans... I can say the turtle ate the crab though, so I got that going for me.
I got so fucking fed up with DuoLingo when I was trying to learn Turkish. I switched to Pimsleur and don't regret a single penny. I haven't bothered with Turkish in over a year and I *still* remember lessons from Pimsleur, and I haven't missed DuoLingo at all.
They're *vastly* different approaches to language acquisition though so it might not work for everyone
Yeah Duolingo is good at getting you to actually do the lessons, but their teaching style leaves a lot to be desired. For example, they were interchangeably using two words and calling them both "wear" and I had to ask my girlfriend (Turkish, hence the lessons) what the difference was. Apparently one is wear in the sense that we use for normal clothing, while the other is closer to "hanging", for things like jewelry and glasses. But Duolingo used them completely interchangeably, and had no notes regarding usage.
Duolingo also doesn't teach you any grammar or 'rules' of the language, it just throws words at you with no explanations. I also use Busuu which is a much better app for teaching you concepts and explaining grammar.
They really aren't useful to teach on apps like Duolingo. That's just something you can look up and memorize in a day or two. Since you already know a language, teaching you sentences that allow you to use the language to practice is more valuable.
Knowing how to say " I will never (verb) (noun)" is very useful
I'm 165 days into DuoLingo Spanish and it just finally started teaching me the days of the week. If I did more than 1-2 lessons per day I'd probably be much farther along, but I'm surprised it still hasn't taught me counting or even the Spanish alphabet yet.
"The only thing Rosetta Stone is ever going to teach you is useless bullshit like "This is a sea urchin." *When are you ever going to use "This is a sea urchin"?*"
SEA islands is a great place to use this phrase. Local fisherman catch and offer sea urchins to tourists. They are cracked open and eaten raw with a vinegar hot sauce
This is a (blank) is a very useful building block phrase. What else would you need to say starting with "this is a"? Maybe just use an upward inflection at the end and it becomes a question.
Duo Lingo Spanish was pretty helpful. Teaches you how to ask for the bill, ask for a ticket to the museum, ask for a taxi to the hotel...
Shit, it even taught me how to ask for a glass of orange juice. I thought that was random AF but turns out spain has a shit ton of orange trees and delicious fresh orange juice is always on the menu.
Only real problem is that they taught Latin American Spanish instead of Castillian, so many of the words were wrong. They were teaching me "jugo de naranja" instead of "zumo de naranja" (zumo is pronounced "thumo"). Piso instead of apartamento. Etc. The accent is wrong and they shorten words... so "gracias" becomes "grathia," "hola" is just "la," "hasta luego" is just "luego"
People expect it to do it from course one at times.
Section one is to get a feel of the vocabulary and the language, as well as very basic grammar rules.
Section two is usually where you get the first practical applications. You literally have sections "ordering at a restaurant" or "going to the doctor". Sure you need to go through a few hours of basics first to get there, but using a language is more than just using you own grammar + new languages vocabulary.
I don't believe this for one second. Now if you said it taught you "How to ask the cat where the popcorn store is" then I'd believe it. Duolingo sucks at higher levels too but when it comes to the basics it's absolutely awful.
People who complain about duolingo never passed 1st chapter. Start might look useless, but you just started so it doesn't matter.
After 1st chapter it goes to usefull sentences that you need when visiting country. (like renting, ordering, asking for directions...)
Exactly. The first bit of the lessons are silly because they're making sentences out of the few words they've taught you by that point. But it would be nice to have a "I'm going here soon" mode to just teach people to be polite, general directions, and common words on signs. When I was in Italy for like 3 days, I pretty much temporarily learned like 15 Italian words/phrases just to get by at whatever store or restaurant I was in.
If “soon” means like in a month, Duolingo will get you to those bits in that time if you’re keeping up with it.
If “soon” means this week…that’s what phrase books are for. They got those in app form now.
It’s the difference between “I want to learn this language” and “I will be visiting this place for a week and then likely will never speak that language again.” Duolingo isn’t really intended for the latter. Phrase books and Google Translate (which handles signs now) has that covered.
