- Following backlash to statements that Duolingo will be AI-first, threatening jobs in the process, CEO Luis von Ahn has tried to walk back his statement.
- Unfortunately, the CEO doesn’t walk back any of the key points he originally outlined, choosing instead to try, and fail to placate the maddening crowd.
- Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in the firm’s users.
I just started using Duolingo to learn Spanish. Can anyone recommend alternatives they have had success with that function the same way?
I tried out a bunch, including Babbel, Busuu, Language Transfer, Mango, and Memrise. I didn’t like them for one reason or another. I finally landed on Lingodeer. It’s similar to Duolingo, but it is a paid app. (You can try level 1 of any language for free.)
The regular subscription price is definitely not worth it. It’s okay (not great, but not awful) when they do their sales. But I felt okay about paying human workers.
This kind of learning is a great start, but will only get you so far. If your local library has access to Kanopy, look for the Great Courses series on Spanish. I thought that was an excellent series after a little bit of Duolingo.
Use free Anki and get a free 1k or 5k high-frequency community deck from Anki website. Or get Refold 1k deck (paid) for anki.
If you find Anki too complicated and you don’t mind paying a sub (look for discount/vouchers), use lingvist (paid) or memrise (not sure how this app is now after the changes) to learn 1k words. Any app that focuses on high frequency vocab is fine I think.
Cancel subscription once you have learnt 1k words or can read comfortably a simple native book or graded books, or understand a podcast designed for learner (example InnerFrench), probably will take 1-3 months at about 10-30 words a day.
The main difference between 1k and 5k decks is that the 5k decks include very common type of words like “the”, “a”, “he”, “she”, “is”, “are”, which are so high frequency that you will acquire them by just doing anything in the language. Either type of deck is fine, it is up to you.
Try reading graded readers with audio at the same time as you are going through your deck so you are getting more context for new words you learn. You will encounter new words while reading before seeing them in the deck, which has a positive effect in remembering the word. Reading also helps serve to test how much you have improved in using the language.
Read up on some basic high frequency grammar in your target language. Depending on language you will have to also actively learn the alphabet, numbers, phonic and so on before doing any of the above.
The main idea of learning high frequency vocab is to start consuming content as soon as possible. Never forget that using(reading, listening, writing, speaking) the language is the main purpose of learning languages.
If you like gamification and keeping scores, count the books/article read, count the words learnt, count the hours spend listening don’t count coins or gems.
Anki - https://apps.ankiweb.net/
AnkiDroid - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki
Anki shared decks - https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=french
Refold decks - https://refold.la/category/decks/?show=all
Lingvist - https://lingvist.com/
Anki is free. If you need gamification, then perhaps memrize is for you. I’d just go with anki though. Ankidroid is a good app to work with the anki decks.