This question is probably dumb af but, say in tw years I wanted to travel through central and south america in search of a wife.
Could duolingo get me 80% of the way there speaking Spanish in two years time?
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https://files.catbox.moe/nmrn8x.txt
This will serve you far better than an ineffective mobile app that punishes you for making mistakes.
The file you requested was dead for too long! Lain is getting it back right now though!
FUG, what gives bro?
Duolingo is good for grasping and memorizing the absolute basics. After that it's just treading water and you have to move on.
It's basically exactly what I did, even down to the two year time frame (but ignoring the wife thing), and it worked well for me. I sprinkled it in with a bit of extra reading/listening practice by the end, but Duolingo alone did get me to the stage where I could have basic conversations with people (after a few days or so of being in Mexico, at least. It took a while to train my ear/mouth just because I had literally 0 Spanish conversational skills when I arrived.
This is more or less correct though. . Some people shit all over Duolingo just because it won't make you fluent, and others say that it's utterly useless, but I'm 100% confident that it's a pretty good method for starting off with. Just don't aim to finish the entire course, because once you can understand a bit and have a basic grasp of grammar, you'd be much better off moving onto something else.
The benefit of Duolingo is it’s simple and gamified so it’s “easy” to stick with. The downside is everything else. It’s a terrible resource for learning a language as it does WAY too much translation stuff, makes you think in English as opposed to the target language, and never exposes you to actual native speakers. I recommend:
>Pimsleur to learn pronunciation. Boring but will have you speaking Spanish properly
>Language transfer to learn how to properly think about Spanish
>any vocabulary learning resource (I used Lingvist, but any SRS anki type system will work)
>dreaming Spanish (this will be where you actually learn to understand Spanish people talking)
>paying a tutor on italki
After all this, you will be actually conversational, and this can easily be done in 6-12 months with consistency, let alone one year
>t. Learned Spanish and moved to Argentina
https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/143dp0e/duolingo_is_a_videogame_if_you_want_to_learn_a/
Many comments contradicting OP though.
Redditors being dumb fricking NPC's, nothing new.
>t. Learned Spanish and moved to Argentina
How's that going? The only thing that makes me worried about moving there is their moronic government trying to frick me with their wealth tax if they start enforcing immigration laws
i absolutely love everything about it, probably the best decision of my life. its obviously beyond cheap, but its also a safe (for latam), naturally beautiful, great people country. my advice is just buy a one way ticket here and decide later how much to commit.
and the wealth tax is somewhat of a meme for now, it is comically easy to avoid. but also im a young guy with no real estate and all my money in foreign stock accounts + crypto. its really only argentinians who have to leave and do stuff to avoid the tax, you never really hear about foreigners paying the tax
you aren't required to carry ID in the street in Argentina? federal agents never check your passport and visa? what if you want to leave for whatever reason, will you be fricked upon departure and banned from returning?
>my advice is just buy a one way ticket here and decide later how much to commit.
Yeah, I've already been there and it's great, even been to cities other than BA and they were cool too
>you aren't required to carry ID in the street in Argentina?
>federal agents never check your passport and visa?
lol
>what if you want to leave for whatever reason, will you be fricked upon departure and banned from returning?
I'm not sure what his visa situation is, but from what I've heard you can overstay as long as you want on a tourist visa and when you leave they give you a lecture and you give them a $20 and they tell you to come back whenever you want, I'm just worried about that changing in the future and would prefer not to give them my info to get a long term visa
yea for 1.5 years i was doing tourist visa (visa runs and overstaying) and it was no trouble, just a fine on the way out, but now i am on rentista because i want citizenship. theres a huge community of digital nomads from all over here, its a pretty well trodden path
>moved to Argentina
I hope you brought lots of USDs. Arg. peso is just going to get worse
pimsleur + 1000 most spoken words + interpals
boom you're good. 1 year max to learn spanish if you aren't a dumbass
Consider visiting /lang/ on SighSee.
Duolingo is fricking garbage.
frick no. After completing duolingo you'll just have a little bit of vocab and be able to recite some pre-determined sentences in spanish. It'll get you maybe 5% there.
My advice: Learn basic grammar rules and start immersing yourself in native material (videos, books, articles, speaking with native speakers, etc.) as soon as possible. Comprehensible input. There's no app or 'game' you can play on your phone while taking a shit that's going to get you to fluency level. Most apps are memes. If you want to learn a language you have to actually use and interact with it on a daily basis..
PIMSLEUR
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M
S
L
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Watch Spanish language novellas on TV.
thank you for the good recs everyone
If you need a gimmicky type game style to learn use memrise on your mobile browser, the app makes you pay for it. Also use Italki to practice your speaking
Geomaxxing is purely for cooming in zero percent agency sloots, if you are going to become a betabux deluxe trad cuck why would you choose the most demonic and red blooded group of women to have your children with?
that would be american women
>duolingo
>in search of a wife
lmao what a loser
you're too cool for love?
I bought a three month subscription to duolingo in autumn 2021. It was very helpful for learning Spanish verb conjugations, a lack of which had seriously hampered my Spanish comprehension on a previous trip to Colombia. But the inane repetitive exercises bored the hell out of me after a few weeks. The review function was particularly useless, as I was expected to translate one word in the same stupid sentences again and again, instead of the app providing various contexts to use what I learned. When I finally got my import permit and entered Mexico, it took a while to be able to use what I learned on duolingo in casual conversation. But eventually, I did get the hang of "fuiste" and "queria".
My brother in Christ, Duolingo is an absolutely terrible app to learn any language.