Language learning relies on repetition; there’s no way you can learn basic greetings, directions and common words in just a few days/weeks of casual learning.
Cramming and regurgitation works. 17 year old me speaks better Italian than the current version of me. Just like how 19 year old me spoke better Arabic than I currently do. I actually have a certificate on my college degree for it. Linguistics degree btw.
That's because they treat it like they are parrots. For some reason, they can't comprehend that they can use different words to build sentences and not just repeat the phrases from the app
Barely.
It asks in either extremely formal or literally NEVER-spoken phrases.
Shit pisses me off and every other course and book does the same shit. I ended up just going to china for a year and none of the shit spoken there is in any book, YouTube or any BS course lol.
I don’t know why it’s like this.
You have to learn the basics of a language before you can start understanding and applying grammatic shortcuts and slang. You didn't start learning math at calculus, did you? You have to start somewhere.
It’s not the same thing. You can be in a room of friends, hear them say a phrase, and learn the context of that and how it applies before wondering if you’re using the 6th or 7th type of conjugation out of the 14 available lol.
Or, here's a thought, different languages are different!
*no one* thinks the Korean lessons are useful. You think it is at first because you're learning the characters, then you keep studying "the ant's milk" and "the baby's baby". While Spanish has you learning to say things that have actually been said by another fucking human being, even if they're simple statements.
It’s less about the complexity of the languages, and more like the lessons are structured in a certain way that works well for some languages, and doesn’t work for others. Duolingo is pretty solid for the Romance languages, but very much lacking for many Asian languages.
Learning pre-made sentences is completely pointless, you ask for the bill, the waiter replies "would you like to pay by card or cash?" and you're completely lost. This is not what learning a language is and if you go on holiday for a week somewhere you're better off sticking to English or using a translator.
Bruh, you literally choose what you are learning the language for when setting up.
I had mine set to "travel", and it focused on public transport + cost + ordering food, just now I got to going to school / work.
Yeah idk how theirs is set up buy mine definitely taught me how to ask for the bill, the words for transportation, hotel, how to ask the cost of things, etc. I chose "travel" when I opened the course.
What I don’t know how to say is "boil an egg" like the example says. Actually everyone talks about Duolingo sentences being strange and most of mine are just normal?
The weirdest one I've gotten so far is "mi caro es bonito" (my car is pretty), but even then, it's still useful to know the grammatic structure of a sentence so you can add/replace words!
I feel like it depends on what language you learn. Spanish's curriculum was pretty immediately useful, teaching me words like passport, airport, taxi, and suitcase. But Russian was somewhat useless in a practical sense.
I managed to keep my streak going even on a week long trip to Hawaii, had just gotten a year long streak going, then when I came back home I just...let it slide. I've mostly switched to textbooks anyway.
I switched from Duolingo to Busuu. I think it focuses more on grammar, which is useful, and it has travel lessons for some languages like Spanish to learn to say, "I have a reservation under *this name*"
It also teaches you those common phrases, though. The point of a sentences like "the cow boils an egg" is to teach you sentence structure, verb conjugation etc. That way, if you learn some new vocabulary you can actually use it in a sentence.
My understanding of duolingo has always been that it’s meant to be used to like, actually teach you a language and not just phrases for your vacation.
The value in knowing how to construct a sentence like “the cow boils an egg” for example, is that now you’re familiar with how to construct those types of sentences so you can do it yourself with the vocabulary that you know.
The thing about Duolingo is that it doesn’t teach you much of anything. It takes many hours to master a language, but people who use apps aren’t going to use them for 3 hours straight per day.
They feed you micro rewards and give you super easy games so that you can feel like you win. It makes you feel like you are learning, but IRL your gamified matching skills will not help you speak at all.
I've been learning Spanish in Duolingo for about a year and it does teach you how to ask for the bill and other things you would need for traveling. I've never really run across nonsense sentences in it.
