Open Source

31366 readers

55 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

134

How hard is it to build an open source alternative to Duolinguo? (feddit.it)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Speaking as a total ignorant from a coding perspective. But I guess that wouldn't be the hard part, considering that most of Duolinguo is just boxes and text inputs. How difficult it is to create a database of competent linguists with an efficient training who can progressively enhance your understanding of languages?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

As someone who is at around a high B2/low C1 level in Dutch now and moved to Belgium and used dualingo in the beginning I have a bit of insight into it.

It doesn't do shit for grammar and sentence structure, but it builds vocabulary. If you learn only with dualingo, you will probably make a lot of mistakes, flipped adverbs, verbs in the wrong place, sentence structure errors, etc...

It definitely made me feel like I could speak Dutch because I could read it MUCH better after 1/2 of the dualingo course, but then when I moved, speaking was pretty bad and I had only moved up to an A2 level with the vocab of maybe B1. You definitely cannot become semi-fluent or fluent with dualingo. It doesn't teach, it only helps practice what you have already been taught.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Conversely, I'm at a similar level in Dutch and I'd attribute a lot of my grammatical knowledge to Duolingo, especially modal verbs. However I have scoured dutchgrammar.com many a time because I learn well from reading textbooks. It hasn't helped me at all with output though; I was quite bad at that until I moved to NL.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the insight. I can see that, maybe a vocabulary builder.

Though I'd bet your time would be better spent doing other things like Anki or consuming media in the language instead, though some people just need/want the gamification.