What kills me about Duolingo Spanish is that every time there's an update, they shuffle things around and I get weird vocab words I've never seen before pop up like I should know them, and concepts i covered months ago show up as new content. I have no idea what I've missed because there's no real patch notes for me to go back and see. I do really like it because although I'm motivated to learn Spanish, my wife isn't as much so, and it's easy to turn it into a game between us to keep her motivated to learn every day. Note: I'm not some monster forcing this poor woman to learn Spanish, we have plans to visit Central America in a couple years and want to be prepared.

Apparently the quality of the Norwegian course is a legacy of a very involved and knowledgeable volunteer group back when Duolingo relied on that.

I'm a Duolingo veteran and completed 11 courses between 2014-2018, mostly Germanic and Slavic, in many cases not long after the courses first went live. The Dutch and Danish courses were good enough to get me near-fluent, and I sat A-level Dutch in 2016 and got the highest grade. The Polish course is also excellent, really rigorous and comprehensive. All the courses were volunteer-made which is why the quality and length varies a lot - the only reason the Norwegian course is like that is because the volunteers were really passionate and added so much content. The Hungarian course is notorious for being broken and was stuck in beta for years (I don't know if it still is) - learners would reach a point about two-thirds of the way through that was basically impassable. The main complaint long-time users like myself have is the "enshittification" of Duolingo. So many good features have been gotten rid of or made pay-only. The whole thing is way more cartoonish, ad-infested and dumbed-down than it was a decade ago.

Duolingo isn't gonna get me to learn languages on it's own but it optimises the 5-20 minute downtime I have on public transport and keeps me productive . It's a great bonus to my language learning experience . I compare it to Tajin . I can't live off of Tajin but a little bit goes nicely with a lot of different foods . That being said I'm always happy to check out new language learning resources and love your content

"Toilet time language learning market", I'm dying!

Great video! For anyone looking for a specific language: 10:38 Scandinavian languages 11:00 German 11:08 Yiddish 12:45 Dutch 13:04 Hebrew 14:27 Arabic 14:47 Russian 15:11 Czech 15:49 Ukrainian 15:57 Polish 16:07 Romance languages 16:21 Romanian 16:34 Latin 17:44 Celtic languages 18:20 Mandarin 18:56 Japanese 20:24 Korean & Vietnamese 21:19 Greek, Hungarian & Turkish 21:30 Indonesian 21:40 Hawaiian 21:53 Hindi 22:15 Swahili & Zulu 23:06 Navajo 23:46 Valyrian 23:53 Klingon 24:26 Esperanto

"pardon my French" "pardon my Yiddish" I feel that you have a goal to be pardoned in as many languages as possible. Can't wait for the F bomb followed by "pardon my English"

As an Irish speaker, the audio for Irish is actually horrendous, the AI voice is really really bad and mispronounces even the most common of words

It is my understanding that the US military did not simply use Navajo as a code. They used a "normal" code but instead putting English into code they put Navajo into code.

Can I just say as a language learning content consumer that I HATE ai generated voices?! Just hire a voice actor; it’s not even that expensive.

The reason Norwegian is an outlier is that it has been done by a group of very dedicated, skilled contributors. As such, it is much better than other, centralised, courses I did (Italian). They did not only add pieces of actual Norwegian culture in there, they also did it in a fun way. Now, Norwegian is a simple language for me because I know both German and English. But I went straight from doing the course to reading books. That's how good the course is (thank you, Lynn, if you ever wander in here). If you are doing more than one of the centralised courses, you will get bored by the stories quickly because they are the same everywhere, so even if you don't understand a lot of Spanish, you just know it's the same story you already listened to in the Italian course.

"made up languages ...like Latin" LOL

Something I’d like to add is that for some reason, the duo Japanese course doesn’t start consistently teaching you the kanji form of words until like 50 hours in, which means that until you get there, you won’t be able to read almost any Japanese outside of duo, even extremely simple sentences.

Oh great algorithm please shine favorably on this content creator he's dope

I have to admit that I indulged in the "shock locals" kind of video for a little bit. The best thing that I got from that is that I eventually landed in this channel. So, I guess it wasn't a complete waste of time haha

I enjoy Duolingo less as a language study tool, more as a language mobile game. With that in mind, I enjoy it quite a bit. I think your conclusion is on point. It's a great way to try out a language, and learn a few hundred words for a foundation, and give you a boost toward more serious study.