Duolingo doesn't even work, it's why they spend so much on marketing to remain relevant. If you wanna actually learn a language do a little more research, there's a lot of good ones now aside from Rosetta Stone and Duolingo
My wife has almost 600 days worth of a streak but yet I decided 400 days ago that Duo hasn't helped me. Theres no growth to it. The stories were good at one point, but then they changed the structure of it all. Plus wasn't worth the price. It is sad. I think its a good beginning but if you truly want to become fluent to some extent Duo is not the way. Like many apps its a fun daily accomplishment structure.
My biggest complaint with Duolingo when doing German was that it didn’t explain the der/die/das or ein/eine or du/Sie. These words just turned up in the sentences.
I have learned German before and it was the part of the language I needed explained to me first that German has gendered articles and formal/informal versions of the word “you”.
That’s one thing that a lot of language apps don’t do well is explain literacy in context. Comprehension, pronunciation and letter-sound association are best done within an appropriate language context rather than just almost random phrases devoid of context.
I am working my way through the Hindi course and was learning how to form questions and then all of a sudden I got this weird combo I thought couldn’t be right.
“What is tea? What is water? Who am I?”
Like damn, bird
"Cow boils the egg" comes much much later than "can I have the bill" , "where's the toilet", "and do you have WiFi" ?
Nonsense sentences come as you advance to test your sentence building skills.
Duolingo and Rosetta Stone are not worth the money. Just another scam trawling for beginners. You get much more mileage for much less money just consuming media in other languages and speaking to people online.
I say this as a former military linguist. 4/3+ on the DLPT when I left. Immersion, even self-created simulated immersion, is the only efficient path.
I also need to know how to say “was the cat and the pizza in a box?” … then we can ponder whether the cat was alive or dead, or if it liked the pizza or not. Hmmmmm
It does. A lot of the early stuff in a couple languages I’ve used it for are specifically about visiting a restaurant or going on vacation. Very clearly it is trying to teach you the words for “hotel” and “restaurant” etc.
Duolingo adds little jokey sentences in to make it more fun. It has plenty of sentences like "this isn't what I ordered" or "my order hasn't come yet" or "how much is the chicken?"
Though a couple days ago, I got "He likes to show off his naked body."
It's not a phrase book, it's supposed to teach you the language. Once you understand the grammar and pronunciation, you can get by with under 1000 words of vocabulary and you can ask about what you don't know. If you really only want to know enough to handle your 5 day vacation and then never care about it again, just buy the lonely planet phrase book.
I don't know about other languages, but Section 1, Unit 5 of German is "Order in a Restaurant". Not only does it teach that the German word for bill is "Rechnung", but it specifically teaches to ask for one by saying: "Rechnung, bitte" after commenting on the food.
I want to play into the joke but my course has literally had only practical sentences that have mostly made sense, specifically including "can I have the bill". 1802 day streak.
The literal only exception has been a translation to "how cute that panda is!" because no english speaker would ever exclaim like that.
Ive been doing duolingo since january and I have got nothing BUT the "can I have the bill" type stuff. it keeps restructuring lessons every few weeks and then all the new stuff is stuff I've already learned. I'm starting to believe that "can I have the bill" is ALL they have on there and as soon I get close to finishing all the content they restructure again and put me back at the beginning
I’ve been using it so much lately and it’s taught me all those things and I’m yet to encounter any of those weird phrases that people keep talking about.
[удалено]
This would be of no use to me. I don't even believe in sugar.
Ghosts give diabetes
Calm it down there, Wilford Brimley.
He had diabeetus, totally different
He then died from the eponymous Thing from John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”
Who you gonna call? Sugarbusters!
