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Here's the Duolingo thread for Irish, seems fairly popular.

We're adding some of the user suggestions given in this thread.

Since this means adding words, the progress rate went down a tiny bit, because each of these words requires three sentences which we need to come up with. (:

The return to 98% is actually a great thing and nothing to worry about: it means we're listening to you and improving/editing the course accordingly. :)

Duolingo has designers, engineers, marketers, community outreach specialists, a QA guy, and a finance guy. They don't have linguists on staff, as far as I can see. Available evidence suggests that they either don't know or don't care about the actual science of second language acquisition.

Duocon was an online conference put on by Duolingo. Oscar never spoke. You can watch the conference recording here. I watched parts of it, it was pretty interesting.

The badge thing was a way to advertise the conference, and motivate people to use Duolingo.

Hi! Thank you for finding it out :) One of the course contributors / Duolingo staff here. Some updates:

1) We are not just teaching Romaji, we are teaching "real Japanese" with Hiragana, Katakana, and even some basic Kanji. We are working on a new, better way to teach scripts.

2) We designed our course very carefully, basing it on a research-backed CEFR-like framework called JS Foundations and also covering vocabulary and grammar for JLPT N5 (equivalent to CEFR A1). Every skill is thematic ('food', 'transportation', 'hobby', etc.), meaning there will be no boring 'grammatical skills' such as 'present verbs', 'prepositions', 'past tense' etc.

May 15th, 2017 is not just an estimate, it's a real target (I know it's aggressive). We are working hard to deliver a high-quality course as soon as we can.

And last but not least, we are looking for contributors! If you speak both Japanese and English and are passionate about teaching Japanese to the world, please apply here!

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/20648872

Quoted from moeka518, one of the administrators: >We created a spreadsheet with all the words and some sample sentences. All we have to do is move those into the incubator, which is still a lot of work, but totally doable in three months.

source

That post is from 7 months ago, I'm not sure if they still doing that. Recently the CEO of Duolingo explained here how they are experimenting different ways to make money.

I guess they typed https://www.duolingo.com/Swedish, maybe hoping to get to the page of the Swedish language, but it links to your profile as your username is Swedish, and links to user profiles are https://www.duolingo.com/username

Yes, it's down. Hope I don't lose my streak because of this.

Edit: At one point I had the Duo bird with tears in it eyes and some error message to the right of it. It only happened once and it hasn't reappeared.

http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/duolingo.com.html States that Duolingo has been down for ~4 hours 17. Checked at: 00:01 GMT + 12:00

Obligatory plug for /r/LearnDutch - recommended in the course mods' Helpful external material thread. We have plenty of learners at all levels, and a lot of helpful native speakers who'll gladly answer questions and give advice. We've seen a pretty nice growth recently, presumably the Duolingo course attracting new learners. Feel free to join us. :)

Pasted from here (updated 4/29 with other poster's feedback):

Turkish 200

Ukrainian 209

Esperanto 241

Irish 292

Polish 298

Welsh 317

Vietnamese 320

Spanish 322

Swedish 325

Danish 340

Dutch 340

Russian 350

French 358

Italian 405

Portuguese 406

German 462

Norwegian 513

This is only the courses of English -> X.

Following this post last week calling for Duolingo to help out with the migrant crisis, and setting down in virtual ink the names and language levels of experienced people who were willing to commit themselves to this.

Looks like Duo was impressed with this group too! Brilliant news!

Duo's listening and speaking resources aren't very good in any language. You may want to find additional audio resources, like podcasts or a cheap copy of Pimsleur or Michel Thomas Portuguese.

Here's a link: https://www.duolingo.com/course/nl-NL/en/Learn-Dutch%20(Netherlands)-Online

I can't click the start course button. It doesn't work.

I feel I should of course give credit to /u/CJ105 for having the common sense to post a link instead of a picture like I did

That is not at all true. The Turkish and Russian teams are dealing with the issue of having to teach a language that is very different from English. The incubator is not flexible or advanced enough for them to fully create a course (of the right quality) yet and there are issues with teaching the alphabet also. It's not as easy for them to make progress at this point.

I thought Selcen's explanation about the causes of the perhaps rather slow progress that Turkish is making, in this thread, was very enlightening: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/3310174 :)

Yes, some of the team members of these teams may be busy, but so are some of ours. Often this has little to do with motivation but merely reflects life catching up with you. ;)

We were just talking about this yesterday. Apparently it's a score based not only on how many words you know, but how well. Here's an explanation from a Duo employee.

Actually the app is right. While I do agree that it does need a 'Report a Problem' feature, in this case, your answer is actually wrong. Check this out to understand better. There have been several discussions about this on duolingo itself in the forums like this one. I hope this helps.