I stopped not learning a language with Duolingo ages ago but my friend got me to start not learning a language with Lingo Legend instead. Neither option really does it for me - I don't retain much from either, but Lingo Legend has gameplay that I like so I stick with it. Honestly if Duolingo had a little virtual pet that I had to keep alive with my streak I'd probably still use it. Like they leaned way too hard into the owl being scary and threatening you. But they should have threatened the owl and told me how hungry it was and that the only way I can afford food for it is to do my Spanish lessons.

Duolingo Norwegian has so much content because, when it was user-driven, the administrator-volunteers put a LOT of energy into creating (what was then) the best course on the platform with more content than the courses Duilingo thenselves produced.

I've been on Duolingo for a over a decade and have used it to brush up my French, Italian and German and learn Welsh, Dutch and Arabic from almost scratch. I also tried Turkish but gave up after a couple of weeks. In the Welsh learning community there is an enormous amount of debate about the value of Duolingo. The course used to be a lot better when the comments were included, ie before enshittification, and the Welsh government have supported the course and ensured it links well with the government supported and subsidised live courses. For me, it got me to A2 when combined with watching TV (especially kids TV) during lockdown, so that I could skip the first couple of years of classes. The main competition in Welsh is Say Something in Welsh, which some love but which was too audio based for me. For Arabic I felt it was never going to teach me to speak, only to understand the script. After months of using it daily I hadn't learned any real verbs! Great analysis anyway.

One thing I do really like using Duolingo for: when it gives you the matching exercise where it wants you to pair 5 words to their English equivalent, I like to take all of the words it gives me and build sentences out of them. Even if it doesn’t make sense for those words to be used together, I MAKE them make sense. It’s a fun exercise, and it forces you to really think in your target language, because you’ll probably have to invent your own sentences; the prompts Duo has been giving you probably won’t cut it if your sentences are going to make sense. I’d recommend trying it.

I had a HORRIBLE experience with Duolingo Japanese. How many times can the lessons repeat "She's a cool lawyer"? Something I will NEVER say on a trip to Japan? The _FIRST_ Japanese lesson in Pimsleur taught me more useful travel terms than THREE MONTHS of daily Duolingo junk. It was decent for learning hiragana and katakana, but there were massive frustrations with that as well, because you can't easily review what you've learned if you put it down for a while, without completing the entire thing.

Duolingo sentences: Our horse does not eat bread. Papa eats pizza on the subway. The stone is in the cafe. Is Papa an engineer? Sigh. I have not had to use any of these sentences yet in real life.

It is kinda fun how the beginner language learner just kinda uses duolingo because they don't know any better but the more advanced language learner starts to dislike duolingo because they experienced more useful ressources but then suddenly the acadamic linguist says that duolingo can actually work really well if used optimally

Hearing your rendition of Tennessee-accented Shakespeare in the midst of a discussion of Yiddish gave me flashbacks to my own high school production of Fiddler on the Roof. Our Yente sounded exactly like Minnie Pearl, bless her heart. And, well, the less said about my take on Tevye, the better.

Thank you for producing a video about Duolingo that isn't just a rant. I really benefited from your other video about how to make Duolingo work for you. The information about each of the modules was invaluable since I've been doing the Ukrainian module on repeat for at least 6 months. Now I am refreshing my high school French. It was also helpful to hear your opinions about the modules, specifically the Yiddish and Hebrew. I was infuriated when I realized the Yiddish wouldn't help me speak with my neighbors and the poor audio quality of the Hebrew just made me cry, although I didn't have as much trouble with "no vowels" as I thought I would. It's so important to get that real-life experience! I predict you will have 1000s of comments... gotta go... and do my daily practice session. ;-)

about the Yiddish course: I studied it and finished it while it was in beta, moved to other languages, and recently came back to see what changed since. to my amazement, it seems that the course got WORSE when it came out of beta. longer for sure, but lower quality, with a lot of pointless padding. also, one thing that automatically makes this version worse is there not being a comment section. if they don't teach me grammar rules and I don't have the comments to consult, I will literally never learn that some nouns behave like other grammatical genders in different cases.