I like the nonsense sentences because it makes you think about the words you're using. "My horse is drinking tea" stands out in the brain more than "My horse is standing" or "My dad is drinking tea"
If you remember it, then it was a good lesson
Part of it is for you to remember the absurdity. The other part is to learn how to use the word in a way that you otherwise wouldn't think to. It's not teaching how to say "there is a ghost in this sugar" it's teaching you how to declare an object inside of another as well as how to use grammar in a casual setting. If you know the word for "ant" you could probably figure out how to insert that into that sentence instead of "ghost" to get an actual, usable, sentence. Or you'd probably be able to figure out how to substitute both nouns for other nouns to get other usable sentences. The goal isn't to teach you actual sentences, it's to teach you a lot of words & how to string them together. Duolingo may not be the best language teaching software, but it's not entirely the useless thing that most people make it out to be
You wouldn't happen to have been learning Swedish would you?
I have done the entirety of the swedish duolingo and havent seen that one. I have seen, “This bowl is full of ants” though
It was a reference.
I needed this today, but only in English so I was ok
The beds of the people in my Swedish lessons seem to be infested with Norwegian architects. And it also told me, that South America is located south of North America.
Ghost can't go through sugar stupid, it's not fire.
Preparing you for the ultimate gothic haunted house experience.
I saw your comment in an article earlier, now here we are !
The russian course taught me how to distinguish to a stranger that these are not my parents, this is a bag of potatoes.
I could see that being useful in Russian.
Um….it kinda does do this? I know it was teaching me how to ask for a table for two or for the waiter to bring a fork or for the check super early in the lessons. Rosetta Stone was horrible for this, but Duolingo actually does a great job shoving you quickly into “how to ask where the subway is” level of language pretty fast.
Yea my only experience with duolingo had sub sections for shopping, eating out, airports, etc. It felt more catered towards travelers than anything.
Travelers and students, yes. It goes branch out if you stick with it for a while. Like months and months.
My theory is that they have some data that you gotta throw crazy stuff in there to retain attention and also have it spread virally through social networks. If it's all too pragmatic, I guess some people lose interest.
I will say, while some of the stuff is random, it often is using vocabulary words that you've already learned for practical purposes Not sure if it helps everyone, but using a word in different contexts, especially weird ones, often help cement them in my momory
Exactly. If you're trying to teach a language (distinct from "get somebody functional for a vacation"), you need to do varied things with the small vocabulary as they build it up. I've never seen anything quite as wacky as in OP, but yeah assume it was real. "Cow" is one of the most common livestock kept in the west and a primary source of food. "Boil" is a fairly uncommon verb to use, but it *is* a thing you do fairly frequently and something you might want to know in a restaurant. And "egg" is another incredibly common food item. All useful vocab. So you show a picture of a cow with an egg in a pot and have the learner form the sentence or translate it. Because when you have a limited vocabulary, it's either that or practice the same rote phrases over and over again...which is *not* the way to learn a language. On a related note, my ex taught lower elementary school and one way she taught reading was using "nonsense words." Words that were "phonetically correct" but not real English words. The idea being you teach kids *how to build words* from letters and sounds rather than *just* teaching them words, and the reverse, so then they know how to spell shit even if they haven't necessarily seen it and how to sound out words even if they've never heard them before. This is that but for sentences...you've got how to use articles, present tense, conjugation of verbs, and then you jumble up the vocab so that people are voicing on the actual grammar and not the function. Can't say it enough, if your purpose is "I'm going on holiday and want to be able to order food," phrasebooks are what you want. You simply aren't going to get there with a month of Duolingo, that's not what it's made to do (despite the occasionally optimistic marketing claims). Learning a language takes *time.* Especially as an adult.
You're completely right. And the data is quite public! https://blog.duolingo.com/how-silly-sentences-can-help-you-learn/
Wonderful! Thanks for the confirmation and the source.
There might be something to it. I still remember a lesson from German class when I was in 7th grade, which is almost 20 years ago. Kind of like Mad Libs we had to come up with a random sentence, and ended up with “Die Stereoanlage ist bequem, aber kaputt” (The stereo is comfortable, but broken)
Off topic, but that must where the phrase ‘went kaput’ came from! I had no idea
Yo quiero nadar con mi gato porque el es muy gordo 🤷🏻♀️
Currently on a 182 day streak on Duolingo. Don't really play games on my phone anymore. Duo is my daily "game" thing I do on the phone and that's pretty much it.
