Flammie A Pirinen on github pages
NB: duolingo changes all the time so anything written here can be outdated. In somewhere around 2023 duolingo disabled discussions and grammar notes so it’s always getting worse and less useful. Also in 2023 duolingo laid off a lot of humans to begin to use AI to make these courses so we can only expect it to be much much worse in near future. If you can use real courses made by professional teachers it is usually much better than supporting duolingo.
Duolingo is a language learning app in 2000’s. It is quite simple, in that it only features few very basic language tests. It has mobile app and a browser app, but I think the mobile app is the popular one and true to early 2000’s it has just got very popular indeed in a way that most people who know programming and games just cannot easily comprehend. However, I have successfully used it too, because, in the end, learning language is rather efficient by doing very simple tasks repetitively and getting points and crowns and gems and high score boards against friends along the way is a good thing.
Like I said, Duolingo has only few types of basic exercises most of which are familiar from schoolbooks etc. At the moment there is:
Most of these are exactly what you get in text books if you studied languages at school.
Duolingo is a for-profit company which is problematic from few aspects. It has to prioritise customer retention over effective learning. It has to sell duolingo plus and push ads. Also one of the more problematic things which I have not thoroughly researched but heard third hand information of of is, the courses are made by volunteers, who may not receive much of duolingo’s profits at all and may not have any understanding of language teaching / pedagogy, and this is quite apparent in some courses (admittedly most bad courses are marked beta). By the way if you know what kind of deal Duolingo has with course admins I would be interested to know some details.
This is my method for learning languages, has worked with: German and Norwegian (Bokmål), both of these courses are good quality.
Some of this may change everytime duolingo changes stuff.
In the end of the day though, duolingo is just a tool to build some basic vocab. After few weeks you’ll have to start doing something on top, read the news or watch a tv without subtitles, talk to people or such.
Duolingo has several quite bad problems that make it less useful than it could be. One of the biggest one is that it is mostly only available in English. English is quite unusual language and doesn’t resemble many of the languages, for most of us it isn’t a native language. Many of the exercises are translation exercises and the system has very simple definition of correct translation; it has a list of acceptable translations and some support for typos. If you rephrase too much it counts as a fail. If you miss an article or use combination of articles (that is a and the) that is not one of the “correct” ones, you lose a point; but most languages do not have same articles or articles at all. If you use doing form instead of do you lose a point but almost no language besides English has this kind of -ing forms, so it’s very arbitrary when the ing forms are accepted or required. Some language courses favour having most literal and word-to-word translations retaining all grammar, others have idiomatic; some like Hungarian course have outright ungrammatical and unreadable “English”, not sure whether the course makers didn’t really know English or tried too hard to retain all the nuances of Hungarian there.
Because the exercises are not really ordered well, you are often listening or writing words you haven’t learnt or given the complex sentences before simple ones. Also the themes of the exercises (in 2022 version at least) do not always relate to the exercises you get at all, you could have like kitchen as a theme and then have a sentence about animals in forest or whatnot, or even worse, a grammar theme that has zero examples of the grammar topic, sometimes it seems like someone who just misunderstood grammar really badly has put the sentences there, like having perfect participle sentences but all examples are of English words that kind of look perfect particple forms but are just adjecives in the language you are learning. Furthermore, the grammar sections come unexplained and without clarifications, even when I am a trained linguist, it is often hard for me to comprehend what duolingo means when it teaches me “Progr. cont.” or some other cryptic thing. In the web version only, one can open an explanation to the category, which may or may not be filled with some words from the course maker of what they meant with the section, which may reveal how they misunderstood this grammar topic.
The system doesn’t really support idioms and multiword expressions, but they pop up in the exercises without any explanations. You can recognise this when the correct solution has a lot of words which are not suggested when you try to hover over words of the sentence to find single word translations. This is super frustrating and pedagogically very terrible and outright harmful for learning.