wes1350

A nice feature would be "locking" black squares, or otherwise marking them somehow, to distinguish them from squares you may still switch in the future.

I'd prefer the rows, columns and diagonals to have their current sums visible next to the desired totals. Right now, it's tedious to have to add all the numbers up for each one.

At the very beginning, just enough to maintain a streak. Once I started getting into it, I spent quite a bit of time on it, up to a couple of hours a day on average at the peak. It’s worth noting this is on the desktop version, so that meant a lot of typing actual sentences. I’m not sure how Duolingo works these days and if anything’s changed, so I’m not sure if I would do things differently if I were to be learning today.

What you say is very relatable. I did a bit of reading in French after this article, though I haven’t kept up with it. A huge motivation for me while learning was that I wanted to experiment with living in France for at least a year or two after finishing school, to be able to experience living abroad, while speaking a foreign language, before “life happens” and I get too rooted here in the US. That didn’t end up happening (which in hindsight was very fortunate, as my time in France would’ve been severely compromised due to COVID), but is still something I would consider in the future. Of course, visits will certainly be an option in the future.

I’d definitely still say the experience was worth it, given that I still have much of my previous ability and can probably relearn it rather quickly. It certainly is a bit sad to see your skills degrade over time, and this has certainly contributed to some fear of picking up the language again, but that probably goes for most skills and hobbies anyways.

And as you said, I have the same experience whenever someone asks me about my language learning experience —- I always mention how rusty I am these days, and there’s a nagging feeling I need to shake off the rust so I don’t have to say that anymore. But in the end, I guess we have to settle for doing whatever we think is best in the moment, and if it’s important enough, we can always pick it up again some day.

Author here, didn’t expect to see this here again after two years!

I guess I’ll give a quick update on how things have been since this article was written. I haven’t used or studied French much since then, and have gotten quite rusty, though I’ve had a few conversations fully in French in the last few months and can still maintain a conversation. I have been thinking of picking up French again soon, as traveling to a French speaking country becomes more of an option.

I also did roughly the same thing with my Spanish in the following year, with similar results, though I’d say I probably reached a solid B1.5 or weak B2 after a year (due to COVID I was unable to take the proficiency test and lost some motivation to continue studying to a high level as a result.)

My recommendations are still largely the same, though I haven’t used these resources (e.g. Duolingo) since I stopped studying a while back. And as others have noted, for other languages, particularly those that are less closely related to English (e.g. Japanese), you’ll have to follow a different path to achieve the same proficiency. However, language learning resources are getting better constantly, so you can certainly still learn quite a lot without total, in-person immersion, as I did!

Probably a reference to “priming” variables in mathematical contexts. You have variable x and then variable x’ comes up. Or you learn to ride a bike and then later on you’re supposed to figure out how to ride a bike’.

Author here. You are right, that was a lot of cards, but doing it in French is several times easier and faster than doing it in English due to the massive number of cognates and near-identical alphabet. The 5k deck was also, as you say, a massive time saver, if not less effective than making your own deck.

Author here. I have never configured a website like this so I wasn't aware of these problems. Any tips for fixing this?

Author here. Thanks for assuring me that these drawbacks aren't so bad! I did want to include these sort of limitations though so that people don't think I can do everything a native speaker can do. In particular, I wanted to avoid giving off the "I GOT FLUENT IN 12 MONTHS USING THIS SECRET TRICK!" vibe.

Je suis l'auteur. Je pensais à écrire une version française, mais il y a 9000 mots dans l'article ! Ce serait un tache énorme et probablement pas la meilleure façon de passer mon temps, car j'écris bien moins vite en français qu'en anglais. De plus, j'imagine que la grande majorité de gens qui vont lire cet article sont anglophones.

(For those who don't (or do) speak French, I tried to write this: "I'm the author. I thought about writing a French version, but there are 9000 words in the article. This would be an enormous task and probably not the best way to spend my time, since I write significantly slower in French than in English. Furthermore, I imagine that most people who are going to read this article are English speakers.")

Author here. You're absolutely correct. Make that deck 5000 non-cognate words and 50 words a day quickly becomes unsustainable. Not to mention the alphabet(s) required for a language like Japanese. French is a language I think any decently well-read person (so as to recognize many of the cognates) can learn vocabulary in surprisingly quickly, considering how much of English vocabulary is derived from French.

Author here. I heavily concentrated on speaking, but you're absolutely right that without that you can get quite far surprisingly quickly if you only care about reading. I mean, look at the millions of language students that can read complex texts in their foreign languages but can't spend 30 seconds discussing their day.

Author here. I agree that Duolingo is almost certainly not optimizing for language learning effectiveness, which ends up being somewhat of a side-effect of their business model. However, by using the desktop version and turning off the word bank, you can better optimize for effectiveness for yourself.

Duolingo is certainly a grind, but I don't think that's 100% a bad thing. It's far from perfectly executed, but I think you need a certain amount of grind to really drill some of the vocab and grammatical concepts into you.

As an example, in a classroom you do some homework exercises, and maybe get feedback the next day on however many exercises you do. You don't necessarily get to redo the exercises you miss enough to let the concept sink in, and you might do way too many exercises that do nothing for you as you've already internalized the concept. With Duolingo grinding, you have to repeat your weakest points after you get them wrong and get to drill in all the exercises until they stick.

I estimate that each lesson of roughly 20 questions, with redoing exercises I got wrong, takes me something like 3-5 minutes, so in an hour of focused effort you might get 300 exercises in. That's far more exercises than I imagine you do in school for example, and you also get to decide if a unit is too easy and you can afford to skip it, or if it's hard enough where you have to repeat it. Plus, each sentence has a discussion page, many of which (especially the tricky ones) have detailed explanations about the concepts within the sentence.

Duolingo is far from perfect, but despite all the criticism it receives (rightly so for what it claims you can do with 5 minutes a day on the mobile app), you can actually make it a surprisingly effective tool.