It would be great if you made a mini follow-up for the languages learnable using other languages but not available for English users on the duolingo app. These languages are Guarani and Catalan for Spanish speakers and Cantonese for Mandarin speakers.

I speak Japanese decently well and I got my foundation in the writing system and basic vocab on Duolingo but quickly found myself needing to go look for actual study resources to make real improvement. My actual Japanese Duolingo experience now a few years later is slogging through some extremely simplistic grammar while occasionally finding unique words I haven't encountered before. I'm glad Duolingo exists but I'm pretty sure I've exhausted it's potentially at this point. Fully agree with your assessment.

Oh THATS why its called rosetta stone.

Living in Texas on the gulf, I run into tons of people who only speak Spanish. I'm not sure about other places in the US, but regionally It always made sense to me why Spanish was the main language to learn because I'm going to interact with a lot of people who speak it.

I've been pretty impressed with the effort they've put into Scottish Gaelic, and it's been fun watching it improve. Thanks as always for great content.

I'm using duolingo to supplement my Chinese learning, and the best thing they have done for Chinese in the past year is to add a section where you draw characters. Yes, obviously I could be practicising my writing with pen and paper, but since I'm self-studying and no one checks my homework, I tend to skip the tedium of writing the same character fifteen times over. The gamification of duolingo really helps with that.

I have a problem with the Polish course - on polish subreddit we constantly get people, who are confused by the case system. Questions like "Why in this sentence is it 'pies' but in this one it's 'psem'?". It seems that there isn't like a mandatory intro to the language or at least grammar explanation that is easily findable/accessible. I myself tried learning Korean, but it was so unstructured then, that I gave up and just used TTMIK and other resources.

PSA: the audio on the Japanese course is often incorrect and I would highly discourage anyone from using the Japanese course on Duolingo because you won't know how it's incorrect unless you already speak Japanese

Duolingo lost 50% of it's value when they got rid of the comments. I am also immensely frustrated that it assumes I speak Californian American, rather than Standard English. In the German course, it translates German words that have obvious English translations into some American vernacular. Serviette is translated for no obvious reason into Napkin. Others Such as KäseSpätzle into Cheese (obvious), Spatzle... WHUT? Rucksack into Backpack, I know that is "literally" correct, but who doesn't use the word rucksack? A backpack is something you put your kids books in. Those are trivial ones I can remember, but it goes deeper, I often find myself having to translate from German into into English, then into 'Murcan to get a correct answer.

I've been slowly going thru the Yiddish course on Duolingo and didn't know the subtleties. Your description of it was quite amusing as being like Shakespeare speeches in a Tennessee accent..

I was just waiting for you to mention the Dutch content because that's what I've been studying for the past few years. I'm one of the eight! Woo-hoo! I do get a little jealous when I hear about the features and stories that the Spanish learners get.

Can't wait for the 'why I don't like Esperanto' video.

I have been studying Scottish Gaelic on Duolingo for a year and a half and I love the course. There are so few resources for this language, and even fewer with audio, that I am delighted to see how long it is. The audio, while missing occasionally, is all real recordings (one of them even sings a bit from the kid's show Dòtaman), expressing the appropriate emotion for the content, and representing a variety of dialects, which can be confusing but also provides a broader sense of how the spelling relates to pronunciation. From the posts which we used to have access to in the former discussions, people compared the Scottish Gaelic course very favorably over both the Irish and Welsh courses, which they found severly lacking in accuracy and overall quality.

"dogwater" - language simp mentioned 😎

I did all the DuoLingo content for Ukrainian. It was a good starting point and it was very helpful for learning the Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet. It was time well spent, but as you said you won't get to fluency. A good grammar course is needed and I used Lingq to stuff vocabulary into my brain.

Duolingo also not only doesn't have traditional Chinese, but also marks you incorrect if you type a traditional character into their prompts. It teaches pinyin decently, but also teaches words people don't say extremely early on (things like 哪兒）it fails to tell you that 你最近怎麼樣 means how have you been recently, but drop the time word and you just asked "what's wrong with you? " as a greeting. With all that said, I still recommend Duolingo but you can you'll basically pull all you can from it (if you're trying to learn traditional characters) within the first month.