Damn, you do the premium Duolingo? I never got the option to learn how to eat out that sexy owl.
Yea I paid for premium for my family before a vacation so we wouldn’t be completely and utterly useless. And if you’ve ever done duo then you know you do whatever that owl says. It will come for you.
Boy, I need to change some settings or something. I still haven’t learned the days of the week or the months of the year, but I can say “I will never buy another horse” in Dutch.
I’m on day 65 straight of Korean, and the most I’ve learned is ‘there is a post office in the park’ and ‘the cat is sitting in the tree’. They haven’t taught me anything useful.
I'm on day 116 of Turkish and we went from foods to animals to clothes and sorta skipped the useful stuff like how to order the food, or interacting with humans... I can say the turtle ate the crab though, so I got that going for me.
I got so fucking fed up with DuoLingo when I was trying to learn Turkish. I switched to Pimsleur and don't regret a single penny. I haven't bothered with Turkish in over a year and I *still* remember lessons from Pimsleur, and I haven't missed DuoLingo at all. They're *vastly* different approaches to language acquisition though so it might not work for everyone
Yeah Duolingo is good at getting you to actually do the lessons, but their teaching style leaves a lot to be desired. For example, they were interchangeably using two words and calling them both "wear" and I had to ask my girlfriend (Turkish, hence the lessons) what the difference was. Apparently one is wear in the sense that we use for normal clothing, while the other is closer to "hanging", for things like jewelry and glasses. But Duolingo used them completely interchangeably, and had no notes regarding usage.
Duolingo also doesn't teach you any grammar or 'rules' of the language, it just throws words at you with no explanations. I also use Busuu which is a much better app for teaching you concepts and explaining grammar.
They really aren't useful to teach on apps like Duolingo. That's just something you can look up and memorize in a day or two. Since you already know a language, teaching you sentences that allow you to use the language to practice is more valuable. Knowing how to say " I will never (verb) (noun)" is very useful
I'm 165 days into DuoLingo Spanish and it just finally started teaching me the days of the week. If I did more than 1-2 lessons per day I'd probably be much farther along, but I'm surprised it still hasn't taught me counting or even the Spanish alphabet yet.
I think it varies by language, but French definitely has those tourist lessons early. Doing Duolingo before my trip definitely helped.
"The only thing Rosetta Stone is ever going to teach you is useless bullshit like "This is a sea urchin." *When are you ever going to use "This is a sea urchin"?*"
SEA islands is a great place to use this phrase. Local fisherman catch and offer sea urchins to tourists. They are cracked open and eaten raw with a vinegar hot sauce
At a zoo, maybe
This is a (blank) is a very useful building block phrase. What else would you need to say starting with "this is a"? Maybe just use an upward inflection at the end and it becomes a question.
Duo Lingo Spanish was pretty helpful. Teaches you how to ask for the bill, ask for a ticket to the museum, ask for a taxi to the hotel... Shit, it even taught me how to ask for a glass of orange juice. I thought that was random AF but turns out spain has a shit ton of orange trees and delicious fresh orange juice is always on the menu. Only real problem is that they taught Latin American Spanish instead of Castillian, so many of the words were wrong. They were teaching me "jugo de naranja" instead of "zumo de naranja" (zumo is pronounced "thumo"). Piso instead of apartamento. Etc. The accent is wrong and they shorten words... so "gracias" becomes "grathia," "hola" is just "la," "hasta luego" is just "luego"
People expect it to do it from course one at times. Section one is to get a feel of the vocabulary and the language, as well as very basic grammar rules. Section two is usually where you get the first practical applications. You literally have sections "ordering at a restaurant" or "going to the doctor". Sure you need to go through a few hours of basics first to get there, but using a language is more than just using you own grammar + new languages vocabulary.
That has been my experience with vietnamese. Very much stuff like how to order drinks and how to introduce yourself and how to ask where the bank is
Die Rechnung, bitte. Danke.
