Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I believe her when she says it’s purely the app, she didn’t study languages and is otherwise English (they tend not to speak another language).
It seems likely to me that Duolingo works, gamification obviously works (Snapchat Streaks, Reddit Karma etc) and it pretty clearly drills you on vocab and sentence structure which are the most important things for beginners.
It’s good for very very basic stuff. But it encourages bad habits, and also creates the illusion of progress.
What Duolingo teaches is pattern recognition. You see a phrase in English and then pattern match it to whatever language you want to learn. This does work for very basic stuff — stock phrases, greetings, vocabulary. The problem comes when you’re unable to use the word banks, and worse need to generate a sentence not specifically covered by Duolingo’s course. You want to tell someone to do something? It’s not really covered in the Chinese course, so too bad. You need to say that you plan to do something next week, or that you’re thinking about doing something? It’s not covered in the pattern matching.
The second problem is a false sense of progress. It’s designed to feel like progress. To feel like learning. This is their business model, to be honest. They’re not selling “you’ll be able to read a newspaper in your target language,” but “you’ll finish the course and know enough stock phrases to feel smart.” It’s actually perfectly possible to be able to pass a lesson without being able to read the language. You just have to more or less recognize the shapes of the words or the hanzi or kanji or whatever. If you learn to recognize 你好 as “hello” that’s good enough for Duolingo— even if you have no idea what the word is. You can get pretty far that way. At least until you want to use it in a conversation. You’ve “learned” a lot of words and stock phrases, but unless the person you’re talking to sticks to the script and you don’t want to say anything off script it’s going to be a problem.
Finally it encourages a lazy attitude to learning a language (and other skills as well). You cannot learn if you’re not focused on the project. Fifteen minute sessions is far too short to do any deep work or meaningful practice. And this is exactly the gamification model. Just casually do a problem a day and be a math wizard! Spend two minutes a day and learn Spanish. It’s not possible to learn complicated topics without putting in the work. And for any topic that includes the logic of the system — something Duolingo and other gamification apps skip because it’s boring to learn grammar or to learn the axions of math or the laws of physics. They’re necessary, but it’s memorization and drilling until you get it, so it’s boring and left out because people won’t keep using the apps if you include boring stuff.
I’m not sure how much I agree. All learning (all human intellectual ability, really) is pattern recognition, as the success of LLMs show. Teaching grammatical rules (even the ridiculous ones that exist in certain languages) by rote is unnecessary if someone can do full immersion, which is ultimately the only way to truly learn a language if you’re not a polyglot (and even then, most “I can speak 20 languages” type people have done exactly what you decry and learned a bunch of canned phrases from books and vocabulary using anki). It’s why young adults who are very online from non-Anglophone countries often speak excellent English without ever even trying in (and often failing) English classes as kids, because they literally just consoomed thousands of hours of English language TV and video games and YouTube content and their brain just pattern matched grammar, no rote learning of verb tenses necessary. Recognizing the shapes of eg. kanji/hanzi is obviously a core part of learning those languages.
When thrown into the deep end of full immersion, the person who has remember thousands of canned phrases and extensive vocabulary is usually much better equipped than the person who, like a Latin student at a Victorian school, has copied out thousands upon thousands of declension and conjugation tables and who therefore has ‘perfect’ grammar (when writing, very slowly, short sentences in the language). The person with the vocab and canned phrases can usually get the meaning of their speech across (even if broken) and over time will naturally pattern match new sentences they hear to what they’ve heard, supporting genuine language learning. Over time, they’ll go from (eg.,) very broken Spanish to broken Spanish to more accurate Spanish once they’re in-country.
Traditional textbook-based language education seems designed primarily for people who would like to read (and, to a very minor degree, write) in another language. If you want to read Camus in French or Dostoyevsky in Russian, or maybe correspond with a Spanish acquaintance via letters, that kind of thing. It feels in many ways descended from the fashion in which Greek and Latin have traditionally been taught. It isn’t designed to front load the basic ingredients for ‘getting your point across’ (even in a broken form) which is actually the most important part of language learning for people planning on moving or spending time in another country, because in those cases being able to understand meaning (via memorized vocabulary) and interact casually in typically rote ways (via canned sentences of the classical kind for ordering food, buying stuff, making small talk) are what unlock the most freedom for a new speaker.
Duolingo seems to be a gambit that the methods in which children learn languages (primarily exposure) can be gamified for adults. I think there’s a reasonable chance this is why it works, you may never be told exactly what the pattern is, but over time your mind comes to recognize it. However, some nerdier people (like Hoff below, possibly like you) don’t like the idea of speaking ‘broken’ [language] becuase of embarrassment, they may prefer in theory to hit the ground running and speak in a limited and guarded but grammatically perfect way to spare themselves the humiliation or mockery of poor practice. But that’s just how learning a language works, it’s not something to be avoided but something to be overcome.
It’s kind of a both and situation. It is important to know some stock phrases, just like it’s important to know addition and multiplication tables in mathematics. That’s simply to get you to the point of being able to use those facts to “use” mathematics. Or in the case of language, to be able to hold a very basic conversation in the target language. This as I said, works until it doesn’t. That’s my issue here. Once you start getting into more complex things, the method fails. You cannot memorize your way to understanding, and without understanding the grammar, you’re lost when dealing in conversations that use vocabulary you don’t know yet, or more complex sentences, you lack the tools to figure out how to get at understanding what they’re trying to say, or to say something complex yourself. The method is a mile wide and an inch deep.
I tend to find, at least from the people who claim to have learned via Duolingo alone, that they’ve either already learned the language in another setting, or speak a similar one prior to starting. If I already know Spanish, I have decent exposure to the structure of Romance languages and can then use that to bootstrap myself to understanding the structure of a different Romance language. If I already know Spanish, learning Italian is simply figuring out how Spanish and Italian handle conjugation and the vocabulary. This is quite different than an English speaker trying to sus out Korean — an unrelated language with far fewer common features and only a few loan words in common.
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My problem with Duolingo, at least at the beginner levels of language instruction, is that it doesn’t do a very good job of actually explaining why a sentence is structured a particular way. I would suddenly be confronted with a sentence that looked very different from anything I had previously studied, with no context explaining the theory behind it, and I was expected to basically just figure it out using context clues, and then incorporate that new knowledge into future lessons without ever being told why I’m doing it in the first place. Which, to be fair, is probably a more accurate representation of how adults learn a new language than I would get by studying a textbook. For someone like me who is used to being careful and articulate with the way I use my native tongue, the thought of going to a new country and making a ton of flagrant grammatical mistakes because I don’t understand the formal structure of the language is something I find really icky.
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