A Linguist explains how to make duolingo actually work

if you've thought about learning a language at all in the past decade you've probably thought about or even tried Duolingo it's massively popular and it's easy to see why it's free it's gamified it comes in bite-sized chunks and the linguistic content is different for every language they offer unlike say Rosetta Stone but can you actually get fluent with it they claim you can get to B2 in the common European framework that's separate and they have compelling looking graphs and grammar breakdowns to convince us that you can as a language learner with a PhD in linguistics I think the truth is that you can learn with anything but it's a question of speed ease and whether it works for you literally everyone I know uses Duolingo including myself and all my linguist colleagues but a lot of people also tell me that it just didn't work for them along with classroom study self-study Michelle Thomas CDs Rosetta Stone and literally everything else so today I'm going to explain how to take Duolingo from the app that you use when you're on the toilet and Reddit is down to a real way to get up to speed in a language spoilers you're going to have to pull your pants up wash your hands and be a little bit more intentional about how you learn let's do this I'm Dr Taylor Jones and the Green Owl isn't making me say these things ah this is language sounds [Music] the truth is all sorts of different approaches to language learning will work Duolingo has the benefit of being free in your pocket all the time and somewhat aggressive and encouraging you to learn or passive aggressive depending on who you get and they have a lot of languages they also have plenty of shortcomings like being entirely translation based and not having any imagery immersion and imagery really kick-start memory instead of letting perfect be the enemy of good though I want to give you 10 tips to supercharge your language learning with what you're probably already using you don't have to do all of these or really any of them but they all work and if you use them all you'll see that you actually get a lot more out of Duo then go than XP which are it turns out not redeemable for cash and do not correspond to linguistic ability without further Ado one think about what they're trying to teach in each lesson you'd be surprised how many people practice a lesson or a skill in Duolingo and then couldn't tell you afterwards what it's trying to teach when I'm done with a skill I can tell you exactly what grammatical concept they were really trying to teach for instance date of experience or constructions and double date of marking in the Spanish course that's your leg supplement with a grammar not to memorize but to familiarize a grammar being a book with a name like an essential grammar of X in a few hundred Pages you'll have all and I mean all of the grammatical structures of a language and the exceptions at your fingertips don't memorize it just use it as a reference I like to skim a grammar of whatever I'm learning periodically two talk with people in your target language I use italki for this as you might have seen in this video iTalk is a platform that connects Learners with native speakers of their target language with over 150 languages represented they have their own video conferencing platform through their website a mobile app that allows you to easily schedule lessons and a ton of teachers and tutors to choose from the reason to use a platform like italki is that the teachers expect to teach you rather than being interrupted on the street or in a cafe and their patient experienced and tend to have pretty good lesson plans although I often take notes on what I'm seeing in Duolingo and then just ask my teachers about that so I get real-time interaction with real people a deeper understanding of what's being taught and when I see the same materials in Duolingo it's in an exercise in locking that all into long-term memory if you're curious what a real lesson looks like this is from a recent lesson with Barack where we got to talking about bone breaks and lower body injuries gamma a lot okay yeah okay sure so I just don't remember it um which is is described what it is walking so yeah they wouldn't translate straight to English but in English the translation will be stress fracture if you want to try italki I have a promo code in the description below for five dollars off with your first ten dollars I misspoke here let's get an extra five dollars free with your first purchase you can try it out lessons start from five dollars the promo code is what is the promo code promo code's gonna appear on the screen and it's only available for the first I don't know how many people three when you're prompted to translate from English to your target language come up with the whole sentence first then select the words that is don't pick words from the word bank one at a time to answer and don't type the words out one at a time get the whole sentence in mind and then go bonus say it out loud first bonus bonus don't move on before saying it naturally or at least not haltingly a for uh uh show before Shield team four use it regularly daily or more often so you build on and reinforce what you see I know this sounds really obvious but you'd be surprised how many people do half a skill take a week off do the other half and then complain that they didn't learn anything as with anything else you have to actually sometimes commit time back when I worked retail for Rosetta Stone the whole selling point was that it was as little as 20 minutes a day that was before smartphones and now people bulk at a two-minute lesson set aside 10 15 20 even 30 minutes and just focus on language learning you can spare 30 minutes I have a newborn at home and I can spare 30 minutes practically this means for most languages treat a skill that is an entire circley dude as one thing and aim for at least one but preferably more than one a day here's the secret about Duolingo they're a company that wants to make money they're balancing actually teaching you something with wanting you to feel like you've learned something but continue using the product forever either you pay for plus and you stay subscribed forever or you don't and you see ads forever but you can actually finish their course any of their courses that said do the math on it French has like 180 units with approximately 10 skills per unit and four to five lessons per skill if you're doing a skill a day that's 180 times 10 equals 1800 days or roughly 4.9 years I won't fault you if you actually speak French it'll be too level in that amount of time I took High School French visited family in France throughout high school and my University years and then worked at Rosetta Stone for a year before taking the B2 exam and acing it but it's pretty well established that you can get there a whole heck of a lot faster than five years I can do a french lesson in Duolingo and two minutes flat a skill then in 10 minutes a unit a day would be about an hour and a half a day doable if I'm really committed and just watch less TV and at that rate one could finish their very long French course in 180 days or about six months this is