My worst language in is German, where every manual is well elaborated in terms of graphical design, but every exercise askss you to insert a word or two into a sentence. Or pick an answer from a set. Basically, Duolinguo sent to printer. So after couple of years of working with teachers and taking intensive courses, my level is B1..2. I can listen to radio and understand something, I can read something. I actually can speak in a shop -- they'll understand my level and speak accordingly -- but I can't do a normal conversation. I couldn't find a teacher that doesn't just drill you through these same fancy books.
"A friend who had been learning some language in Duolinguo and then couldn't say a sentence to a native", should be proverbial nowadays.
So, despite the app idea being interesting and compelling, this teaching approach, picking correct options from lists, are good for testing (if the subject is given little enough time), but futile at teaching.
For some context, when moving abroad I felt that most other countries don’t really teach grammar and language analysis to the point that we do in Italy. I did attend a language-focused school, which obviously leaned even more towards this tendency; but I get the impression that most competent teens graduating italian schools have a more extensive grammar-related vocabulary than other cultures.
It makes sense then that Italian learning books would be more focused on grammar compared to other languages. I felt it extended to how we were taught English as well (i.e. the opposite direction). I don’t think it is the absolute best tactic for language learning, but perhaps it is the best one when restricted to purely written exercises.
I’d be curious to know whether you had a similar impression. My evidence is all anecdotal, mostly from talking to various people around Europe.
Yep, I have to agree, as an Italian living abroad. In my case, I now have kids on the verge of finishing primary school and - maybe they will start next year who knows - I haven't seen grammar taught that much. Ironically they have more grammar exercises when studying English than the native tongues. But maybe it's just a "modern school" thing...
I tried picking up some German via Duolingo once. I thought it was going great, pretty soon I was up to full sentences. Then one day I realized (because my voice teacher sometimes makes me translate the foreign language songs) that I wasn't learning German sentences, I was learning English sentences substituted with German words. German grammar is completely different. I haven't touched Duolingo since.
I remember only two sentences from the Dutch Duolingo, maybe because they were constantly repeated:
"Ik ben een appel." (I am an apple.)
and: "Nee, je bent geen appel!" (No, you are not an apple!)
For comparison, I did self-study with Japanese in my teens and learned enough to ace the first 1.5 years of college Japanese instruction without much effort. And I remember taking Spanish classes in high school and to this day can at least fumble my way through a basic conversation.
In contrast the only use I would have for what I learned of Dutch via Duolingo would be if I came across someone having a psychotic break. You're _not_ an apple, dude.
Granted, I spent more time with both Spanish and Japanese than with any language I tried with Duolingo, but my point is simply that Duolingo just doesn't make languages "click", at least not for me and apparently not for a bunch of others either.
I learned Hebrew in Duolingo and I've in fact spoken many sentences to natives. All the Israeli women we know are always negatively comparing their American Jewish husbands to me, the goy who learned Hebrew from Duolingo.
Granted, those natives are either married to me or related to someone who is. So maybe that component is essential.
I tried to learn Mandarin via Duolingo, and whilst I agree that the "multi choice" style isn't great for learning a language I did notice that I was picking up fragments of what native speakers were saying around me.
Before I took a good teacher's classes, I had been listening German radio for 2 years, learned nothing of substance.
Portuguese, which I do speak, probably even at B2, is the language that I learned through radio, thanks to similarities to Italian and Spanish, and in which I feel the least confident. All my progress with it was when I was actually using it -- spoken or written, looking up dictionaries.
One cool effect is that your vocabulary can be heavily concentrated on what you're watching. Like police procedures. (in Alte they speak very clear German, can recommend.)
It's not an "app" and doesn't have a "streak" or an "HP bar", so...
Yes, you probably need a proper textbook and (ideally) a teacher to learn grammar and the language rules. This is hard work, but IMO gamified apps make users a huge disservice by handwaving this and hoping the user magically figures it all out. But, like the author found out, grammar alone won't make you fluent.
I'm personally very fond of flashcards (Anki). Yes, memorizing words is just a part of language learning, but it's important and FSRS is extremely good at it. Way better than repeatedly reading a textbook.
I personally hate duolingo for many reasons (it doesn't work for me), but some of my friends use it. This touches another important thing: regularity. Gamified apps and flashcards make it easy to form a habit. You can complete your daily lesson in a bus. And they are (more) fun. Even ineffective learning method is better than nothing.
Finally, ymmv and there's no one size fits all. I got pretty good (fluent and communicative) by in Russian by initially just studying flashcards (followed by reading and listening - another very important component) - because grammar is similar to my native (Slavic) language and I could, actually, figure out most of it. Textbooks came much later. It was not as easy with German...
PS. worth noting that the author explicitly says that this app is meant to teach you just the very basics and numerals, not for language learning
A turnip is female, the fishmongers wife is neutral, a boy is male, a girl is neutral, the wife is female. Plural of Tür is Türen plural of Öffnung is Öffnungen, plural of Vogel is Vögel plural of Fenster is.. Fenster.
