My take on Duolingo as a semi-professional translator (and polyglot) who has used it extensively. Useful, but also flawed. It’s going to take a lot more than 5 minutes a day to learn a language. Methods below.

One thing I’ve begun noticing in recent years is the likelihood of Duolingo comments popping up on language learning posts on Reddit. <br><br>I’m a translator. I’ve been a Duolingo user for years. It’s useful, but has some significant flaws as well. <br><br>I’ve learned 11 languages. I’ve now recently been using Duolingo for advanced practice, and to maintain my languages. And not for learning new ones. The reasons for this are below.<br><br>I want to say that I’m not here to discourage anyone from using it. I’m simply here to point out some of its flaws, regarding actual skills learned, and what I suggest to mitigate them. <br><br>Here’s my experience with it so far, across multiple languages. I’m not saying it’s bad, I simply want to point out what I see in it’s limitations, in my capacity as a professional translator. You should decided for yourself if you want to use it, but I think you should be aware of its limitations. <br><br>I am fairly certain that their algorithm, which is programmed to create sentences and to make translations that are as unique as possible, also produces sentences that at best are not common, at worst sentences that make little sense to native speakers, even with a basic understanding of the concept of the sentence.<br><br>Overall, with the sheer quantity of sentences, it is fairly obvious that there are several ‘translation’ patterns that Duolingo tends to rely upon, when generating sentences. The problem is that by repeating these patterns over and over again, it creates sentences that are not logically coherent, are far-fetched, or are extremely unlikely to happen in real life. The skill of using logic to create a sentence and understanding the nuance of a language, is super important. One example is a Duolingo sentence I once encountered in Dutch. Something like, ‘A car almost hit me when I was eating my yogurt’ and it was translated in English as simply, ‘I almost got hit by a car while I was eating my yogurt’. There may be a word for word translation, but it is not something that would ever be said. There are countless examples of sentences like these. I have run through them all (and I do mean all) in Dutch and Spanish. I have done a fair amount in other languages as well. Enough to be able to notice consistent patterns. <br><br>The second problem I have with it is the lack of grammar regarding types of emphasis. This may be more common in Asian languages, but it is a problem for Germanic languages as well. Let me give an example. In an English sentence, which of the following means ‘the’ dog, instead of ‘a’ dog? - <br>1. The dog. <br>2. A dog. <br>3. Dog. <br><br>If you answered 1, you’re wrong. Whether or not the word ‘the’ is present doesn’t affect anything. ‘The dog’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘the’ dog. <br>So what does? What does mean ‘the dog’, as opposed to ‘a dog’? Emphasis does. Emphasis is everything.<br>That’s right. ‘THE dog’ is what means ‘the dog’. <br>By placing emphasis on THE word THE, it means ‘the’ dog. If you say ‘the DOG’ it means ‘a dog’, but you’re emphasizing the word ‘dog’. ‘The DOG’. This is a very important concept to grasp. Emphasis means everything in a sentence. ‘I love you’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘I LOVE you’. Or ‘I love YOU’. <br>By emphasizing certain words, or placing emphasis in different places, the meaning of the sentence changes entirely.<br>This is important because when you’re speaking in a real conversation, you can easily use emphasis to clarify or change your meaning. This is something that Duolingo can’t teach you, because it’s an audio based platform, and you can’t see stress marks or emphasis on the words Duolingo gives you. <br><br>The third problem I have with it is the lack of ‘real life’ situations where you will hear someone saying something like, ‘I am a black bear, and I enjoy eating honey’. ‘What do you mean that you’re not afraid of me? I can rip out your heart with one swipe of my paw’. ‘Actually, no. I prefer honey’. ‘I understand’. See the problem with this? Outside of weird memes, you’re never going to encounter this situation (at least I hope not, because it’s dangerous!).<br>I’m digressing. This problem is especially prevalent in the stories, which are so obviously AI generated. The thing with AI generated sentences, is that while Duolingo is good at creating a sentence that may look logical, it can’t necessarily create a situation that is logical or makes sense, and especially one that people would actually be saying in real life, or a situation someone would actually encounter. <br>In real life, you would never hear someone say something like, ‘I’m not trying to make fun of you, I’m just trying to help you. I’m a schoolteacher at a university’. ‘Would you like to hear our band play?’. ‘Yes, please’. A lot of the sentences are very ‘on the nose’, which is a screenwriting term for a sentence that is simply stating something instead of conveying important information to the viewer in a more subtle way. <br>A good example of this is in the original Star Wars movie. Compare these two lines - <br>‘I’m a smuggler. I smuggle stuff. I’m very good at it, and I’m not afraid of anything!’. <br>…Vs…<br>‘I’ve made the Kessel run in 13 parsecs’. <br>Both sentences convey the same information, but the second one is far better than the first. The first one is ‘on the nose’, and the second one is subtle, and suggests smuggler. <br><br>This brings me to my last point about the way Duolingo teaches you to ‘default’ to a certain word or phrase regarding a certain situation. Even if Duolingo tries to generate new sentences, it can’t possibly cover every single situation where a certain word or phrase is used, and where it isn’t. In real life, out of the blue, a super subtle and eclectic reference to a song lyric or piece of a novel is far more common than you would think. I’ll give you a good example of that for this point as well. <br><br>Take the phrase, ‘hold my beer’. You would think that this phrase would be used in a situation like this: <br>Person A: ‘Do you want to hold my beer while I go pee?’. <br>Person B: ‘Of course!’. <br><br>But no. The actual origin of this phrase is it was something that someone would say right before doing something crazy. Like this… <br>Person A: ‘This is the last beer in the fridge. I’m going to go out there and die for it’. <br>Person B: ‘Hold my beer’. <br><br>Someone’s going to go out and die for their last beer in the fridge! - You can imagine this happening far more often than not, in real life. <br>The thing with this is, if you’re ever in a situation where you have to make a subtle reference to something, but you’re in your target language, a lot of the time you won’t be able to think of it. Because you didn’t learn it in Duolingo, you learned sentences that don’t make sense instead.<br><br>Now that I’ve finished, gotta go play some chess. Fite me on lichess :)