Prior to travelling to Amsterdam this year for only 5 days, my 16 yr old daughter completed the entire Duo Dutch course in about 8 months. In the end she did not need to know Dutch at all in Amsterdam - if you’ve ever been there you’ll understand. BUT she was super proud of the fact that she understood all the signs and what she sometimes overheard ppl saying. Additionally she has made several online Dutch friends who are happy to communicate with her in Dutch. She chats with them daily and is doing so well! Living proof that the Duo course was very effective.

I think you skipped Finnish! Its unrelated to the other Scandinavian languages so I don't know if youre counting it under that category in terms of course quality

Thanks for this review, really appreciated. I'll continue my learning journey of Italian and Russian. My brother moved to Lisbon, and in the passed I considered using Duolingo for Portuguese, but the app only offers the Brasilian variant, which is very different (apparently the difference is bigger than between European Spanish and "latin" Spanish or European english and American english). That's something you forgot to point out. Keep up the good work!

From a chat I had with an Irish man who was also learning Irish (or re-learning it? He has connections to Irish speakers in the home country, and of course they learn a solid chunk of it in school) he was really disappointed in the course's AI voices. Their pronunciation was frequently all over the place, and didn't really have a 'home accent'. The main problem I had was that they seemed to cut off the first half-second of each word? For example, I had one listening exercise where you had to hit the button to listen to a word, and then press the corresponding written word. Both "te" (hot) and "im" (butter) were options, but each of their audios sounded like a grunt, despite these words sounding completely differently when properly sounded out. And if you guess the wrong one? That's one less life for you! This happened more than once a day on average, sometimes twice or thrice in a single section, and when the app is constantly shoving "spend money to get unlimited hearts" ads in your face, it feels a little more than scummy. It was like if I were to ask someone whether I was saying "Castellano" or "Está bien" by going "tae". Not fun. It got to the point where I dropped Duolingo entirely, because why try to learn a principally-spoken language through an app when the pronunciations are dreadful and the audio cuts out half the time?

Duolingo used to be a very competent language learning platform. There was a lesson section, even in some of its less popular languages, like Romanian. And the forums were a great way to get input from native speakers into vernacular phrases and to clarify misconceptions. But when I downloaded it again last year, it was changed entirely for the worst. Not only are the lessons no longer available, now there's a life system that prevents you from progressing if you make the typical mistakes that are bound to happen when learning a language. And even more so, when you are deprived of the lesson primer that was meant to give you a minuscule idea of the grammar behind the sentences you're filling in. It's pretty much candy crush, but less slay.

I've been on Duolingo Italian for 33 days, it's been pretty okay. They give me a premium for free so I'm happy. Now I can say I'm from Philadelphia.

What about Finnish? I didn't catch your review of the Finnish course. (Personally I found it too short and not even close to giving you real skills, but what did you think?)

Cool, I am spoiled as the only user of Duolingo Norwegian 😊

I'm ready to listen to a livestream where you recite all of Shakespeare's Hamlet using a Tennessee accent.

"Maybe you can order in a restaurant and SHOCK locals" 😂

The Welsh course is entirely made by volunteers, hence why no speaking practice etc, but was supported by the Welsh Government to align with government standard taught courses in Wales. However, there is no explanation of mutations or even the difference between chi and ti, unless you go digging on the internet- the volunteers put such effort into the course and DuoLingo just shat on them from a great height. Now the Welsh course has been mothballed, meaning no more updates.

I live in Vietnam, the pronouns aren't that difficult, there's basically one for a ,man younger than you, one for a man older, one for a woman younger than you, one for a woman older than you, one for a very old woman, you can pick them up in ten minutes, where it's different is that the pronoun remains the same whether it's the subject or the object. It's not that tricky, the hard part is the lack of cognates.

'If you've been under a rock....' Duolingo will still find you! Professor Jones puts correlation coefficients into language learning videos. Excellent! I expected nothing less....

I can say from experience that Duolingo has helped me do one thing I wanted to do for Japanese: recognize and read hiragana. I learned katakana first for a video game years ago, so I was learning backwards. I don't know if it's the best for kanji, but I've learned a few, so I'll look into videos here on KZfaq, maybe. As you said, it's not good for speaking properly, but I think it is good for learning the structure of the language. Heck, I'm still using it, so that's a testament to it.

