tlhIngan Hol vIghojtaH!
“Courses” is a strong word for what Duolingo offers. It just shows you flashcards, but never explains grammar/syntax rules. Lingodeer is far superior.
Perdonally I’ve heard a ton of good things about Language Transfer despite not using it myself
Thanks for the recommendation! Difficult to find genuine and good language apps these days that don’t cost to much money and or are riddled with ads and intrusive tracking.
Thank you for sharing this it looks great. They’re iOS app requires minimal permissions too which seems to be rare for language apps
Duolingo does have that function. It’s much more obvious on desktop web, but in the phone app, you tap the notebook icons to the right of the headings. I mean, they’re not necessarily excellent explanations, but they’re there.
Lingodeer is a technical mess with popups, banners and lock or crown icons everywhere. There are situations where it just won’t let you continue to the next lesson and the flow inside the exercises is very janky. Turning off the animations helps a lot but it’s nowhere near the ease of use of Duolingo.
The problem with all these alternatives is that the language selection is extremely limited. You want to learn English, French, German, or Spanish? Great, there are a million options for you! But if you go a bit more niche like Finnish or Irish, your options are much more limited. Of course there are ways to learn those languages - and much better ways than Duolingo. But Duolingo’s strength is offering a bunch of them, for free, in one place.
Note that I’m not trying to defend Duolingo, but rather deploring the lack of alternatives.
Just gonna hijack this and recommend https://www.renshuu.org/ for everybody trying to learn Japanese.
It’s probably the best compaion-app I have found for learning the language.
Fascinating that Duolingo tries to teach Navajo. The language is incredibly tonal and with sounds not native to most languages. I imagine it’s incredibly difficult to teach through an online service
Idk how duolinguo works (at all), but if the app can play the sounds for you and judge on your pronunciation, that would be quite enough to do the job. If it can handle mandarin (idk if it can) than any tonal based language is fair game.
I would think any decent speech to text could do a decent job determining pronunciation, if there isn’t a dedicated thing for that… either it registers or it gets garble and you try again.
I almost found a way to get university credit for learning Klingon. My downfall was that the Klingon Language Institute was not an “accredited” learning institution. I wonder if that’s changed yet…
High Valerian also doesn’t have all the ingredients to become an actual language. All I did was translate words in sentences into the language for the show, but Klingon, it is an actual language and has been developed enough that you can call it a language
But still no European Portuguese 😠
Last time I looked it still did a weird mix of American and European Spanish, too
It had me pick Latin American or Castilian Spanish when I started using Duolingo, I couldn’t tell you exactly how accurate it was though.
When was that? Last time I tried it was a couple of years ago.
As for the difference, outside of Spain the conjugation of Vosotros (you, plural) isn’t used, but speaking to strangers is much more formal. Also, there’s a lot of vocabulary differences which can be confusing for non-native speakers.
Good luck with your learning, it’s a great language :-)