Try Clozemaster! https://www.clozemaster.com/ It's built for exactly this post-Duo phase and it's aim is to learn language in context through mass exposure. Hope it's useful! Also I'm the creator - let me know if you have any language requests or feedback!

As a developer on the team of a mobile app, can confirm that "Bug fixes and performance improvements" pretty much a very common changelog entry for us. Got to say, though, I very much love the new trend of comprehensively communicating changes along with the internal story that drove them. Examples:

YNAB: https://www.youneedabudget.com/release-notes

VSCode: https://code.visualstudio.com/Updates

Here is a statement by the founder himself. It's only on the Duolingo forums, so I don't blame you for missing it. Sadly, it looks like the gems and the annoying health mechanic are here to stay.

Try Forvo. It's a site where you can find native recordings of thousands of words.

I would also recommend listening as much as you can - music, audio courses, podcasts, kids shows... even if you don't understand everything, it helps to get used to hearing the language. Also check out YouTube if you're struggling to recreate any particular sounds, there are plenty of people who teach more in-depth pronunciation of most languages there.

Duo should only be one tool in your kit anyway. You don't have to give it up completely, just make other sources your primary focus and use it more casually: e.g. 10xp a day to maintain your streak, using the generic skill strengthening.

Also there are a couple of things that may give Duo somewhat of a new lease on life for you:

• Doing the reverse tree (Spanish -> English)

• This upcoming feature: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/25615588

Klingon is actually pretty well developed, in fact it's probably the most developed artistic conlang.

High Valyrian, on the other hand, is going to be improvised. The course is developed by the creator of the language and he's making it up as he goes.

I saw a post a while back on /r/duolingo saying that 34 hours of duolingo practice was equivalent to a semester at a university.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/17/study-learning-spanish-with-duolingo-can-be-more-effective-than-college-classes-or-rosetta-stone/

>After some ten years of development, which Zamenhof spent translating literature into Esperanto as well as writing original prose and verse, the first book of Esperanto grammar was published in Warsaw on the 26th of July 1887. The number of speakers grew rapidly over the next few decades, at first primarily in the Russian Empire and Central Europe, then in other parts of Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan.

https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-Online

Hope springs eternal, but despite nearing 100% completion, the Irish and Dutch courses are still works in progress, and are waiting for certain features of the Incubator to be released before they transition into beta.

Check this out.

The main qualification is being fully bilingual, as in bilingual enough to write a few paragraphs in the application fluently. Judging by this post your english is plenty good enough. It takes a LOT of time so you'll have to take that into account. Duo will use a combination of ease of course/similarity to offered languages/number of contributors to decide when to call up all of their applicants and stick it on the site.

Actually, Duolingo is the one making the Japanese course.

Edit: "Out of Duolingo’s 70 employees, about half spent the last six months working exclusively on making the Japanese course a reality." https://www.duolingo.com/comment/23437301/Thank-you-Hideki-staff-and-volunteers-for-Japanese-for-English-speakers

Generally, I'd say your best bet is to learn the language you want to learn.

Swiss German is indeed quite different from standard German and if Swiss is what you want to learn, learning German first will only marginally help with that. A decent book I've found (and basically the only one) for learning Swiss is this one. The only thing is the method of instruction is standard German.

I would bet that the majority of learning material for Swiss is going to be from German, so that will make learning Swiss difficult.

There's also the problem that Swiss German isn't really a written language, so it's going to be difficult to find that kind of useful material as well.

There are some resources here, but not all the links still work.

There's also the issue of every major area having its own dialect of Swiss German. Of course, those are generally going to be closer to each other than to Standard German.

On the other hand, if you go with standard German, there are tons of resources, tons of native materials, tons of movies and music, and probably more than you can ever use. On top of that, most people that you're going to end up speaking with in Swizterland will already know High German and you can use that while having them also teach you Swiss German when you're there.

tl;dr Swiss German is very different from Standard German but lacks the necessary resources for you to really be able learn much of it. But if your heart is set on learning Swiss, go for it.

Surprisingly, there was no official announcement made by either the Duolingo team itself nor the Swedish team. You'd think that such an occasion would warrant a post about it from at least one of the two groups. Perhaps they will get around to it later.

This news comes not even a day after the Swedish course finally obtained their on-screen keyboard.

I have had it confirmed by Duolingo staff: the beta of these courses, and all others, will be open for all. :)

Once the course is out in beta you can select the language course from your settings (> learning language > select language) or this page with the overview of all courses, provided by Duolingo.

