Duolingo and many other apps avoid the hardest and most essential skill: translating from your language to the other.
It's often easy to guess what words mean especially with the help of cognates and other similarities between languages. 99% of Duolingo mobile is like this. Even when you see words in your language first, your task is to tap the presented foreigin words in order.
You'll never learn to speak this way. The best way is to flip the order:
The language is difficult -> La lengua es difícil.
But that's a slog by comparison. The dopamine rush isn't there, which I guess is why no one does this[0].
I actually wrote a script to build Anki decks from Duolingo and Busuu[2] which did this. The front front is a short sentence. The back is a transliteration and translation. Then I discovered Mango Languages (free through many US public libraries) that's the same with great audio and a pretty good flash card system.
I used that strategy 2 hours a day for two months, and I learned enough Italian to argue with a cab driver whose meter "non funziona."
[0]: In Duolingo's defense, the desktop version isn't a tap fest, but there's not enough opportunities to
> avoid the hardest and most essential skill: translating from your language to the other.
The hardest and most essential skill, second only to: not translating from your language to the other :)
(or maybe it should be the other way around; translating is useful but a really hard crutch to kick. Keeping it around will make it hard to keep up while speaking/listening and make reading a slog)
> Keeping it around will make it hard to keep up while speaking/listening and make reading a slog
That's not something against translating, that just means you haven't done it enough yet, so you're still too slow.
The first time you translate a basic sentence it might take 10s. 2nd time 5s. And so on. The 100th time it takes 0.05s and you can just say it without thinking. If one just keeps translating, you automatically reach that point.
It's often easy to guess what words mean especially with the help of cognates and other similarities between languages. 99% of Duolingo mobile is like this. Even when you see words in your language first, your task is to tap the presented foreigin words in order.
You'll never learn to speak this way. The best way is to flip the order:
But that's a slog by comparison. The dopamine rush isn't there, which I guess is why no one does this[0].I actually wrote a script to build Anki decks from Duolingo and Busuu[2] which did this. The front front is a short sentence. The back is a transliteration and translation. Then I discovered Mango Languages (free through many US public libraries) that's the same with great audio and a pretty good flash card system.
I used that strategy 2 hours a day for two months, and I learned enough Italian to argue with a cab driver whose meter "non funziona."
[0]: In Duolingo's defense, the desktop version isn't a tap fest, but there's not enough opportunities to
[1]: https://mangolanguages.com (not sure why no one knows about this)
[2]: https://busuu.com (probably the best for grammar)
[3]: https://memrise.com (very, very good AI text convos with corrections provided and mixed language support)