Hundreds of unspoken rules regarding word order, some verbs that can be separated and others cannot.. Completely random.
And good luck even being able to hear the difference between spucken and spuken if your language doesn't have long vs. short vowels.
But I can hear the difference between short/long (as in, differing in actual temporal duration) vowels just fine, e.g. in Finnish/Latvian ― although those languages kinda overextend it IMHO.
I can compare that to Goethe institut's intensive courses: 6 weeks by these fancy colorful textbooks. Waste of time.
If your native language is similar, for example, Romanian or Spanish, sure it is. For the others, not really.
> while German makes absolutely no sense.
Mark Twain also complained about it.
> A turnip is female, the fishmongers wife is neutral, a boy is male, a girl is neutral, the wife is female. Plural of Tür is Türen plural of Öffnung is Öffnungen, plural of Vogel is Vögel plural of Fenster is.. Fenster.
So as in basically every language that has a grammatical gender. If it's not the same as in your native language, it won't make sense, and you'll need to learn it. After some time, you'll notice the pattern and will be able to guess accurately.
> Hundreds of unspoken rules regarding word order, some verbs that can be separated and others cannot.. Completely random.
The rules are well understood and clearly written. You just need to learn them.
> And good luck even being able to hear the difference between spucken and spuken if your language doesn't have long vs. short vowels.
Isn't that the case about every foreign language? I was never able to distinguish or pronounce correctly French diphthongs. I'm pretty sure half of the people here wouldn't be able to pronounce a couple of sounds from my native language even if their lives depended on it.
Regarding learning languages, I'm not a fan of this style of learning. It seems to me this is still Duolingo, just with a different interface. I had good success with https://www.languagetransfer.org/
I haven't learned a new language since high school, but I think to learn one you need immersion. Individual words for sure, but the focus should quickly go to reading whole sentences / paragraphs / books, listening to native speakers in their natural environment, and (probably the most difficult one to do on an app) speaking / conversation practice.
I only know English well because of daily exposure through media and twenty years of shitposting on the internet.
Conversation practice with humans [0] is key: As a child I had complete, native-level fluency in French, because my first few years of school were in the local schools of a farm village in the interior of France (my US Air Force dad was stationed at a nearby air base). All through high school and college back in the U.S., I took French for the easy A. But now mumble years later, when my wife and I watch French TV shows on Netflix, I have to rely on the subtitles because I just can't keep up.
I've read comments by people from non-English-speaking countries who say they learned English by watching Friends on TV. I can't imagine how they did it.
[0] Maybe someday an AI could substitute for a human native speaker in conversation practice?
Yeah, I tend to think for the specific case of languages that share a common root, language transfer is unbeatable value (especially since it's entirely free).
1. A HUGH repository of raw materials, both in text and in audio. They are all written/recorded by native speakers, not non-native language teachers.
1.5. (Optional) The materials come with supplemental vocabulary lists and grammar guides.
2. You take a test.
3. It recommends materials for you to read/listen to, according your proficiency level shown in the test.
3.5. (Opt-in) it can read your YouTube history and social media to recommend materials that you might like.
4. Every month or every N hours of reading/listening, you take a new test to recalibrate your proficiency level.
That's it. However due to copyright issues, I don't expect to see such an app in near future. What a bummer.
(Not-so-off-topic) Personally I consider all the apps that don't resemble the above workflow "dictionary-like" (useful but as a reference tool, not a learning tool) or "Duolingo-like" (a healthier alternative to doomscrolling, but nothing more). The article sounds Duolingo-like.
It's basically a podcast player where you can browse a database of podcasts filtered by spoken language, and listen with transcriptions and translations.
For each language I made a podcast to learn the most frequent words.
You can also get audible feedback on your pronunciation.
I am in the process of building a YouTube database of channels by spoken language to play youtube videos on the app.
> Every month or every N hours of reading/listening, you take a new test to recalibrate your proficiency level.
I slightly disagree with this part, I think the moment you add some sort of "test" or drills it can become tedious or dreadful to learn in the long term.
I've learned 2 languages to fluency, and the only thing that ever works for me is immersion with comprehensible input, and conversation. I've been generally disillusioned with language learning apps that aren't "language exchange / penpal". And I've tried all of them. I don't think language learning is easily "gamified".
Ah... those pesky people speaking their very own language instead of the (ahem...) lingua franca.
But the quantity of smiles goes up 300% when you talk to them in bad French with finger pointing as opposed to fluent English, even in tourist trap areas.
Maybe slightly better service too.
Edit: hey HN, can we have the option to post one anonymous coward comment every couple days from our regular accounts? We're going to run out of throwawayNNNNNN ids sooner or later.
Nowadays young frenchs learn english by overexposition to the language through various medias (school is of no help) and in the past, even if english was taught at school, I think the majority of them didn't learn it properly beyond "my taylor is rich", "The cat is happy" and "I love you".
I didn't "learn" english and it is a mystery why I can express myself and understand others in this language, I guess I have been overexposed to the language when I was young.