In the beta stage the incubator moderators and contributors receive the feedback & reports from users and improve the course accordingly. When these course creators and the Duolingo staff are 1) convinced that the course has improved enough and 2) have observed a certain stability of the course, in terms of reports and other issues, it 'graduates' from beta and reaches phase 3: that of an official, graduated (previously incubated) Duolingo course. :)

QQ more.

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/8027766

>Hi there! We have those languages in the reverse direction. English for Korean, Mandarin and Japanese. That's the first step and they will then reverse. It's not Klingon over Mandarin, but really Klingon + Mandarin and all the other languages. Check out: Incubator.

I can't say exactly why it has taken so long aside from common guesses like the volunteers creating the course haven't had the time to update as frequently as they would like or perhaps a few dropped from the course (though I cannot confirm these things). The course did add a new moderator several months ago, and in the past couple of weeks seems to have been picking up quite a bit of steam.

The course seemed to have been stuck at around 16% for quite a while, but about three weeks ago has seen that total increase to 18% then 22%, as seen in the last weekly update (https://www.duolingo.com/comment/7934734).

This week they've gone up another 4.3% (http://www.moviemap.me/duoinc/), so we may have hope for the course yet! If they keep up this pace, maybe we will finally see the Polish course this year, which would awesome because this is the course that I am most looking forward to. :)

There's no mention of predicate adjectives that I could see -- not even by name, but in terms of how they're different. The course seems to skim over the idea that you use a different inflected form when you say 'The cat is big' ('De kat is groot') than you would if you said 'The big cat eats' ('De grote kat eet'), but I've never studied a language that makes that distinction before and so it didn't seem obvious to me.

Also, the notes say that 'Dutch adjectives are usually made by adding an -e to the end of the word.' Adding -e to the end of what, exactly? Now I know that it's the uninflected form, but I didn't at the time. It wasn't until I checked another website for an explanation that it made sense, and I think that's a downside given that Duolingo seems to be marketed as a one-stop beginner course. Still, it's an easy fix, at least. The 'de' and 'het' thing is way more of an issue.

>hideki 2 hours ago

>commented on Japanese course in the Incubator

>“The page was automatically generated by accident when we were testing some configurations. Sorry guys!”

https://www.duolingo.com/hideki

Evidently it's not happening afterall.

Haha!

A user created a dark theme that can be downloaded for Firefox and Chrome. They posted about it here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/1853274

Also, if you haven't seen this and you're interested, here are some scripts created by users for Duolingo: http://duolingo.wikia.com/wiki/Duolingo_Userscripts

As far as I can tell it's still accepting incorrect spellings as detailed here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/8726406

I imagine those who aren't familiar with Ukrainian probably all have some degree of difficulty distinguishing between и, і, ї, й etc so I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to do a course that won't correct you if you use the wrong one! On the other hand, if you just want to learn Cyrillic, it's probably fine.

Edit: As far as input goes, if you don't care how your keyboard looks then I strongly recommend adding Ukrainian input to your computer and just writing the characters on the keys with a sharpie. The most frequently used letters will wear out first, and that's how I learned to touch type.

They are doing A/B testing to figure out what to do with people having too many lingots: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/8129285

As you may guess, you have been randomly chosen to test what happens if there's no reward for long streaks.

It's not just an assumption: Luis actually said they would, and even mentioned a timeline (which Duolingo normally never does), in an interview given a couple of years ago.

Here is a discussion with a link to the interview (which is in Spanish): https://www.duolingo.com/comment/9609404/Mayan-will-come-to-Duolingo.

Just goes to show that Duolingo's plans are all over the place. They do things they say their not going to (they said for ages they couldn't bring out Japanese, even when they were already working on it, and then popped it out pretty suddenly), and don't do things they say they will (there was never a comment or an explanation to what happened to Mayan).

This happened to me 11 days ago - I lost a 180 day streak and I took a screenshot showing that I had even hit my XP goal for the day.... Best of luck recovering your streak. I'll update my post if my bug report amounts to anything.

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/24128605

http://imgur.com/a/9cTqH

Get support for it in the forums. Follow this guide so that more people know about it. https://www.duolingo.com/comment/15014194/GUIDE-I-would-like-a-new-course-What-should-I-do

Basically, go to this forum, and start a discussion requesting Circassian be added. Hopefully with enough support it will get added. https://www.duolingo.com/topic/1/new

Hope that's useful.

I definitely am! The more languages to learn on Duolingo the better! Of this post gets more upvotes I'm sure it would! https://www.duolingo.com/comment/6898089 What other languages are spoken in Ethiopia apart from Amharic? =)

If there are any more courses you'd like to see, have a look for them here and give them an upvote. It's a good way for Duolingo to see which courses are the most wanted: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/15014194/GUIDE-I-would-like-a-new-course-What-should-I-do

For the last few days, I've been shown these ads after completing a lesson. As Luis mentioned, they routinely test new monetization techniques and it doesn't mean they're permanent. I thought others might be interested to see this example.