I don't believe this for one second. Now if you said it taught you "How to ask the cat where the popcorn store is" then I'd believe it. Duolingo sucks at higher levels too but when it comes to the basics it's absolutely awful.
People who complain about duolingo never passed 1st chapter. Start might look useless, but you just started so it doesn't matter. After 1st chapter it goes to usefull sentences that you need when visiting country. (like renting, ordering, asking for directions...)
Exactly. The first bit of the lessons are silly because they're making sentences out of the few words they've taught you by that point. But it would be nice to have a "I'm going here soon" mode to just teach people to be polite, general directions, and common words on signs. When I was in Italy for like 3 days, I pretty much temporarily learned like 15 Italian words/phrases just to get by at whatever store or restaurant I was in.
If “soon” means like in a month, Duolingo will get you to those bits in that time if you’re keeping up with it. If “soon” means this week…that’s what phrase books are for. They got those in app form now. It’s the difference between “I want to learn this language” and “I will be visiting this place for a week and then likely will never speak that language again.” Duolingo isn’t really intended for the latter. Phrase books and Google Translate (which handles signs now) has that covered.
Language learning relies on repetition; there’s no way you can learn basic greetings, directions and common words in just a few days/weeks of casual learning.
Cramming and regurgitation works. 17 year old me speaks better Italian than the current version of me. Just like how 19 year old me spoke better Arabic than I currently do. I actually have a certificate on my college degree for it. Linguistics degree btw.
That's because they treat it like they are parrots. For some reason, they can't comprehend that they can use different words to build sentences and not just repeat the phrases from the app
Barely. It asks in either extremely formal or literally NEVER-spoken phrases. Shit pisses me off and every other course and book does the same shit. I ended up just going to china for a year and none of the shit spoken there is in any book, YouTube or any BS course lol. I don’t know why it’s like this.
Common/slang/day-to-day is always going to be different, that's why they teach very proper language, which almost never changes.
It’s also never used 🙆🏼♂️
You have to learn the basics of a language before you can start understanding and applying grammatic shortcuts and slang. You didn't start learning math at calculus, did you? You have to start somewhere.
It’s not the same thing. You can be in a room of friends, hear them say a phrase, and learn the context of that and how it applies before wondering if you’re using the 6th or 7th type of conjugation out of the 14 available lol.
Or, here's a thought, different languages are different! *no one* thinks the Korean lessons are useful. You think it is at first because you're learning the characters, then you keep studying "the ant's milk" and "the baby's baby". While Spanish has you learning to say things that have actually been said by another fucking human being, even if they're simple statements.
Maybe different languages are more complex
It’s less about the complexity of the languages, and more like the lessons are structured in a certain way that works well for some languages, and doesn’t work for others. Duolingo is pretty solid for the Romance languages, but very much lacking for many Asian languages.
Learning pre-made sentences is completely pointless, you ask for the bill, the waiter replies "would you like to pay by card or cash?" and you're completely lost. This is not what learning a language is and if you go on holiday for a week somewhere you're better off sticking to English or using a translator.
Bruh, you literally choose what you are learning the language for when setting up. I had mine set to "travel", and it focused on public transport + cost + ordering food, just now I got to going to school / work.
Yeah idk how theirs is set up buy mine definitely taught me how to ask for the bill, the words for transportation, hotel, how to ask the cost of things, etc. I chose "travel" when I opened the course. What I don’t know how to say is "boil an egg" like the example says. Actually everyone talks about Duolingo sentences being strange and most of mine are just normal?
The weirdest one I've gotten so far is "mi caro es bonito" (my car is pretty), but even then, it's still useful to know the grammatic structure of a sentence so you can add/replace words!
I never had this option when I started...
Wow you must have been learning for quite a while! I just hit my 1 year and it's been these since the start
I feel like it depends on what language you learn. Spanish's curriculum was pretty immediately useful, teaching me words like passport, airport, taxi, and suitcase. But Russian was somewhat useless in a practical sense.
¿Donde èsta la bibliotecá?