going to be different for other languages Hebrew has way fewer skills but way more packed into each of them but one thing that I learned from coding and from running a business is to take time at the beginning to figure out exactly what the scale of a project is you want to use Duolingo to get to B2 totally doable how much time will that actually take though how can you fit that into your plans to speak at a B2 level in six months or in one year or in two years do the math make a schedule and get it done five for Less common languages take notes and analyze what you're seeing don't make them perfect I intentionally keep a very messy notebook for Hebrew with different writing styles and layouts and transliterations and formatting that's just all over the place because if I'm not careful I start fixating on getting perfect handwriting my notebooks are not going to be poured over after my death like Leonardo da Vinci's yours probably aren't either the act of writing helps you to memorize more so than typing and externalizing means you can go back and revisit without doing it on Duolingo schedule it also helps with spatial memory formation based on looking at where it is on the page six consider doing more to memorize than just trusting Duo alone or not for French and Spanish I don't do this at all for Hebrew I use the Hebrew Anki deck and add notes to myself and sometimes helpful images or mnemonics but again I don't need that for romance languages your mileage may vary but if you're not remembering things you have to reinforce the memory formation and space repetition software is a great way to do that and it's a passive way to do it seven get it over with and continue on to real content and real people this is a combination of points four and two get it done and move on real people you can start with italki link in description but I also mean that you can use that as a bridge to IRL interactions scary right learning French watch French movies go to French restaurants and just eavesdrop if you're shy extreme the news on YouTube on France mancat buy a plane ticket and go to France don't wait until you've completed every lesson and you feel like you've perfectly mastered the language that day will never come get comfortable being a little uncomfortable but improvising I like to use Gabriel winer's list of 625 words and try to figure out how I could express any complicated concept with just those words it's an exercise it's like playing taboo by Hasbro make that your game uh I'll tell you eight self-test after walking away you can do this in your head out loud or with a pen and paper not necessarily exact sentences but think about vocabulary and grammatical Concepts this is in part why I always know what they were trying to teach the best way to do this is to generate your own sentences using what you learned that aren't the sentences that you saw already even if it's just swapping out a word for example let's say you learned so you say or conversely have fun making connections and swapping out words in constructions I do this all the time washing dishes I'm just babbling to myself nine free association chains this will appeal to a certain kind of person and maybe not so much to everyone else I like to start somewhere and just free associate example one I go by related meanings if I start with a word like conocer I might then think about what's like it you can even get to antonyms like dudar example two associate by Form conocer has an interesting first-person singular form konosco so from there Fresco Etc bonus do it with two types it can just be nonsense because you're just playing word games for instance verbs and animals and so on it's a game have fun with it the forms are going to depend on the language so I might do like PL verbs in the past and foodstuffs in Hebrew so that's because number ten it's kind of a bonus imagine scenarios using the language they don't have to be realistic and in fact there's some evidence that the more outrageous and the less realistic they are the better you retain the language that you're populating your Daydreams with I'm not super motivated to learn Spanish as you may have heard when I just spoke a little bit but unless I'm thinking about specific situations with people I like for instance a trip to a city with a friend from there or imagining being the most interesting international Man of Mystery in Buenos Aires who dances Tango and spends the afternoons drinking cortados and making contact with foreign agents everything becomes that random example that's a sentence from Duolingo that's no longer a tediously simple sentence I have to get through and Duolingo in order to move on predicated on an outdated mode of media consumption popular across language learning platforms for some reason instead it becomes a code phrase by which I'm making contact with my Handler who might be a double agent for all I know these tips are just general best practices but combined with Duolingo I'm confident that you can actually learn your target language without spending much or any money although I do recommend investing a little bit in lessons with italki again down below will get you to C2 absolutely not the funny thing is people who ask this don't seem to have a grasp of what the test actually entails you learn all of the grammar of French and a vocabulary that will serve you in all of your day-to-day interactions and you're at wait for it B2 C2 is entirely about whether you can analyze texts extract arguments basically do all of the meta-linguistic cognition necessary to not just be someone who speaks say French as in my example but who can work effectively in intellectually demanding jobs or give an interview on live TV but you can't get there without the foundation in the language so these are all tips that I use and should probably use even more than I do every single one is time tested and effective have you used any of these with your study or your favorites let me know in the comments so I'd actually finish this video when I came across something in Duolingo that I think I should really point out they've been using a lot more AI to generate their text and to generate their audio and this comes with its own dangers so in this sentence in French foreign the Amazon is actually obligatory in that context so instead of it should be a native speaker would never make this mistake but because it's automatic text to speech you get a little weirdness sometimes so it's just something to be aware of if you read a grammar you're gonna get Corrections you're going to understand what the problems are and when you talk to real people you're going to get those corrections as well it doesn't make it unusable but it does make it a little tricky to use as your only way of learning special thanks to all of my patrons if you want to become one there's a link in the description and if you like this video check out this one where I criticize fake polyglots and as always I have merchandise available as well until next time happy learning and look out for the owl

Channel: languagejones

Views: 820,233

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Id: WXHtwQP9DnQ

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 11 2023