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/10560322

"Our team is not really approving this way of learning Ukrainian, but there's an option for you, anyway..."

It seems it wasn't a request from the team but pushed through by Duo. Again it seems to part of their push to increase user retention regardless of whether this leads to a dumbing down of the content.

Refresh y'all. They used to do a thing where after you finished a lesson it told you your approximate knowledge of the language. I was just doing a lesson and it popped up on all my languages

Edit for info with source:

>This is exactly what it sounds like: our estimate of your fluency in the language you're learning. It is calculated based on what words you know, how important those words are, how well you know them, and how likely you are to forget them. It will increase over time as you learn more words and strengthen your skills, but it will decrease if you don't keep up your strength. Since our goal is for this estimate to be as accurate as possible, be aware that finishing your tree won't get you to 100%. We're constantly working to improve how much Duolingo can teach you, and we hope that providing this insight into your progress will be both informative and encouraging. Happy learning!

>This is currently an A/B test, so only half of you will be able to see it. It is also only currently available for those of you learning Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, and English.

Dude, you should already be listening to music if it's what you love. Don't worry if you don't understand everything. Enjoy the music and the occasional "hey, I know that word". Find a few songs you really like and can listen to again and again and amaze yourself as you figure out what more and more of the words mean until you can get the gist of the whole chorus. Duolingo will help you know what different words mean, but getting used to identifying them when spoken, and moreover sung, is a whole other ballpark.

Here is a website where you can listen to music in other languages and it's arranged by difficulty. There's also a game mode where you follow the lyrics and type the missing word.

Good Luck

I spend a lot of my language-learning time these days on Clozemaster, which typically has a considerably larger lexicon for review than is available on Duolingo. They have a German course with over ninety thousand sentence exercises:

https://www.clozemaster.com/l/deu-eng

As others have said, it is always a good idea to diversify your resources for language-learning. Myself, I have a friend I can message with in my target language, and I also like to watch YouTube videos about aspects of the culture of the country of my target language. Finding music to enjoy in that language also helps a lot. You can also find the subreddit in that language and browse around—that ought to give you a good taste of the colloquial language, whenever you are ready.

Hi! I am a forum and course moderator so hopefully I can shine some light on the situation :) Yes, Duolingo does have linguists working for them. There is Rémy who works on the French course, Myra who works on the German course and Vivian who works on the Portuguese course (she is new and may not appear there yet). Many of the other staff members are also linguists. (See here to see their staff)

I don't agree that we should get paid for what we do. We volunteer to create the course and we know that we aren't going to get paid, but that doesn't matter to us...we still do it out of the love for Duolingo and languages.

I think Duolingo will continue with the crowdsourcing model because so far it has worked tremendously well for them and it allows them to make more courses faster and easier. Sure, they could spend their millions creating a handful of courses, but that wouldn't work for them. Duolingo still doesn't make a profit so this money is probably going towards staff salaries, running costs and into the development of new features.

Also note that every course has a linguist/staff member working with them. They make sure the course runs smoothly and are there to answer the volunteers' questions. They all have experience in making their own courses.

Final note, not all courses are 100% crowdsourced. Some the courses for the original six languages (English for German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, plus the reverse of each) were made by Duolingo themselves originally, though now some volunteers contribute to these courses along with Duo's language experts. I hope this answers your questions, but I'd be happy to clarify more if you have them :)

Larissa_L talks about it here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/2167524 (response to Morgengrauen responding to her):

>I can neither confirm nor negate it. Personally, I don't see how with current Duolingo tools we can teach you alphabet. Let's say we show you a table with the Russian alphabet, but then what? You can find it yourself easily, here it is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet

>But would you know how to type? (I think transliteration may be accepted instead). Will you be able to read? What type of exercises should we give you to teach the alphabet?

They manually changed the estimated date at the end of November, so it may not be too far off.

In Jiten Gore's latest incubator update, otsogutxi commented: "I am one of the Alpha Testers on the team. The tree is pretty much finished, but the contributors need to check through all the errors and make sure the tree is 100% ready. Then, we'll just need the audio in place and the course will be ready for release. Hopefully sometime in February:)

source: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/20193776

Of course, sometimes the audio can take a while.

I could give it a shot! This is one of the subs I browse through pretty much every day.

I've done professional web development for a few years, so I'm used to battling with CSS. I'm a moderator of a few subs that are low-activity or for testing - so while I don't have a whole lot on my mod resume, I've at least seen the tools and taken some mod actions.