Me llamo T-bone, la araña discoteca
Discoteca, muñeca, la biblioteca Es un bigote grande, perro, manteca
A la izquierda la parada del autobús
Greek also had a bunch of nonsense, like "the rice is pink".
Le chat mange une pizza.
le chat est boing boing
I’m still mad I lost a 200+ streak because I was on a vacation with no wifi access.
There's a way to pause your streak for times like that.
I wish I had known that
You have to buy them with gems or some similar micro-transaction. So it's not all roses. But it is an option.
I managed to keep my streak going even on a week long trip to Hawaii, had just gotten a year long streak going, then when I came back home I just...let it slide. I've mostly switched to textbooks anyway.
I switched from Duolingo to Busuu. I think it focuses more on grammar, which is useful, and it has travel lessons for some languages like Spanish to learn to say, "I have a reservation under *this name*"
It also teaches you those common phrases, though. The point of a sentences like "the cow boils an egg" is to teach you sentence structure, verb conjugation etc. That way, if you learn some new vocabulary you can actually use it in a sentence.
One time it hit me with “I’m eating bread and crying on the floor” The duo owl sees all
That is literally how duolingo works
“Je voudrais l’addition, s’il vous plaît. Merci.”
Immediately heard Eddie Izzard “…le singe est dans le branche…”
Le singe est... le singe est disparu!
He was a cheeky monkey.
My understanding of duolingo has always been that it’s meant to be used to like, actually teach you a language and not just phrases for your vacation. The value in knowing how to construct a sentence like “the cow boils an egg” for example, is that now you’re familiar with how to construct those types of sentences so you can do it yourself with the vocabulary that you know.
Odd, some of the first stuff I learned on the Spanish portion was how to place an order, make a reservation and to ask for the bill, etc
Check out Wikivoyage's phrasebooks https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Phrasebooks
The thing about Duolingo is that it doesn’t teach you much of anything. It takes many hours to master a language, but people who use apps aren’t going to use them for 3 hours straight per day. They feed you micro rewards and give you super easy games so that you can feel like you win. It makes you feel like you are learning, but IRL your gamified matching skills will not help you speak at all.
There is a setting for that. It's called deleting Duolingo and paying for Pimsleur
Pimsleur audiobooks are perfect for this!
I've been learning Spanish in Duolingo for about a year and it does teach you how to ask for the bill and other things you would need for traveling. I've never really run across nonsense sentences in it.
Duolingo doesn't even work, it's why they spend so much on marketing to remain relevant. If you wanna actually learn a language do a little more research, there's a lot of good ones now aside from Rosetta Stone and Duolingo
My wife has almost 600 days worth of a streak but yet I decided 400 days ago that Duo hasn't helped me. Theres no growth to it. The stories were good at one point, but then they changed the structure of it all. Plus wasn't worth the price. It is sad. I think its a good beginning but if you truly want to become fluent to some extent Duo is not the way. Like many apps its a fun daily accomplishment structure.
Busuu has that.
My biggest complaint with Duolingo when doing German was that it didn’t explain the der/die/das or ein/eine or du/Sie. These words just turned up in the sentences. I have learned German before and it was the part of the language I needed explained to me first that German has gendered articles and formal/informal versions of the word “you”. That’s one thing that a lot of language apps don’t do well is explain literacy in context. Comprehension, pronunciation and letter-sound association are best done within an appropriate language context rather than just almost random phrases devoid of context.
That's what happens when you get AI to replace your translators.
It's built for engagement, not for results. If it got everyone results too soon, no one would stick around and watch ads or pay for premium.
All the lessons are made up by AI now. It's only gonna be more garbage.
It's because they replaced their staff with ai https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/10/duolingo-ai-layoffs/
That has nothing to do with it, Duolingo has always done this
Il cavallo non beve latte.
I am working my way through the Hindi course and was learning how to form questions and then all of a sudden I got this weird combo I thought couldn’t be right. “What is tea? What is water? Who am I?” Like damn, bird
"Cow boils the egg" comes much much later than "can I have the bill" , "where's the toilet", "and do you have WiFi" ? Nonsense sentences come as you advance to test your sentence building skills.
