I'm so over Duolingo already. It's just a more democratic Rosetta Stone.

I voted Anki of course.

Which option is your favorite language learning tool?

There's a thing for Duolingo called 'the incubator' which was officially started on October 9th, which is basically crowd-sourcing for the time and energy of creating the course for other languages. So, it might still be a while before Japanese is rolled out, but it is higher on the list and should be one of the first additional languages released for DuoLingo.
I tried it for Spanish for a while, it kinda felt like Rosetta Stone in a lot of ways. You'll notice that the founder of DuoLingo says that it works because they tested it and it worked as well as the leading language learning software i.e. RS.

I bet a lot of Lifehacker's readership isn't made of hardcore language learners though, that's why they pick a Rosetta Stone-like option. I remember watching a Japanese infomercial for it. When the host guy showed an "actual user" speak English, and then went on and on about how amazing she was at it, I couldn't stop laughing!
The people in the Japanese 101 college course I took a while back spoke better Japanese than her English, and that's not saying much.
I wouldn't have minded if they had made it look like she was still a beginner, but all the hosts & other users were oohing and ahing like she was a prodigy, while she looked so proud of her English skills. The truth is, when someone speaks in a language others don't know, it sounds amazing (as long as the speaker is at least semi-confident), even if it's full of mistakes or complete nonsense.

Last edited by Bokusenou (2013 October 21, 12:06 am)

Duolingo is mostly translation (both directions) and dictation. I've been trying it for Spanish for a few days and I find it fun in an odd way. I think the game aspect of it makes it sort of fun. Apart from that, it's sort of an online beginners' textbook with mostly exercises.

The content is bland, but that could also be said for core6k...

What Stian says is basically how I felt.
I think it would be a useful thing if done 20 min/day in the way that iKnow is if one also studies a grammar book and a text book.
I already know a lot of grammar rules in Spanish, so it was sort of vocab refresher. I felt like I had to study things I already know and the game couldn't figure out my level; this also happened when I did Japanese in Rosetta Stone for about two days. Anki gives you more control and doesn't try to be something it's not.
It pitches itself as being all you need to learn a language, but it provides no meta-language because of some theory of learning like a baby learns its first language. The thing is, unlike babies, we already speak a language fluently.

edit: flow

Last edited by tashippy (2013 October 22, 7:33 pm)

Duolingo is trash. I couldn't use it for more than 10 minutes. Are these votes for real?

Most people are more excited about the crowd-sourcing aspect, Re-Captcha creator involvement, and the predicted toppling of RS with DL. It's sort of like when a celebrity had it's time in the sun and then the masses want to see it crash and burn (a la Britney on South Park). The internet trolls want to stage a coup on RS with no regard for results and fluency.

Bokusenou, if we held that poll here we would all quickly agree that they are useful tools in conjunction/preference of the individual, rather than in competition.

Edit: took out all those 'I think's'. You know it's my thoughts.

Last edited by tashippy (2013 October 21, 12:49 pm)

Anki's doing pretty well considering how much advertising the other options (except Memrise?) use.

If you've seen an ad that says 'Linguists/Language teachers hate him: Learn to speak a new language in two weeks' or something like that, if you click it eventually you'll see it's Pimsleur. Rosetta Stone doesn't seem to advertise on the net too much (all up in the airports/malls/chain bookstores), at least not where auto-didacts frequent, considering they'll find their own way without dropping $400+. LiveMocha is a RS website I think. DuoLingo is pretty new, mostly viral word of mouth stuff.

I still see Rosetta Stone ads all the time on TV. SNL actually did a parody of those ads not too long ago, too.

I used to see their ads in national geographic, back when I knew nothing about language learning. That's where I first got the idea that the program was actually something worthwhile.

http://lifehacker.com/most-popular-lang … 1449947237
So voting's done and the results are in. Duolinguo won with 58.26% of the vote. Anki ended up just a smidgen above Pimsleur.

I ended up trying out Duolinguo yesterday, and I wanted to talk a little about my experience. It was... well... let's just say I understand the comparisons to Rosetta Stone now. One good thing did come of it, though. Since it has a placement test, and whenever I hear those words, I feel the strong urge to brush up on my grammar. I ended up making a bunch of excellent grammar cards, which is good news since I lost all my old grammar cards somehow, and my skills were starting to fade.

However, the test was pretty basic. I still got 3 questions wrong, but one of those was because of the robo-voice narrator program they used. It ended up putting me at level 11, and it said "CONGRATULATIONS! You know 2,000 words!" or something. I was actually kind of insulted at that pitifully low number, haha

So then I figure out that there's basically two modes you can use it. One is a really RS-like vocab teaching method, where you do translations, listening, and interpretation, and have to keep getting the questions right or you'll lose all your 'hearts' and have to try it again. I was sorta impressed that they managed to integrate listening, translation, interpretation, and even speaking (you had to use a microphone and they had some sort of speech-interpretation program). I was less impressed, however, that the whole lesson, which takes a good 5-10 minutes to do, only was teaching you about 4 words... So I think about this... I see my number (2000) in the eyes of this website, and then I think of the amount of words I'd have to add and the amount of time it would take before I reached the level where I already think I am...

I came to a decision-no more vocab for me. BUT, I wasn't ready to throw in the towel just yet, so I tried out the translation mode. I came to an article which had some previous attempts. Things weren't looking too hot for the duolinguo team. They had misinterpreted the word "trial" as a true cognate right off the bat, while it actually means "motocross". Things only went downhill from there. I started feeling immensely guilty, thinking "is someone actually going to have to read this article?" So I gave it a shot. I finished off the translation, which was spotty, considering my non-existent knowledge of motorcross, but then I found the answer to my previous question around the end of the article. "Nope." It was from 2007.

So after that, I go looking for something more recent. I saw that 6 hours ago, someone had grabbed the wikipedia daily front page and people were working on translating that. The website's policy seems to be just grab the page, and slap it on their translation page interface, which looks like it was designed for 800x600 resolution, and doesn't actually change in size. Half the page was glitching through the translation screen. There was no discussion going on about the translation, and at that point I was just overwhelmed with the feeling of 'why bother'. It seems like lots of sites are going towards the whole social-network angle these days, and this one is no exception, but I was still underwhelmed. You could add friends so their activity showed up on your feed, and you could post in a general message board which looked like some Twitter-Reddit hybrid, and you know what that means. Neither of those formats are conducive to intelligent discussion... But that was it. No chat or anything. How am I supposed to get hype if all I can find is endless vocab exercises and random online articles I care nothing about...

So at this point I really don't understand the appeal. It does have that sort of 'video game-ified' aspect to it, but the way I see it, so does anki. Anki is just more like a text adventure compared with Duolingo's Link to the Past (they even have rupees). Also, it lacks a good SRS system. They do have a 'strength' for words. And you can practice to keep it up, but the policy with that seems to be "keep the user's tracked vocab low so that reviews are more manageable."

tl;dr duolingo = mehhhhh. I'd say stick with what you're doing even if they do get Japanese. Maybe I'll come back if I want to learn some casual phrases when I'm in the real beginner phase with a new language. I dunno how much it can do for you beyond there.

IGN score: 10/10 "It sucks."