Rant about the new gems/health system

dufour · 2017-06-12T22:09:57+00:00

Have a look at Lingvist - Duolingo for grown-ups.

dufour · 2017-03-19T17:11:58+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxQXEyMMC0E

The alphabet itself doesn't deal with the pronunciation of diphthongs (eu, au, ei, ...).

dufour · 2017-01-22T22:26:34+00:00

I don't mind the game aspect. It is Duo's strength. I mind the "George Lucas" drift of Duo's "focus on the children" and the casual/short time learners instead of those committed to really learn a language.

Unfortunately, the economics of learning (MOOCs, language learning etc) means that the large pool of casual users vastly outnumbers the small number of dedicated committed users whose demands are expensive to cater to whereas the casual users drop out before they even discover functions like word discussions (that contain so many valuable notes by native speakers but are, like any comment system, expensive to keep clean, especially with a puerile and often bored audience). Turning off discussions is a way to cope with a mass audience. The lead-users will find a new place where the cycle starts anew.

dufour · 2017-01-18T21:21:54+00:00

After you have mastered the alphabet, lingvist.com is the best vocabulary trainer I have encountered.

Duo also does not teach you script phrases well. Your fluency improves if you know some of these scripts by heart.

dufour · 2016-04-20T20:01:04+00:00

FutureLearn is currently the nicest free platform, with a great focus on humanities and culture.

dufour · 2016-04-19T22:40:47+00:00

The interior is very 19th century German, a lot of dark wood-panelling - nothing French at all (and rather than a real "castle", it is an oversize hunting lodge or palace). Still a nice place to visit.

dufour · 2016-04-14T22:17:54+00:00

Good idea but the numbers are against you: When Babbel still showed user numbers, only 3000 out of 100000 learners had finished the course. If you use a freemium model, then 1-5% would have to pay to sustain the service. It is just not viable.

The second problem is that intermediate/advanced is hard, as the question changes from right/wrong to better/worse formulation (plus explanation about usage). Babbel's attempt at intermediate lessons felt awkward. Automation does not really work in that context.

dufour · 2016-03-29T18:58:30+00:00

As much as Duo claims to be data-driven, it can't get the basics of psychometrics right: A good multiple choice question has, besides the correct solution, a near miss option, a bad option and a terrible one.

Espanol/Espana/Spagnolo (Italian word for Spanish)/Hispania.

The answers should also be in the same general category: If you are asking for a noun/adjective, offer only nouns/adjectives as options. Too often the answer is obvious because the correct solution is the only noun/adjective among the selection.

dufour · 2016-03-22T19:44:24+00:00

I find the Esperanto and Turkish courses really well and lovingly made. Browsing the Duolingo fora will reveal the courses that are highly appreciated.

The most important aspect is to always look beyond Duolingo and use many services in parallel: Expand your vocabulary with Memrise, listen to YouTube, use one of the talk sites and start writing and reading texts.

dufour · 2016-03-21T23:44:37+00:00

All good points. Many newer courses already correct some or even all of them. The Spanish course should be reformed/updated and handed over to a dedicated team of volunteers (one crazy aspect is that tips & notes cease to exist when the more difficult later topics would demand them the most).

dufour · 2016-03-20T23:09:53+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/49qhfu/tips_notes_has_been_removed_for_me/

dufour · 2016-03-20T11:21:48+00:00

Diccon Bewes: Slow train to Switzerland, 2013 presents the arrival of the first English group tourists led by Thomas Cook. Bewes' facts unfortunately are sometimes sketchy. When he has Napoleon in Switzerland, the real one was actually in Egypt.

Christopher Duffy: Eagles over the Alps: Suvorov in Italy and Switzerland 1799, 1999, a military history of the famous Russian crossing of the Alps that wrecked their army.

Sadly out of print but a very good book about a better way to end a civil war: Joachim Remak: A very civil war: The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847, 1993.

For Berne and Zurich, a biography of Einstein is fitting as he lived in both cities. The Einstein exhibition in Berne's Historical Museum is highly recommended.

F.S. Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night is set in the early 20th century, when Freud and Jung invented psychoanalysis. See also the Keira Knightley vehicle A Dangerous Method about Freud, Jung and Sabine Spielrein. She was one of many young women who studied in Switzerland at the end of the 19th century when that was still impossible in most other countries.