I have a 304 day streak bouncing between German, Spanish, Esperanto, and in the near future, Russian! I'm in the central US, so I tend to see the sub during the day / evening in GMT-6.

Yes, we learn English early on. I even grew up trilingual (German, Cebuano (local philippine language) and of course English - 4 languages if you count Tagalog too). You must have had a pretty good streak with your german acquaintances. I know so many Germans who can´t speak English fluently.

I always get that fear of someday getting rusty in English, so I practice it everyday. Repeating the stuff I learned in school is not the only reason why I am still studying English. I also use this site called lingvist to learn new stuff I never heard. I mean, no German has ever heard of "contemporary" (in German "zeitgenössisch"), but this stuff might come handy in the future :)

André, who is the biggest Klingon expert I know (and doing a Phd on Burmese, how cool is that?!), did me a favour earlier this year and recorded a New Year's greeting in Klingon. He didn't know then that he'd get to work on a Klingon course for Duolingo.

Listen to how awesome this language sounds and sign up for the Duolingo Klingon course!

https://www.duolingo.com/course/tlh/en/Learn-Klingon-Online

Dutch course moderator here.

You know, we don't really frequent this subreddit very often... at all. So we might miss important feedback like this entirely and probably already have several times over. If we never hear about your ideas for improvement, there's no telling if things will ever change. We really appreciate any feedback though, so don't be shy! You can post things like this on our streams or in the Dutch forum.

Adjectives:

As a supplement to the tips and notes, we have a whole thread about them. Predicate use is explained there, but we should try to make these kinds of threads more visible. I will also add the missing information to the tips and notes. There is more to come for adjectives, regarding comparative usage for example.

de or het:

We have asked numerous times for a way to teach users articles separately, but things sometimes go a little more slowly than we hope... it's definitely on the table though. I am going to post a new suggestion to the suggestion board to see if I can push the priority a bit higher.

Duolingo receives money from companies which give to it articles for the community to translate to the language they're learning. That, and also by means of the Test Center app which charges a little fee to certificate the user's language ability.

It will not become premium. Not now, not ever.

According to this Duolingo forum post from Luis van Ahn, new courses teaching other languages from English will begin to emerge in the Incubator around March 1st. My bet is that Dutch or Russian will be the first to make it into beta, possibly by the beginning of May.

You are supposed to do the whole tree on a crown level and then go on to the next level. Take a look at the Crowns FAQ

> Can I test out of Levels? It takes a really long time to get to Level 5.

> Not currently, but you don’t have to get to Level 5 right away! We in fact recommend you don’t get to Level 5 all in one go. Level 5 is there to show that you have practiced the words in that skill a ton and probably don’t need further practice on it for quite a while. It’s completely optional. We definitely think we can do a better job of encouraging you not to binge on one skill, though, since that can feel really repetitive. And of course we take the blame for motivating you to love and aim for gold skills!

I find it makes total sense to do it that way and stretch the repetition over a longer period of time.

Spanish tree is getting a rehaul soon(ish), and they're introducing a "skill levels" feature soon(ish).

Stories and podcast are under the "Labs" tab.

That is the Krakow Barbican. The correct monument is the Arc de Triomf in Barcelona, with the skyline in the background (including the Sagrada Familia). You can see the correct monument here.

I had the problem where reviewing a skill doesn't get the skill to gold no matter how often you do it. It only happens in some of the skills for me. I'm pretty sure this is a weird bug that has existed for years in Duolingo now, across different trees. The way I got around it was by redoing the individual lessons within the skill, rather than reviewing the skill as a whole or doing Strengthen Skills.

This issue has been brought up on Duolingo forums before (e.g. https://www.duolingo.com/comment/4603610/Is-Strengthen-Skills-broken-Or-if-not-how-does-it-work-internally-a-suggestion-4th-edit), but I've never seen any indication that it's been addressed or even acknowledged. I did find that it affected a lot more skills for Romanian than other trees I've done. Weirdly, the problem does seem to disappear after some time.

I did notice a change in the website yesterday But I think the notes are still there - at least for Spanish e.g. https://www.duolingo.com/skill/es/Verbs%3A-Past

It's just that there never were that many notes in the first place. How you're supposed to guess what it all means without outside help I have no idea.

You (and I) appear to be among the lucky users selected for yet another A/B test. As with all of their tinkering, whether this change is implemented permanently or abandoned will depend on the results of the test. Given that I have nothing else to spend lingots on, I kinda hope they don't drop this one forever.

> Apparently, they don't see a lot of interest in the community

If that is true I honestly don't know what to say, after all the Finnish request thread is the second most upvoted post of all time on the Duolingo in English forum, behind only the FAQ. How else can we show we want it?

