I'm currently in the middle of learning a new language as an adult. I'm using Duolingo for the formal grammar lessons, but most of my learning is honestly coming from music, podcasts, and reading (comics are great for this). Recently made a few friends who speak it so that helps too.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
32 points (97.1% liked)
Asklemmy
49266 readers
771 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
I thought Duolingo was terrible for grammar.
I'd imagine it depends on the language. I will say their podcasts are fantastic (and there's no AI in those)
The best learning material is the one you have motivation to follow through. Doesn't matter if there exists better ones, if those will be left unused.
I agree, I use Duolingo because it's good at making me comeback to learn. But I use it for vocabulary as I feel it is best for that. It was never very good at teaching grammar.
But I don't know why it is not good at teaching grammar. I don't think it's that difficult to replicate textbook exercises in a fun way. All I can think why they don't have good grammar exercises is that it's some dark pattern I don't recognise.
If you have a lot of intrinsic motivation, Anki will probably make you learn the languages the fastest (or maybe you pick one of the two, idk how Norwegian Bokmรฅl and Nynosk interact)
If not, some gamified thing like Duolingo keeps a lot of people engaged for ages apparently. Keep in mind that even their scientific papers are using engagement as the metric by which they score different spaced repetition parameters, not lesson retention. My grandma has been doing English for a year and I have yet to hear her speak two words, but she loves the characters and enjoys it a lot and that's the important thing for her ^^. If you've already got the book for the in-depth part, this could be a way to supplement by building a habit of daily learning
I'd guess that most other software is somewhere in between, at least on learning efficiency (like listening to audio books as someone else suggested: ok that's great and engaging, once you have a solid foundation at least, but it's only listening comprehension and you already need to know a lot so the further learning is somewhat limited)
Audible