Exactly. People act like the learning language streak-counter is as bad a drug habit. I'd rather be addicted to improving a skill for everyday life, than to make excuses as to why you can't do it. And some people take the memes so literal that they will quit altogether if they miss a day. Its weird. But good for you dude. You know what's up!!🎉🎉🎉
When I was learning English, this app was pretty useful. I learned lots of basic vocabulary, so it made things easier to learn when I migrated to new contents from others sources. :x I spent almost 30 minutes a day in my brother's house. I am timid, so I sat in a hidden place and kept speaking as if whispering. Luckily when he worked I had the entire house only for me. 🤣
I think the Duolingo method works very well for shy speakers. It makes you speak, and you will know when you are ready to try it out for real! It is much better than struggling to find the words in front of a class ( the way I learnt French at school).
Great video again Will. I’ve completed Mandarin on Duolingo as well and I find the listening tool is really good. Also Duolingo is a great way to bridge the gap between doom scrolling on social media to formal language learning.
Thank you so much for this honest and informative review. The problem with using Duolingo to learn Mandarin Chinese, is that ,after nearly 6 months, I can't read sentences without pinyin, and that's really really bad. Thanks again. 💯👍
I used Rosetta Stone at the beginning for my French, and I did 30 minutes a day for a month before I realized that I pretty much associated the picture with the sentence that's "supposed to be" and didn't necessarily think too much when I picked the answer - almost like muscle memory. I switched to a textbook after that. However it was fun to start recognizing words from not knowing anything about the language. I could not stand duolingo because it takes too long for the animations to finish. Apps are great starting point but expecting one app, one book, one website to help you achieve fluency is unrealistic.
I use HelloChinese, but I mostly use it as a primer just to get vocab under my belt / have some exposure and familiarity so that I have more context when trying to memorize the characters via Anki or doing listening practice
In defense of Duolingo using strange phrases: i think it teaches learners the different ways new vocabulary can function in a sentence, and it encourages learners to treat the words like lego blocks when building their own phrases.
I am pretty early into learning Chinese, so I can't give a particularly informed opinion, but as someone who studied Russian, and then moved to Russia for university, I actually began with Duolingo [many, many, many years ago--during the Russian beta]. Personally, I found it useful in terms of getting over that initial, tiny hurdle of learning Cyrillic. And I think the strange sentences probably helped more in Russian due to the insane grammar, literred with crazy inflection and conjugation of everything; I guess, the key thing was that it kind of helped drill in the absolute basics of the grammar without actually having to make you sit down and properly try to understand the case system and so on. However, it can only take you so far. IMO, if you don't want to be one of those meme "polyglot" guys who sort of "pretend", for lack of a better description, to know N-many languages, when in reality, it's more like they've memorized enough vocabulary to hold a basic conversation in a given target language, provided the person they are speaking to is putting in an effort to understand them--you can usually smell the American accent bleeding through from a mile a way, the grammar is broken half of the time, etc--at some point in the journey, you are definitely significantly better off taking the "boring" route of picking up a textbook, or, ideally, if you can afford it, finding a tutor with a background in teaching X as a foreign language. It's very, very hard to beat truly understanding the *why* behind the way certain aspects of a language works, and it's also very hard to beat having acess to someone who is a, more-or-less, native speaker to ask questions and improve your pronunciation. Regarding my Chinese duolingo experience, I think, precisely some of the things you mentioned, namely introducing characters before actually showing them in a sentence, as well as the poor SRS algorithm makes for a much worse experience than, say, Russian. Additionally, while I know the pinyin can be disabled, I think many people tend not to, and so in terms of actually memorizing the hanzi characters, I don't think it's been particularly effective, since the defaults essentially encourage you to rely significantly more on listening than written literacy--which I'm not super convinced is helpful long-term. Once again, I'm fairly early into my Chinese journey, but so far, as an English speaker, since there is so little inflection and instead relies much more on word order, it's not nearly as awful to learn in terms of listening/spoken skills as I expected, at least, relative to, again, Russian, whose grammar allows for nearly totally free word order, making every sentence feel like it has about as many possible combinations as a Go board.
I'm a fair way through the Duo Lingo Mandarin course. I find it difficult to evaluate how effective it is as I think a lot of language learning is subconscious. But I get the impression is that it is not as effective as it might be. The point you raise about the language being unnatural is a good one. Thanks for posting!
on the other hand, I have found it one aspect of the design very helpful. Namely the facility to replay audio and the pause while you repeat the sentence. It makes it easy to do this multiple times. It's useful having the Chinese characters there to help meaning. I've turned off the pinyin so that I'm better incentivised to remember the pronunciation.
I started duolingo chineese about a week ago, and my biggest pretension is that i don't understand how it listens to me. Is it good or not for training tones?
Totally agree. I've been using Duolingo for some months and find retention of both vocab and characters not what they should be. I have a head start with hanzi as I have some Japanese, but speaking practice is very limited - mostly self designed. Listening practice is also not graded, the choice is of fast and slow and then only whole sentences. One needs to use the resources in an imaginative way. For example, copying the hanzi to a document, recording with speech recorder and use of translation software. But a lot of work basically creating your own language course. Thanks for the tips on resources available. I couldn't catch the name of the second book you mentioned at 5:56. Hanyu what?
I already know for Chinese its trash, but I'm glad they added Hanzi, im only using it for learning the basics after that I'm gonna use different resources.
The biggest positive about duolingo for me is the daily streaks it's helping me be consistent with language learning.
Exactly. People act like the learning language streak-counter is as bad a drug habit.