I really can't understand why they haven't added it to the incubator yet, everytime someone from Duolingo gets asked they just dodge the question with something like "there are over 6,000 languages, we can't add all of them". I mean come on, asking for Finnish is hardly the same as asking for some obscure Australian Aboriginal language.

You can turn off the sound in the settings somewhere. That was one of the first things I poked around to figure out. It was hella annoying! (So much so that I’m resurrecting hella. :þ)

Hopefully this link will work for you. Switch sound effects to OFF.

1. 60

2. Crowdsourcing translation services. Essentially, giving extra practice for those in the highest tiers of tiers of their target language. Most notable is translations of CNN and BuzzFeed articles. They're considering adding some "pay for convenience" features, such as streak recovery. For example, if you miss a day and lose your streak, you can recover it with a small payment.

3. I'm not entirely sure of their exact level of involvement in course creation, but they generally have folks fill out applications do it on their own.

4. I have no idea.

5. Here is a link to a few studies that have been conducted on Duolingo's effectiveness.

6. In my experience, it should be supplemental. As I understand it, it's really just a first step into a solid A2 to early B1 level.

7. How would that even work?

Duolingo can only provide you with a finite amount of words and sentences. You can practice them and practice them but you're still only going to be learning the limited vocabulary you're already familiar with. The Immersion section is absolutely crucial if you still want to use Duolingo to advance your Spanish at this point.

What you should be doing now is actual immersion. Read some books written in Spanish, listen to music in Spanish, watch movies in Spanish. You need to be learning how to interpret sentences said to you without any context whatsoever. What to do with grammatical constructs and word orders you've never heard before.

If this sounds a little daunting to you and you still like using Duolingo to help guide you through Spanish, you could try doing the English for Spanish speakers course. There's a lot of sentences in there not found in the Spanish for English speakers course and you can read through the comments on lessons and see how native speakers write and you could even practice your Spanish skills answering their questions about English.

I mean, any knowledge is better than none. The main thing with duolingo is that it’s free. Libraries are also free. If you can find a beginners book for learning Japanese it might be better since it would likely teach you more.

I would also like to make you aware of the US Foreign Service Institute which has released many of its language learning material. Here’s the link. I haven’t personally looked at the Japanese course but it’s very straight forward and self-directed.

Best of luck!

I completely agree about duolingo being great but not enough. I am learning Spanish, so in the States it is pretty easy for me to converse with native speakers, but I can understand where German would be harder. Still try really hard to find a native speaker to talk to. You will be super nervous, but get over it, the other speaker will understand and try to work with you and the small conversation will be worth more than a whole week in duolingo.

As for other resources.

https://www.youtube.com/trendsdashboard#loc0=pri

This lets you view what is trending in other countries. Really useful because you get really involved in a countries pop culture and it becomes easier to speak the language

https://www.busuu.com/enc/

Busuu is another language learning site that is not as good as duolingo but has a really great feature that I wish Duolingo would put in. Learners can speak with natives through "Busuu talk." It is really great because you can practice your German with a native speaker and they can practice their English with you too.

Finally, just try and immerse yourself in the language as much as possible. Change your computer and your phone into that language. Listen to music in that language. Read kids books in that language. Watch movies and youtube videos in that language. But more valuable than anything is still speaking with a native. Good luck with your language learning!

If you mean the flashcards on the actual duolingo site, then just review the flashcards after a certain number of lessons.

If you mean other flashcards, you can find corresponding duolingo flashcards for a lot of courses on memrise.

They are super easy once you know 3 basic rules. A lot of people will tell you that you simply need to memorize the huge declension chart, but that simply isn't true whatsoever.

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/556140

>Easier way to know adjective endings (my teacher side is coming out)! I have 3 rules for being able to add (or recognize) the correct ending when an adjective precedes the noun.

>-Big 3 get an -e (der, die, das) der alte Mann, das kleine Kind, die schöne Frau

>-Changin' gets -en (plural and case changes) den alten Mann (accusative), der schönen Frau (dative), die kleinen Kinder (plural)

>-No 'the'? Adjective takes over (no 'der' word or just an 'ein') Kaltes Wetter gefällt mir nicht (das Wetter). Ein guter Mann ist schwer zu finden (der Mann).

>Now the only tricky part is knowing which 'the' word your noun has :)

If you have trouble understanding some parts of that list of rules like I did at first, go to the page I linked and scroll down to where that comment chain starts. It's all thoroughly explained in subsequent replies.

The hardest thing for me about German is probably the prepositions since a single preposition can mean so many completely different things depending on how it's used. And unfortunately, there is no flowchart or easy-to-follow list of rules to help one get around that issue.