Duolingo was an excellent way for me to dip my toe back into Irish after not speaking a word since school. It was great for dusting off the cobwebs but I moved onto other (better) learning materials fairly quickly.

Duolingo needs a Farsi course.

One of the things you didn't really mention about Duolingo is also that the whole design of their software is very obviously based on the way European languages work, and many of the other languages have just been shoehorned into that system, instead of developing activities that are actually tailored to the sorts of things you need to learn for some of the more different languages (such as East Asian ones). For example, with Japanese, some of the types of exercises that come up would make sense with a Latin alphabet, but they don't actually make sense (or don't actually teach you anything) in Japanese because they're dealing with a different way of writing things that doesn't work the same way, etc. IMHO, it's not a deal breaker, but it does make the course feel a lot less efficient, and sometimes more tedious. On the other hand, some things that would be really useful to learn more in depth (such as kanji composition and pronunciations) just aren't really covered at all, because they only have one predefined set of exercise types that they use for everything, and none of those predefined types are designed to handle that sort of problem (because it's just not an issue with European languages, which is what all the software was obviously based on). Oh, and they basically don't teach you the Japanese kana at all anymore. Sure, they've got a weird little add-on thing which isn't actually part of the main course which runs through them quickly, but it's laughably brief, does not have any of the variety of exercise types or fun of the main course, and that's only if you know you should be going and looking for it anyway, since that is not where the course actually starts. It is so clearly an afterthought it's actually kinda insulting, IMHO. Because of this, I would not recommend Duolingo for Japanese to anyone who hasn't already at least spent time getting familiar with Hiragana and Katakana on their own using some other method first. And they keep rearranging the course, so it feels like I'm stuck in some sort of sysiphusian language limbo, where every time I make progress toward finishing the course, I find myself suddenly many lessons, or even whole sections back from where I used to be with no warning, and I don't even have any idea what's actually changed. (I'm not usually this cynical, but at this point I'm kinda legitimately suspecting that the constant reorganizations are actually a deliberate tactic to keep people from ever actually finishing the language, so they can make them keep using the app longer and try to extract more revenue out of them...) But that having been said, it is still a useful tool for me anyway. I would never recommend that anybody use it just by itself, but in combination with some other learning materials, I do find that Duolingo is useful for giving me a good variety of sentences to work with, introducing me to occasional new vocabulary words and grammar that supplement what I'm getting elsewhere, and most importantly, keeping me motivated to do at least some language study every day, which IMHO is very important to actually make real progress. That aspect alone is probably worth keeping it in many people's language learning toolbox, in my opinion.

I started using Duolingo to learn German, about two years ago. As my German improved, I started to notice that some of the English translations were quite peculiar. There were minor irritations like, why do I need to translate "Cafe (G)" to "coffee shop", instead of "cafe (E)", like I would normally say? I started to think the English had been written by non-native speakers, due to some confusion with the use of prepositions. Most notably with the misuse of "in" and "at". Finally, while trying to master the somewhat convoluted sentence structures of the English answers, I started thinking, maybe the German is as bad as the English. That was when I stopped using Duolingo.

I'm a teacher of Japanese language and when I was researching possible sources for my students I decided to check Duolingo - it has an option to solve a test to skip to the highest level and I spent unnecessary 2 HOURS trying to finish the final level and the only reason was not Japanese at all but ENGLISH - almost all the tasks were based on putting an English sentence as a translation of a Japanese sentence and I was constantly not passing for not putting EXACTLY the ENGLISH sentence that there was supposed to be. That was so exhausting and at the end I just had to Google those English sentences to finally get them right because additionally putting a British spelling or a synonym of a word was giving a fail. And not only this type of exercise is absolutely useless on advanced level (why heavily rely on a different language when you're supposed to be already fluent in another one) but also the Japanese sentences the user was asked to translate had many mistakes. Many many mistakes. Can't imagine anyone can get anything out of Duolingo when it comes to Japanese, even the video creator sounds rather confused about the language why there shouldn't be a reason if the source is good.

