Keyed /llg/ - Language Learning General

[FAGGOT!!!!!!!!!!!!]

Da jooooooooooz made you say this to keep them in business

Da jooz are the ones running the language learning apps, dum dum

 

[gem]

Guys, don't use language learning apps; they don't give you experience in actual conversational skills. Enroll in a foreign language course at your university or get a tutor instead.

holy mother of all trvkes
quoting this absolute admission of guilt for why language learning apps aren't meant to be effective from the CEO of Duolingo ximself

>I recently got in touch with Luis von Ahn, a co-founder and the CEO of Duolingo, to ask whether my experience was typical. I expected some defensiveness from him about my need to use books to get the conversational skills I had hoped to get from Duolingo. But instead he laughed and told me the app had done exactly what it was built to do. “The biggest problem that people trying to learn a language by themselves face is the motivation to stay with it,” he told me. “That’s why we spend a lot of our energy just trying to keep people hooked.”
>Duolingo is essentially a product of crowdsourcing; volunteers build much of the teaching content, and the in-app behavior of its 27.5 million active monthly users is continuously analyzed to determine which exercises, sentences, and techniques lead to better adherence and faster learning. The challenge, von Ahn told me, is that the two metrics tend to be at odds: Making the lessons more difficult reliably speeds up learning—but also increases dropout rates. “We prefer to be more on the addictive side than the fast-learning side,” he explained. “If someone drops out, their rate of learning is zero.”
> ... “In the U.S., about half of our users aren’t even really motivated to learn a language; they just want to pass the time on something besides Candy Crush,” he said.

also, college courses and whatnot aren't necessarily better if you don't supplement it with actual real-life scenarios and learning through media. i dont have the source, but i remember reading once of this guy (perchance a redditor?) who took 4 years of french courses and completely aced them. but then he encounters a quebecois toddler. and he cannot understand or be understood by this toddler at all, a toddler who has only learned the language for maybe 3 years. a toddler was doing loops around him in french, because he understood textbook fundamentals more than he did how to actually communicate with someone. you're not going to stand there like a dumbass trying to remember how to conjugate the verb-erinos correctly in a real world situation, yes?

 

[FAGGOT!!!!!!!!!!!!]

also, college courses and whatnot aren't necessarily better if you don't supplement it with actual real-life scenarios and learning through media. i dont have the source, but i remember reading once of this guy (perchance a redditor?) who took 4 years of french courses and completely aced them. but then he encounters a quebecois toddler. and he cannot understand or be understood by this toddler at all, a toddler who has only learned the language for maybe 3 years. a toddler was doing loops around him in french, because he understood textbook fundamentals more than he did how to actually communicate with someone. you're not going to stand there like a dumbass trying to remember how to conjugate the verb-erinos correctly in a real world situation, yes?

Wait, your foreign language classes don't teach you conversational skills? In my high school Spanish class, we were only allowed to speak Spanish, and if we spoke anything else, then our participation points would get deducted for the day.

 

[Ree Vannin]

I "learned" english by playing non-translated videogames, watching filthy frank and using rw twitter.

 

[gem]

Wait, your foreign language classes don't teach you conversational skills? In my high school Spanish class, we were only allowed to speak Spanish, and if we spoke anything else, then our participation points would get deducted for the day.

mine only did conversational skills 2 days of the week. the rest of the time, it was more like "write a mini-essay about the heckin' history of the country and reply to 2 other people's posts" and then you had quizzes and writing a paragraph about your family/whatever topics you learned in the unit without making grammatical errors. it was an online class, so i get why they did this, but in the speaking sessions for conversational skills there was no "you have to ONLY speak the foreign language" thing going on; in the class i took we were flip-flopping between english and russian, and russian was near-exclusively used for yacking about the weather, or my pets and what color they are, or greetings, or whatever on prompt. also gems like still covering the alphabet even 8 months later into the course like bro i can read that well now this isn't new))
well, at least i drilled in essential grammar that way. i probably would have ignored that part for way longer without taking a course. thats the best benefit of a traditional course, in my opinion.

 

[SoytanEnthusiast]

I "learned" english by playing non-translated videogames, watching filthy frank and using rw twitter.

English is the easiest language to learn simply because of the fact that it has the most content available. For most other languages, you have to know where to look. You can just find videos for whatever the fuck in English because English is English

 

[ISTANBUL]

English is the easiest language to learn simply because of the fact that it has the most content available. For most other languages, you have to know where to look. You can just find videos for whatever the fuck in English because English is English

hows spanish going