Has anyone tried babbel?
yeah pretty shit
Duolingo for desktop used to be ok until it started shoving this moronic globohomosexual art dancing around in your face when youre trying to answer a question and it's very distracting. maybe i just have ADD
absolutely love the characters
>maybe i just have ADD
no, you are just a moron triggered by drawings of brown people
You can turn it off too.
Mango Languages does a similar thing as Pimsleur and you can get it if you have a library card at most places, but doesn't necessarily have the same languages. So, heads up on that.
I see a few posts about pimsleur here, is it also as recommended for other languages? I want to learn basic japanese for the same reason as OP
It feels silly to talk to yourself for 30 times 30 minutes per unit, but you'll end up with a repertory of phrases you can quickly use when needed.
I've used it for Greek and Italian and it's pretty good for speaking/learning conversational shit. Not good for reading
a zillion years ago I wrote a web app to help me learn swedish. it's all fricked up and broken now, would take forever to get it working again. basically it was machine-assisted translation - would auto-lookup each word and part of speech ("lemmatization"), and then you'd construct the sentence yourself.
oh it also allowed me to import existing text, so I would take a book that had been translated into english, and then put the texts side by side so I could see the idiomatic english translation to guide my more literal translation. that was great for learning the structure and rules of the language - to help you THINK in that language
the 2nd part, which I never finished, was taking the top ~30,000 words of english, ordered by frequency, and then getting the swedish version of that word. then I used text-to-speech to generate mp3s of each word, so that I could do little digital flash cards with them.
THAT part was definitely helpful for building vocabulary quickly (in addition to knowing the rules of the language from part 1) ... but in the end I just got bored and stopped giving a shit
if I were to do it all again, I'd focus 100% on vocabulary and nothing else. once you know the meaning of words, you could just watch youtube videos of native speakers all day long, until you slowly understand what they are talking about. IMO the structure of the language would come very quickly to you after that, although you'd obviously want to read books and news articles as well to speed up the process
No. DuoLingo can help you with vocab and grammar, but if you want to find a wife you have to get good at this conversation:
>Hi. What's your name? I'm ____.
>How long have you been in country?
>I'm not very good at this language, but I've been practicing online.
>What are your hobbies?
>Do you like ____?
>Are you free this weekend?
>I know this cool restaurant. Do you want to get dinner?
>In my home country, my job is _____.
>How many brothers and sisters do you have? I have...
When meeting people in new countries, they all tend to ask you the same questions over and over, and you start to naturally build language skills specifically for those questions. Knowing how to say and answer these questions will be 100x more useful than whatever DuoLingo will teach you. Also, you should learn adjectives like long, short, big, small, colors. So when you don't know the Portugese word for banana, you can say "it's small, it's yellow, it's curved. You eat it..."
This. duolingo teaching you to say "the furry banana flew over the walrus" is god damn moronic. the
>Could duolingo get me 80% of the way there speaking Spanish in two years time?
Duolingo should be avoided
Read https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/why-shouldnt-i-just-keep-using-an-app-instead
This guy gets it. For updated immersion techniques look up Refold & Matt vs Japan.
OP, learning Spanish is frick all easy as long as you don't waste your time with the meme traditional ways of learning a language. Took 2 years of Spanish and learned absolutely nothing with a terrible gringo accent. The way to learn Spanish would be to download the ANKI app, and get the top 5000 Spanish Vocab deck. Go through the deck as fast as possible just to finish it (say 100 new cards a day it would take you about 50 days to finish). Once you're done with the deck immediately start immersing in the Spanish language - watch shows, listen to the news, try to read things, etc. At this point, begin sentence mining by making your own decks from Spanish TV shows you like which is super easy. Look up subs2srs tutorials on youtube which the weebs have perfected to make Japanese anki decks but you can use it for Spanish. If you can't find subtitle files you can just make your own using SubtitleEdit app which has built in machine learning sub creation. After about 6 months of going through sentence mining stuff and immersing as much as possible begin learning verb conjugations with the Anki deck Ultimate Spanish Verb Conjugation. Once you do a year or two of this I'd recommend getting a tutor or someone to practice speaking with since at this point you'll be able to pretty much understand 80-90% of everything that people are saying just it's weird at first to start speaking.
For a longer explanation I highly recommend the book The Telenovela Method which explains how to learn Spanish through immersion & Anki in further detail.
Agree with this Anon 100%. Quality effort post with advice that anyone learning a language should follow.
One other recommendation I have is using tandem or hellotalk to talk to native speakers. I prefer talking to randos to telenovelas, but the approach of learning vocabulary then immersing yourself with people natively speaking the language is basically the same. For something like Chinese where pronunciation is hard, I strongly recommend one of these apps so you can find someone to teach you pronunciation.
Going to try Pimsleur soon, seems like it might help bridge the gap from vocabulary to conversation faster.
DUOLINGO is garbage and the biggest waste of time ever. This is NOT how you learn a language. Literally everything they do is about maximizing their revenue and not about getting you to learn a language effectively. I spent 6 months using it trying to learn German and I could barely order a meal. My friend who followed the classical approach almost learned idiomatic spanish in the same time frame.
DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME! It's a fricking scam.
I like using mondly. It let's you practice speaking and lets you have pretend conversations with yourself. The only fault is that it doesn't explain vocabulary rules well.
Duolingo is a nifty tool to help you study in between the things you should actually be doing, which should be studying vocabulary (especially verbs), consuming media in the target language, and talking to native or heritage speakers.