You're doing what people have intuitively known for years, at least those more concerned with depth on its failings and benefits. You've put it rather succinctly in this video and gave the best quantitative approach I've seen yet. I used Duolingo for German and found it intensely frustrating the more skilled I became. It did however provide a great testing ground as a supplement and one indispensable for my pursuits to use the language in Germany. It has its place, but needs improvement like anything else.

For Welsh I would highly recommend taking actual classes which are heavily subsidised and can be attended on line. This is especially true if you want to learn the dialect of the north, duolingo occasionally tells you specific nouns that are different but it doesn't do a good job of the more fundamental stuff in my opinion (including a whole vowel sound that isn't made in the south).

I started on Duolingo because it was the only free app with Modern Greek at the time. You didn't say your analysis of Greek. I actually watched this on the toilet.

I love your unique data-driven analysis to substantiate your claims! Few bother to do anything similar. I really like seeing which languages "punch above their weight" (as you put it) in regards to content. This video was like kind of like seeing a science experiment or study carried out. Your graphs about these languages reminds me a little of the "Power Language Index" (PLI) by Dr. Kai L. Chan, where Bengali is more spoken than Japanese, but yet, Japanese remains one of the most powerful languages in the world despite having fewer speakers. Great stuff!

The Irish course doesn't use real people for the audio. It's AI voices. Has been for a while unfortunately. It's such a shame! It used to be an actual native speaker! :(

Tried their Navajo, you aren't kidding, it really isn't enough. I would say its basically enough to get a taste if someone is interested. Really, I'd say the best way to learn Dine bizaad is to make Navajo friends and learn from their parents, that's how I learned it growing up.

Bro's courting death 💀 That green bird is gonna have a field day 🐦

I was looking for the Haitian Creole mention and am happy to know you found the language fun! :)

"Asymmetrically mutually intelligible" is a good description of the Scandinavian languages. As a native Swedish speaker with some friends who speak Danish and Norwegian, the impression I get is that Swedish and Danish speakers both understand Norwegian better than they understand the third language, and that Norwegian speakers understand Swedish & Danish even better than they are understood by speakers of those. While this is probably partly due to historical and social factors not inherent to the languages themselves, I still suspect learning only Norwegian would give you a better shot at understanding the other Scandinavian languages than learning only Swedish or Danish.

I'm like 2 years into Spanish, both duolingo and physical courses and I must say, though duolingo is somewhat useful for vocabulary, it's grammar teaching is ass, and I think that's partially due to the game format where you just spend your time translating stuff. Firstly it means that with the short sentences it's very difficult to learn very contextual grammar rules like the subjuntivo (which it doesn't even properly explain). Secondly, it just translates English grammar 1-to-1 even though Spanish grammar has its specific rules. My favourite example being that it uses the present perfect against the preterito perfecto. Thus it asks you to translate the sentence "I have lived here since 2019" as "he vivido aquí desde 2019". But it's wrong in Spanish here, you're supposed to say "vivo aqui desde 2019", you're using the present tense. Has to do with the fact that the English present perfect describes a situation that started in the past but is still ongoing to this day, whereas the Spanish preterito perfecto is for situations that happened in the past within a time frame that's still ongoing, like today, this month, this year... so where you would say in "I ate breakfast today" in English, the technically correct way to say it in Spanish would then be "he desayunado hoy", so in the preterito perfecto. I really wish Duolingo had a better way of explaining these things and that their translations are more dynamic... although many Spanish natives won't fret too much about which past tense you're using, it misses the fundamental point that time just works differently in the Spanish language.

It had been a while since I needed to take a shot Also just want to mention, this is one of my favorite channels currently

I had fun with it with a year streak, until I decided it wasn't as helpful as it should have been. Using other resources has been much better, but Duo will always be good for beginners.

Personally I liked the old tree structure better, because it allowed me to progress much quicker and decide the ammount of intake by myself, I used to do 2-3 units then going back and do the older ones to gold and then switch again to new stuff... (Then again, I had had half a year of torture with an absolutely dry and boring learningpsychology class and had learnt 2.5 languages during school) ... For me the path currently has way too many repetitions, but that's a me issue...

Since you’re in New York and a linguist I encourage you to look at the absolutely batshit insane, yet hugely effective, Latin-Greek Institute at Brooklyn college. Moreland and Fleischer was written for that course. Rita F. is quite old now, but still makes an occasional appearance to give out (single) m&ms to students.