I'd rather be addicted to improving a skill for everyday life, than to make excuses as to why you can't do it. And some people take the memes so literal that they will quit altogether if they miss a day. Its weird. But good for you dude. You know what's up!!🎉🎉🎉
When I was learning English, this app was pretty useful. I learned lots of basic vocabulary, so it made things easier to learn when I migrated to new contents from others sources. :x I spent almost 30 minutes a day in my brother's house. I am timid, so I sat in a hidden place and kept speaking as if whispering. Luckily when he worked I had the entire house only for me. 🤣
I think the Duolingo method works very well for shy speakers. It makes you speak, and you will know when you are ready to try it out for real! It is much better than struggling to find the words in front of a class ( the way I learnt French at school).
Great video again Will. I’ve completed Mandarin on Duolingo as well and I find the listening tool is really good. Also Duolingo is a great way to bridge the gap between doom scrolling on social media to formal language learning.
Thank you so much for this honest and informative review. The problem with using Duolingo to learn Mandarin Chinese, is that ,after nearly 6 months, I can't read sentences without pinyin, and that's really really bad. Thanks again. 💯👍
You can turn off pinyin on the app
I used Rosetta Stone at the beginning for my French, and I did 30 minutes a day for a month before I realized that I pretty much associated the picture with the sentence that's "supposed to be" and didn't necessarily think too much when I picked the answer - almost like muscle memory. I switched to a textbook after that. However it was fun to start recognizing words from not knowing anything about the language. I could not stand duolingo because it takes too long for the animations to finish. Apps are great starting point but expecting one app, one book, one website to help you achieve fluency is unrealistic.
I use HelloChinese, but I mostly use it as a primer just to get vocab under my belt / have some exposure and familiarity so that I have more context when trying to memorize the characters via Anki or doing listening practice
Sounds great!
In defense of Duolingo using strange phrases: i think it teaches learners the different ways new vocabulary can function in a sentence, and it encourages learners to treat the words like lego blocks when building their own phrases.
Definitely agree, it's really good to try and learn words like blocks that fit together!
I am pretty early into learning Chinese, so I can't give a particularly informed opinion, but as someone who studied Russian, and then moved to Russia for university, I actually began with Duolingo [many, many, many years ago--during the Russian beta].
Personally, I found it useful in terms of getting over that initial, tiny hurdle of learning Cyrillic. And I think the strange sentences probably helped more in Russian due to the insane grammar, literred with crazy inflection and conjugation of everything; I guess, the key thing was that it kind of helped drill in the absolute basics of the grammar without actually having to make you sit down and properly try to understand the case system and so on.
However, it can only take you so far. IMO, if you don't want to be one of those meme "polyglot" guys who sort of "pretend", for lack of a better description, to know N-many languages, when in reality, it's more like they've memorized enough vocabulary to hold a basic conversation in a given target language, provided the person they are speaking to is putting in an effort to understand them--you can usually smell the American accent bleeding through from a mile a way, the grammar is broken half of the time, etc--at some point in the journey, you are definitely significantly better off taking the "boring" route of picking up a textbook, or, ideally, if you can afford it, finding a tutor with a background in teaching X as a foreign language.
It's very, very hard to beat truly understanding the *why* behind the way certain aspects of a language works, and it's also very hard to beat having acess to someone who is a, more-or-less, native speaker to ask questions and improve your pronunciation.
Regarding my Chinese duolingo experience, I think, precisely some of the things you mentioned, namely introducing characters before actually showing them in a sentence, as well as the poor SRS algorithm makes for a much worse experience than, say, Russian. Additionally, while I know the pinyin can be disabled, I think many people tend not to, and so in terms of actually memorizing the hanzi characters, I don't think it's been particularly effective, since the defaults essentially encourage you to rely significantly more on listening than written literacy--which I'm not super convinced is helpful long-term.
Once again, I'm fairly early into my Chinese journey, but so far, as an English speaker, since there is so little inflection and instead relies much more on word order, it's not nearly as awful to learn in terms of listening/spoken skills as I expected, at least, relative to, again, Russian, whose grammar allows for nearly totally free word order, making every sentence feel like it has about as many possible combinations as a Go board.
I'm a fair way through the Duo Lingo Mandarin course. I find it difficult to evaluate how effective it is as I think a lot of language learning is subconscious. But I get the impression is that it is not as effective as it might be. The point you raise about the language being unnatural is a good one. Thanks for posting!
on the other hand, I have found it one aspect of the design very helpful. Namely the facility to replay audio and the pause while you repeat the sentence. It makes it easy to do this multiple times. It's useful having the Chinese characters there to help meaning. I've turned off the pinyin so that I'm better incentivised to remember the pronunciation.
Thanks for the videos Will. Could you make a video tutorial on how you used Anki for language learning?
he has a playlist on anki !
I’m on 170 days of doing Chinese and I’m really keen to see what happens if I continue for a year or two
Looking forward to seeing how you get on!
Is it good for learning
Does the Chinese program end at section 3?
I started duolingo chineese about a week ago, and my biggest pretension is that i don't understand how it listens to me. Is it good or not for training tones?
Totally agree. I've been using Duolingo for some months and find retention of both vocab and characters not what they should be. I have a head start with hanzi as I have some Japanese, but speaking practice is very limited - mostly self designed. Listening practice is also not graded, the choice is of fast and slow and then only whole sentences. One needs to use the resources in an imaginative way. For example, copying the hanzi to a document, recording with speech recorder and use of translation software. But a lot of work basically creating your own language course.
Thanks for the tips on resources available. I couldn't catch the name of the second book you mentioned at 5:56. Hanyu what?
汉语风 I believe if you search chinese breeze you may also be able to find it
@@willhartmandarin thank you!
What was that second graded reader series? Hanyu Feng?
Yes 汉语风 I think it may also be called chinese breeze, it should be available on amazon.
I already know for Chinese its trash, but I'm glad they added Hanzi, im only using it for learning the basics after that I'm gonna use different resources.