Repeating the falsehoods about Captcha being used to decipher old books and Duolingo being used to get some crowdsourced translations. Van Ahn spoke about these as potential options but it actually never happened. And it is not hard to imagine why. And now let’s talk about Duolingo as a language learning tool. Like many other ones including Babel, Rosetta Stone, Pimaleur etc. It will fail for many people. For those that do not understand how to use them to learn a language. For me Duolingo has worked amazingly, once I built some vocab and learned basic grammar, I supplemented it with classes on Preply and now speak Spanish, watch movies in Spanish and learn articles in Spanish. Again, Duolingo will not give you fluency in any language on its own, but is one of many useful tools that can help you jumpstart an adventure with a new language.
Repeating the falsehoods about Captcha being used to decipher old books and Duolingo being used to get some crowdsourced translations. Van Ahn spoke about these as potential options but it actually never happened. And it is not hard to imagine why. And now let’s talk about Duolingo as a language learning tool. Like many other ones including Babel, Rosetta Stone, Pimaleur etc. It will fail for many people. For those that do not understand how to use them to learn a language. For me Duolingo has worked amazingly, once I built some vocab and learned basic grammar, I supplemented it with classes on Preply and now speak Spanish, watch movies in Spanish and learn articles in Spanish. Again, Duolingo will not give you fluency in any language on its own, but is one of many useful tools that can help you jumpstart an adventure with a new language.