For the Welsh course I wish they used a speaker with the north walian accent for sentences containing northern dialect words, and vice versa for the south walian vocab. I tried the chinese (it wasn't labelled mandarin/cantonese - so maybe this is out of date) course and felt I was getting somewhere, then asked a native cantonese speaker about one of the phrases and he said that the writing was a mixture of mandarin and cantonese together, so I gave up on any further progress. I do wonder if that is still the case.

Thanks for all this work! I live in Georgia (the country) but grew up in Indiana (the state), so I’ve needed to learn Georgian. I can’t imagine how it would work on Duolingo, which is probably why (along with the number of speakers) that it isn’t there. But I was a university level Russian instructor in a previous life, and I really enjoy Duolingo for helping me remember my Spanish, learn some French, brush up my very rusty Hungarian, and play around with Hawaiian and Polish. Everything you said rings true to my experience. When I think back to how limited resources were when I was learning Russian, I’m so impressed at the availability of such a breadth of resources.

One issue you didn't really touch on (probably because it's not as relevant for you or your audience) is that duolingo doesn't really tell you the grammar and expects you to figure it out from context. Language learning subreddits are basically flooded with people asking "why is this wrong?", because the are seemingly completely unaware of very basic concepts like gender, cases, declinations etc. Also, when you e.g. get the gender wrong, the correction Duolingo gives you often doesn't simply correct the article but instead changes the noun to a synonym where the article fits. I've only dabbled in Portuguese and Polish and I speak related languages, so it wasn't an issue for me, but English speakers in particular seem to struggle with this.

hey im one of those 8 people learning dutch, thank you for the well wishes!

Thank you for sharing your passion for language learning! ❤ Dulingo is the perfect app for me due to the gamification of language learning. I had previously stayed away from it due to the limitations of the free version. However, I paid for the membership after watching your video on it a year ago. I started learning Ukrainian two years ago but made the most progress on Duolingo. I also watch a lot of Ukrainian news and also now have several friends from Ukraine. Ukrainian’s I speak to can understand me and are very friendly and helpful with correcting me on proper word cases.

Thanks for a very informative summary. I'm glad I'm on my sister's family plan for Duoliguo (which she got to better interact with her live-in Vietnamese D-i-L), as I used it first to scrape the rust off my Hindi after a few years away and TOTALLY agree with your dogwater assessment. I will say that its Hindi is so bad it had the unexpected benefit of making me realise I had NOT lost as much as I'd feared. But at least in my case, the price is right.😁

My mom got completely obsessed with duolingo. She has been doing it daily (with a couple breaks) for like 10 years. I mean, she got a 1000 day streak. She is studying Portuguese. She still doesnt know Portuguese.

As someone who has to learn Hebrew for Jewish conversion I love Duolingo so much. It's basically the only thing out there that doesn't involve moving to Israel or talking to people in real life (ew). I've gotten to the point where I can understand about 10% of r/ani_bm.

They don't do Slovene. Millions, billions, no trillions of frustrated wannabe learners are waiting. Aren't they?

My first introduction to learning Chinese like a lot of language learners was Pimsleur. Takes me back. I just finished HSK4 and I found the Duolingo lackluster as you say for Chinese specifically. I'll give the podcast you mentioned a try though. I'm crying out for authentic and interesting listening materials to get my hands on while I finish my PhD online in Applied Linguistics. Much love from China.

This video actually reminded me I was about to lose my streak, I swear to christ that owl is everywhere, friends. Take care. Don't let it take you!!!

I am officially one of the eight Dutch learners on Duolingo. I've been kiiinda slowly learning it off-and-on for about three years, and honestly, whenever I'd take breaks with the app, I find I'm amazed at how much I've successfully retained. (For the record, I'm currently halfway through Section 2)

Just so it is a fun fact: Duolingo was created by the same person who created the Recaptcha: Luis Von Ahn. A guatemalan, who's now living in the United States.