Just reading it now..

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/5316622

So, one of them is saying they fixed 100 audios and another is saying they are going to need more time to look for a better solution.

I wonder did they re-record those 100 audios with the same voice artist and are now realising with all the criticism that they need a different solution altogether, eg. native speaker.

I wish they'd just say. It's been months.

The estimated date is based on the number of words completed, and is not an accurate representation of when a course will be done at all, unfortunately. However, I think they are very close, just don't be disappointed if it doesn't come out today :)

One place to read more about this: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/3691472 (under "KaiEngle from Team Dutch")

I hit a 700 day streak today and also promoted to the diamond league. Getting to the diamond league was tough. Everyone in the Obsidian league was doing 100+ XP per day, and some 500.. And there were only 5 slots to promote.

https://www.duolingo.com/profile/rmavery

1) Go to https://www.duolingo.com/courses

2) Click 'I speak English' and change it to Spanish

3) Select the Spanish to French tree

It's worth mentioning that the Spanish to French tree will be very different to the English to French tree. You will also have to start that tree from the beginning unless you do a placement test to test out of early levels

Hopefully!

Just found this discussion thread: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/24230403 Looks like the trophy sprite for Czech was added a day or two ago, and one of the course contributors commented saying that the audio is in place, too!

How about [Guaraní?](https://www.duolingo.com/course/gn/es/Learn-Guarani-(Jopar%C3%A1\)-Online).

Yeah, Duolingo could have way more "minority" languages, it could be done as Guarání, Irish and Welsh proves and ultimately the will have more as this was stated as one of goals of Duolingo (Together with bringing the "big" languages like English and Spanish to everyone who can't afford some formal education for any reason)

But the company is small, Duo is (yet?) not profitable and they have a lot on their plate. If you want some native language, don'T wirite email to the Duolingo, but get together few people that could work on that language and then wrote to Duo.

Is having implies eating in English, but haben doesn't in German. Das Mädchen hat Reis just means the girl has rice. "The girl is having rice" would need to be translated as "Das Mädchen isst Reis."

See this comment thread.

If anyone is confused or simply wishes to know why this is happening, see this post:

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/15695026

tldr: Duolingo will be testing multiple monetization methods to see which one works best. For example, if daily activity drops too much while ads are implemented, they probably won't go with ads.

https://www.duolingo.com/skill/ru/Alphabet-1 was there from the day one (I think?) and that's pretty much all you need to learn it. Flashcards can speed it up a little, but it boils down to memorizing the letters.

As for typing, well, again it's something you need to build muscle memory for, so just keep doing lessons and eventually you will get there. It helps to have a picture of the Russian keyboard layout at hand for the first few days, though.

You could find someone doing an awesome project, like Criculann's Lingots for Stories, and give your lingots to them so they can increase the prize pool (or give bonuses yourself, for example, for stories about a favourite subject of yours, or stories in your favourite language, or something).

Or there's progress tests, of course, which some people find useful.

You get the odd person pop up in the forums who'll do something like make an icon or wallpaper, or something, for lingots.

Beyond that? Throw 'em on the bed and roll in 'em.

How many you got? You can transfer them by finding a post someone's made in the forums and clicking "give lingot" in the post - five at a time, if you click fast enough.

Info can be found on this forum post: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/12433591

I guess it will be all tweaked in a month, and then duo will be testing it for effectiveness. Afterwards it'll be open for all learners!

That's just because the Hungarian team hasn't reported a percentage in 8 months, despite a lot of work going on.

András Bárány, one of the contributors said about a week ago "The 100% is legitimate, but we're ironing out some mistakes and bugs that are still in the course, so we are close — estimates are easy to give and difficult to live up to. I'd suggest that you can probably start the course in the first half of next year." Source: https://www.duolingo.com/AndrsBrny

Now, that's still kind of a mixed message. The 100% is legit, but it could still be up to 6 months to finish reviewing, fixing, writing tips, and getting the audio done.

The release date is automatically generated from how many words are in the course. The Russian team has said several times that the course is basically 100% complete - they've just been waiting for the Duolingo team and the text-to-speech provider to implement the TTS for the course.

In the meantime, they've redone some of the earlier lessons, so it's fluctuated between 98%-99%. But really, the part it's hung up on isn't even part of the Russian team, as I understand it.