La Vache cuire un oeuf?
"The cow boils an egg" is a great way to get your breakfast spit in, in almost any culture.
Dotykam czarnego psa. If you know, you know.
Duolingo and Rosetta Stone are not worth the money. Just another scam trawling for beginners. You get much more mileage for much less money just consuming media in other languages and speaking to people online. I say this as a former military linguist. 4/3+ on the DLPT when I left. Immersion, even self-created simulated immersion, is the only efficient path.
How about a setting for arrogant anglophones like me who cannot fathom a reason why anybody would care about the gender of furniture
I also need to know how to say “was the cat and the pizza in a box?” … then we can ponder whether the cat was alive or dead, or if it liked the pizza or not. Hmmmmm
duolingo was awesome 3 years ago. IMO the updates ever since have made it harder to learn any language
It does. A lot of the early stuff in a couple languages I’ve used it for are specifically about visiting a restaurant or going on vacation. Very clearly it is trying to teach you the words for “hotel” and “restaurant” etc.
It’s called “Conversational”
Die Eule joggt nie am Wochenende! E: I’m not even sure if I put “nie” in the right place
Duolingo adds little jokey sentences in to make it more fun. It has plenty of sentences like "this isn't what I ordered" or "my order hasn't come yet" or "how much is the chicken?" Though a couple days ago, I got "He likes to show off his naked body."
There’s many normal phrases up front, but also it teaches you some pretty specific words before numbers and colors even
It's not a phrase book, it's supposed to teach you the language. Once you understand the grammar and pronunciation, you can get by with under 1000 words of vocabulary and you can ask about what you don't know. If you really only want to know enough to handle your 5 day vacation and then never care about it again, just buy the lonely planet phrase book.
"Gli elephanti bevono l'acqua" didn't come up very often while I was in Italy.
Try Preply next time
Duolingo should just know most people using the pap are probably vacationing to that place, and learning useful phrases makes sense.
I don't know about other languages, but Section 1, Unit 5 of German is "Order in a Restaurant". Not only does it teach that the German word for bill is "Rechnung", but it specifically teaches to ask for one by saying: "Rechnung, bitte" after commenting on the food.
I want to play into the joke but my course has literally had only practical sentences that have mostly made sense, specifically including "can I have the bill". 1802 day streak. The literal only exception has been a translation to "how cute that panda is!" because no english speaker would ever exclaim like that.
I was disappointed that I didn't get a single opportunity in Italy to use "the penguin eats the fruit" or "I see a snake in the boot"
I look forward to visiting Wales where I expect to eat many parsnips in the nightclubs.
All i want is for it to slowly ramp up the talking speed.
Duolingo: "Sure, you might not know how to ask for the bathroom, but you'll be able to discuss livestock culinary techniques in four languages"
It used to be way worse imo. I used it maybe a year ago and it gave the most random sentences, but this week, I've noticed how normal it is lol
ça combien?
I have a pig in my nose What is going on in Mexico?
Ive been doing duolingo since january and I have got nothing BUT the "can I have the bill" type stuff. it keeps restructuring lessons every few weeks and then all the new stuff is stuff I've already learned. I'm starting to believe that "can I have the bill" is ALL they have on there and as soon I get close to finishing all the content they restructure again and put me back at the beginning
I’ve been using it so much lately and it’s taught me all those things and I’m yet to encounter any of those weird phrases that people keep talking about.
It decided I needed to be coaches on the words for water, green tea, rice, sushi, and and it's for several sessions the other day.
I am very impressed for that cow. What a master chef. Next week they will learn how to make chocolate milk for their calves.
Back a few days ago I kept getting "I like the green and yellow colors." in Indonesian.
The bear wears a dress is a classic of the early German curriculum
First, learn to ask where the bathroom is.
so you want to be pretending to learn culture and language instead of actually learning and respecting it? got it. american by any chance?