I can say that you need to find multicultural area or country if you really want to apply or practice your duolinggo. The best place in the world to learn and experience is in Unite Arab Emirates. You will get 200 nationality across UAE. Some languages that you need to learn if you stay or work in middle east especially Dubai, UAE. you can start from the top to the least to learn: 1. English (Mandatory, Daily) 2. Arabic (Gulf Dialect, Daily casual + Spoken and Written MSA if you want or work to enter government office /area for foreigner) 3. German (Hospitality, High Paid Job Company) 4. Russian (Hospitality, High Paid Job Company) 5. Hindi/Urdu (Daily casual for all sectors+ work in Indian area) 6. Tagalog (Daily casual for all sectors) Those are top that you will get nice life and good job in UAE. You may add more another minority languages in UAE to your list: 7. Arabic another dialects for daily casual engagement (1.Egyptien, 2.Darija / Maroccan, 3.Levantine(Jordan, Palestine, Syrian), 4.Iraqi) 8. Pashto (Pakistani Pashtun and Afghan language) 9. Turkish (Hospitality) 10. Nepalese (Daily Casual) 11. Bahasa Indonesia (Small community but exist) 12. Chinese (Small community but exist) 13. Thai (Small community but exist) My little secret for UAE that i can share to enjoy chit chat or gossip zone then you need to give small attention to hindi, urdu, tagalog, pashto, nepalese and darija. You will not get people trying to backbite you.

Your description of Duolingo Yiddish had me glad I was language learning on the toilet because thwt honestly sounds like a hot mess and i love it. I never knew i needed southern drawl shakespear

Unless I've missed it, not a word on Finnish...! Facinating language of course, with many "exotic" features, exotic of course for anybody not speaking a Finno-Ugric or Uralic language... I sort of assume you would put it in the same category as Hungarian or Turkish as far as Duolingo courses are concerned. And by the way, talking about Turkish, I'm not sure that Greek was mentioned either in the video.

I am offended that they have Klingon and High Valyrian but not Quenya, Sindarin, or any of Tolkien’s other conlangs😒

I started out on the Duolingo German course, but meandered over to Vietnamese. I’ve been supplementing the Vietnamese with native speakers on KZfaq. Duolingo only teaches the northern dialect, the central and southern dialects also feature slightly different vocabularies. I feel like it’s a good enough introduction, at least for the grammar. If I manage to complete the course, I’ll probably get a tutor.

I LOVE the instant feedback of the characters after you submit your answers. Keeps things fun!

As a Norwegian and Spanish learner I see this as an absolute win :)

Colloquial Zulu is a train-wreck - so full of proofreading errors that I had to find my copy of Teach Yourself Complete Zulu to figure out what I'm supposed to learn. I quit after Unit 8 - I should have quit sooner.

Thank you for reviewing Hebrew. I have been plodding through for years and often feel confused. I feel like I often can guess a verb but can't tell you what conjugation is which. I don't really have time to supplement it with anything but I am glad to know that it's not just my lack of talent for learning language that makes trying to figure out what rules of conjugation they are teaching me.

I've been learning Hebrew for about a year now and was wondering what your assessment of the duolingo course would be! I have a grammar book that I like to use along with Pealim (glad to see you shout them out, it's a great website!). Had a head start because I knew the aleph bet and some vocabulary from my bat mitzvah study, but I've actually found duolingo Hebrew super useful, mainly for practicing vocabulary and making sure I study consistently. Glad to see it getting some love. It's a really impressive job for such a niche language. Also -- Latin: An Intensive Course was my Latin 101 textbook in college! Absolutely love it. Duolingo Latin on the other hand... oof.

I majored in Russian and the AI voices don’t get the important syllable stresses obvious enough. The Ukrainian course is even worse (useful, but I know enough of Slavic languages to be afraid of not knowing where the stress in the word really is). Scottish Gaelic is a delight and has a huge variety of native speakers of an insane number of dialects. Duolingo ditched the brilliant grammar lessons they attached to every new section, but it has been saved on-line by others, thank goodness. And I don’t say that just because they were hilarious.

I was in a Hindi learning group until recently, and we tried DuoLingo and Glossika and a few other apps. They were all HORRIBLE. Lots of different issues. Starting with crazy transliteration, continuing through bad audio to, well, just about everything possible that can go wrong. One huge pet peeve of mine was the same word being spelled differently in different sentences (for example हिन्दी versus हिंदी) so you literally have to memorize which one goes with which sentence or you just get them wrong for no reason.