One of the moderators actually had an interesting conversation on her profile page recently. Here are some highlights (emphasis mine):

>...we finally got the TTS (the sound), so after some testing to insure that the sound works properly I guess they would release the course. I'm not sure when exactly though. It is not up to us any more, it is up to developers

>Talking about dates, the Duoteam's plan is to release the course some time next week. But, given how things are usually don, I would count more on something like beginning of November. Still, now it is really happening, it is just a matter of days. We've been working on it for so long, that we can way a couple of more days now :)

Use StudySpanish.com to learn more about grammar (because Duolingo is basically useless for learning about grammar). You can also read about Spanish grammar on SpanishDict.

Try to develop fluency by writing every day in a notebook and speaking whenever you can.

Came here to express sadness that "practice weak skills" is no longer on the app. I would downgrade to the previous version of the app if I could, just for that. It was extremely helpful to my learning.

EDIT: Apparently the team heard our sadness and are working on an update: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/2726476

And to add to this, check out Py, another Duolingo-like app, teaching you how to code.

Are you sure you need his Google account? In case you didn't know, Duolingo has a website as well as an app - https://www.duolingo.com - you should be able to log in on a web browser with just his email and password.

If you already missed a day it might have used a streak freeze (if he had bought one already) so you can still continue the streak the next day.

Here you can create: https://schools.duolingo.com/

If you want to skip creating it you can join my classroom and invite anyone you want I won't kick anyone from it. You just need to follow this link:

https://www.duolingo.com/o/nuqzxs

I hadn't thought of buying multiple copies, but you can also buy additional language packs for $2.49 each (half the usual price) from the Humble Store.

But yeah, as I wrote on the /r/languagelearning, I'd consider it a vocab-building tool at most. It could be a good resource for a school's computer lab, assuming it were supported by proper lessons.

https://www.duolingo.com/dictionary/German/Salz-salz-noun-neuter-singular-nominative/509fd87dd659b011abbf3ef77679b142

This is the Duolingo entry for the word. I believe that you simply mistook the word for something else. All three of the definite articles do start with a d after all!.

What lesson was it in?

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/26843961 I posted a similar question in the duolingo forum.

You're still able to see which lessons have decayed (i.e. aren't gold) by going to duolingo.eu/XXXXXXXXXX/progress. Put your Duolingo usename into the XXXXXXXXXX part. (unfortunately this method probably will be a bit complicated to constantly do on a phone).

I essentially use duolingo.eu to see what has decayed each day, then go through those decayed skills just like before the crown update.

I'm not sure if they've ever said anything either way about Latin, but if you're interested, this forum post is the most complete official explanation of their new language reasoning I've ever seen.

The founder actually claims they've been "testing the health mechanic on new users for the last six months" and "seeing a positive impact on engagement and learning results thus far".

Some possible explanations:

• Most users are annoyed by the health system, but it still makes them use Duo a bit more for whatever reason (e.g. by making them binge less).
• New users who are more accepting of F2P Duo because they haven't experienced non-F2P Duo.
• New users who are still relatively early in their trees, and have not yet reached the point at which Health truly becomes annoying.
• There's a silent majority that actually likes, or at least doesn't mind the health system.
• [puts on tinfoil hat] They're lying about the alleged benefits of the health system so that they can push it through and make more money.
  

Do I want to see Duo die? Not really. It's a company that offers a service of value and needs money to stay afloat. I just wish they could find a better way to make the ends meet.

https://www.duolingo.com/comment/8987397

This was the state of things as of a year ago. It's not impossible that they're testing advertising but that seems to be a major departure given their prior stance on banner ads.

It's not in Beta yet. The site says it's still hatching: https://www.duolingo.com/course/hu/en/Learn-Hungarian-Online

Release dates on the courses are rough estimates only, not a guarantee. It will probably be released in the next two weeks.

Jitengore's weekly updates are cool for tracking what's going on. He aggregates updates from the incubator teams and has a chart where you can see how each team has progressed in the last few updates.

Go here: https://www.duolingo.com/settings/direction

Pick what you want from the list.

Press the green button.

To mods: those threads are a daily occurrence. It would be nice if there was a stickied thread or a huge in the sidebar about this problem.

For the English for Hindi course we took input from the Hindi Survey - March 2014. Unless something changes, we will continue on the same path - incorporate Hindi the way it is used by the general population.

Duolingo’s strong suit isn’t grammar. If you really want to learn, it’ll be a lot easier if you study conjugation charts like http://www.spanishdict.com/conjugate/hablar. There are plenty of websites where you can find conjugation patterns. It sucks, but Duo’s not really going to help you with real sentence building.

Nice, congratulations! :)

I just hit 100 yesterday for Polish, and I'm also really enjoying the crowns system. I'm a little over a month in and I'm starting to feel very comfortable with a lot of the grammar now, which is a really nice feeling.

Once you finish up your tree, you might want to look into https://www.clozemaster.com/. That's my next stop after finishing my tree in a couple of months.