I think it's been mentioned once or twice on the forum, but it deserves its own thread.

Check it out: http://duolingo.com

As far as I can tell, it's free, effective, and beautiful.

It's just French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German right now, but I don't know if they plan to add more languages.

Thoughts?

Edit: By the looks of it, they're planning on adding Chinese at some point in the future.

Looks bad to me. I'm immediately suspicious that they give almost no details, just a flashy ad with a lot of vague talking points and a request to sign up through facebook or e-mail before you can see anymore. The method sounds ridiculous; that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad but I'm skeptical.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Looks bad to me. I'm immediately suspicious that they give almost no details, just a flashy ad with a lot of vague talking points and a request to sign up through facebook or e-mail before you can see anymore. The method sounds ridiculous; that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad but I'm skeptical.

It's more interesting if you watch this video instead.

http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_ma...ation.html

Thank you so much! I checked the German version, and so far I'm liking it. It's a language I always wanted to learn (after Japanese of course ).

Seems pretty good. I'm sure there are a lot of minor errors created through the crowd translation but as a learning tool it seems quality.

I could see myself getting into it if they offered some languages I'm more interested in.

Yeah this is an awesome idea! Hopefully they add more languages.

I watched the video, and I think this could be pretty great, but I can't get over the fear that learning by constantly translating might train you to translate everything when you encounter your L2 later, instead of trying to understand it. Maybe I'm over-thinking it, though.

I know we've all heard the warnings against translating in your head, but when it comes down to it, you can't translate something well without understanding it first. So I think you train understanding by means of translation.