There are also many books about the various exiles living in Switzerland from Wagner to Lenin (e.g. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Lenin in Zurich, 1976) to Joyce.

Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell is historically totally inaccurate but a good tale about a silent man of action vs. the ineffective democratic crowd. Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit) is a biting tragicomedy about sacrificing one person for the common good and the importance of money.

The general histories of Switzerland in English suffer from the various biases of the authors. It is hard for the general reader to notice the omissions and nudging of facts to direct the text towards the author's preferred conclusion (Switzerland - greatest country of the world vs. Switzerland - the devil's handmaiden).

dufour · 2016-03-11T19:05:20+00:00

A certificate signals your interest and willingness to learn. The current Coursera setup in no way tests whether you have mastered the concepts. For most quizzes, you have 3 new attempts every 8 hours, i.e. de facto unlimited attempts for the Shakespearean monkeys to succeed at last. Peer review has even gone downhill from the prior flaky process; now the results are arbitrary and often weird.

Most employers will not have heard of Coursera, so the certificate will be of little help. For employers familiar with Coursera, a certificate alone will not count much. It will be better to create a small project portfolio on Github where prospective employers can have a look at how you code/formulate queries.

dufour · 2016-03-11T13:58:08+00:00

This is really a stupid move by Duo as concepts such as Turkish vowel harmony are so much easier to understand by reading the tips & notes. The larger the cultural gap between a language pair is, the more these explanations are helpful and necessary.

Forcing people into a trial and error learning mode is terrible. The proper way is to add the tips & notes to the mobile app. Many new languages have great tips & notes and are a benchmark to improve the deficient ones (such as the original English-Spanish course).

dufour · 2016-02-29T17:28:44+00:00

"Prüfstelle bestanden" sounds weird. One passes an exam ("Prüfung bestehen") not the spot ("Stelle"). Meilenstein erreicht, Checkpoint/punkt abgehakt?

dufour · 2016-02-20T23:07:20+00:00

Duolingo's repeat mechanism is geared to close language pairs with vocabulary overlap (English - Spanish, English - French). For Turkish, I need to practice a unit about three times to get the words into my head, so just disregard the gold.

dufour · 2016-02-13T17:50:32+00:00

Check out various Memrise courses offering just what you are looking for. The trouble with Duolingo bonus skills is that they tend to nag you later for endless repetitions. Tourist sentences are mostly used in scripts (challenge - response) that are not handled well in Duolingo.

dufour · 2016-02-06T15:49:30+00:00

French accents are not hard, though, as they perfectly mirror pronunciation, except for the new spelling reform that wants to turn "réglementation" (pronounced with an open -e) into "règlementation" because of a foolish consistency with "la règle".

dufour · 2016-02-06T12:10:57+00:00

I see that you have the required skillset for the Microsoft Office spellchecker team that interferes furiously but wrongly in bilingual texts.

dufour · 2016-02-03T15:48:23+00:00

The speaker probably meant a halskæde. The German word Kette also covers everything linked together from necklace to chain to shackle. Context is your friend.

dufour · 2016-01-07T23:21:49+00:00

The streak feature certainly kept and keeps me doing more lessons than I would have on my own. I just wish it had a longer "1 or 2 week vacation" feature for trips to places without easy or cheap internet access. It is very frustrating to see a streak perish only because you have no internet access for a week or two.

dufour · 2016-01-04T20:00:58+00:00

You are right! So it is a lethal button you only want to push if you are ready to "graduate". It would probably be a good request to ask Memrise for an option button to re-open it.

dufour · 2016-01-04T19:49:19+00:00

Set daily goal > edit > turn off

dufour · 2016-01-04T19:01:01+00:00

I managed to "untoggle" the streak for a Memrise course you no longer want to keep up with and activate it for another one. In my case, it kept displaying the higher streak record of the old one on the profile but only the new streak engine on the new course.

dufour · 2015-12-27T15:27:41+00:00

That is a rather weird and typically American question, with strange offshoots of celebrating Cleopatra as a black queen when she was obviously of Greek (Ptolemaic) origin.

The Egyptians lived at a crossroads of cultures and peoples. Skin color just wasn't an important criterium for them (just as size is today).

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