That said, I worked in museums at a time in my life and was actually surprised by the huge amount of people travelling in the world with no knowledge of the language of the country they are in, expecting everybody to be able to talk their language like if it was universal, be them italians, frenchs, americans, chinese or whatever.
Another note: I live in Cambodia, where many French people live, and nearly none of them speak the local language, and a very decent amount of them don’t even speak English. Worse yet, the older generation is still hung up in the idea that it’s better for the locals to learn French than English or Chinese.
This is really a very French thing, and you don’t see the same behavior in eg Germany or Italy.
(I’m originally from The Netherlands)
Quand je peux aider quelqu'un qui échoue péniblement à trouver des interlocuteurs et qui ne parle pas français, je suis ravi de le faire et je ne m'en sens pas insulté par ailleurs.
(I realize it was (hopefully) meant in jest-ish, but there are better ways to make the point.)
Honestly, I myself learn one emergency phrase in the native language, "I am sorry, please repeat this as if I have a learning disability". Upon hearing this my vis-a-vis would either actually switch to a slow and dumbed-down register of their native language or realize they won't lose face by speaking bad English to me.
Why are speakers of Japanese, Banty, Hindi and Algonquin vacationing abroad a problem of locals who just want to live their own life?... Most people do learn English for one reason or another, but "entertaining tourists" is not one of them.
What I’m trying to say is that this is someone who can really, really write - he’s deeply funny and self deprecating, but obviously also knows his shit, big-time. And that’s a massively powerful skill, maybe as much of a skill as being able to write Swift or make great interfaces or ship an app.
> “If you grew up with Tamagotchis, you already understand why this was tempting. Not the “cute pixel pet” part. The part where a device the size of a digestive biscuit turns into a low-resolution hostage negotiator.”
This is irritatingly good and it makes me want to buy his products and subscribe to his RSS feed. Great writing is powerful magic.
The funniest part to me is that I suspect the LLM generated the line about the 4th of July, and the suspected prompter being British, felt the need to insert an explanation for why "they" would reference it, in a voice/cadence that doesn't really match the rest of the article:
> "Confetti, fireworks, the whole 4th of July experience (I've seen it only in movies though, not sure why but it's not celebrated in the UK)"
I can't definitively say this is LLM-generated, but it resembled it enough so that I still came away annoyed for having read it.
I think you look for AI too hard. Perhaps that kind of dry humour is not too your liking, or you're not used to this style? FWIW i lived in the UK a bit, so I'm rather familiar with the way locals speak casually.
Btw. you can check his pre-chatgpt writing style, for example [1]. Looks similar enough to me!
I'm not about to go into a deep dive analysing the author's past writing style, but there is a clear difference just from glancing at the headers alone. Looking at older articles, such as this "featured" one[1], they all share a commonality: the headers are boring. Matter-of-fact. Plainly descriptive. "The reasoning". "The background". "The research".
[1] https://drobinin.com/posts/what-ive-learnt-after-sending-147...
Then a sudden spate of activity in late 2025 after years of not having written anything other than yearly recaps, and all of the new posts share a different commonality: the headers are 'creative'. "The Childhood Trauma". "Teaching a circle to care". "47 seconds: a villain origin story"[2]. "The uncomfortable engineering truth".
[2] https://drobinin.com/posts/how-i-accidentally-became-puregym...
It is quite a noticeable shift to go from always writing useful headers that clearly communicate the purpose of the following text, to always writing clickbait headers that try to hook the reader's emotional attention.
Slightly off-topic, but when learning to speak a new language, it is helpful to actually speak the language as often as you can.
There are a couple of websites that make it easy to book short conversation practice with native speakers. The one I use to practice Spanish is italki.
I find the practice of actually speaking, no matter how badly, helps way more than any app.
I've also realised it's same for English, except we don't really think about it since we're used to the sounds, but the way we'd say "I went to the market" in daily speech is night and day to how it would be enunciated during an English speaking class (e.g. uh wen tu-th markt vs eye weynt too thee marr-ket). To the unpracticed ear they can just sound like different sentences.
But, in my first attempt to read it, I got totally lost in the very first part. I had to go back and forth to understand where it was coming from and where it is heading. I think a little bit of guidance at the beginning would not hurt, for example something like: “this is my personal journey related to the design of an app,” maybe in light gray and italic.
Cool app though.
I like this article, but statements like this go far too far. An app cannot disallow someone's life. It's not that important.
Tell that to the folks busy turning every app into a miniature casino...
I just can't understand how can adult person be so traumatized by silly mistake in a coffee shop, so they will build an entire app to learn a language so this will not happen again.
I mean, I understand you made an error and you could not understand native speaker. Happens to me a lot of times with English and British people. But situation that you may not understand someone speaking foreign language abroad is expected. For me at least. How can you call it a humiliation? Just smile and ask politely to repeat because you do not understand. Point at you ear, which should be understand by everyone that you did not hear. Or look at register and check the price. Or just give them much more that you think it really cost and wait for a change. Awkwardly looking at your phone seems a bit rude.
I got to level thirteen having seen only four verbs (aller, faire, être, and parler) and mostly in the present.
