Learning languages fast - Why Duolingo sucks and more language tips

Tl;dr: Duolingo sucks because it uses “fake” content, and you should only use real content to learn, even if consuming the real content will be really slow in the start.

Motivation

The only thing that will make you learn a language is motivation. The stronger the motivation, the more likely you are to succeeed. Let’s list some motivations from strongest, to weakest:

1. You will die if you do not learn the language
2. You move to a country where everyone speaks language
3. You have an interest in the language - for example japanese due to Anime/manga
4. You are forced to take foreign language class at school

I am motivated - now what?

Some things you might ask while trying to “learn how to learn”:

• Should I use a system like Duolingo, memrise, babbel
• Anki - can I use it to improve retention?
• Memory palaces - can it be used to remember faster/better
• Should I go to traditional classes?
• Grammar - How much is necessary?

The worst thing you can do is to focus more on “how to learn” than learning. But that said, investing a bit in tooling and how to learn effectively can pay off.

I will provide a few rules you can use.

Rule 1: Only use real content

Don’t beat around the bush. The only reason to learn a language is to consume real “content” or produce real “content”. From day 1 in language learning you should only use real content to learn. If you do not have real content to learn from, then you have no reason to learn the language.

Content can be:

• Music
• Books
• Newspapers
• Movies
• Series
• Anime
• Youtube videos

Maybe the hardest problem in language learning is finding the real content that you want to consume in the target language.

This rule means: Duolingo or any other website teaching you language through fake content should not be used. Duolingo sucks, and gamification is just a distraction.

Real content is also what I would call a “natural” anki method, words you need to rehearse more often naturally show up with a higher frequency. Manually using Anki cards is a “big risk” investing time in filling your head with words you might never use again.

Rule 2: learn grammar - A bird’s eye view of the language

It is a myth that children learn language faster than adults. The reason they learn faster is usually:

• They are “forced”
• It is usually their “full-time job”, while adults have many other responsibilities

One of the advantages adults have is that they can analyze the language before starting to learn it and use this information to learn faster. Before starting on a new language I recommend briefly looking over certain language features:

• Language family - is the language related to a language you know
• Does the language have a case system?
• Latin alphabet, cyrillic or something more exotic?
• Are there genders?
• Singular Vs. plural forms
• verbs conjugation

Wikipedia + chatGPT prompts can be used to get a bird’s eye view of the language, this will help you recognize patterns in the content you consume.

Rule 3: Translations should be fast

It is important that consuming content is as fast as possible, since in the beginning you will be looking up a lot of words.

A very efficient way is to use the Google translate extension, it can be used in a very interesting way for youtube videos:

1. Put on transcription
2. Put live captions
3. translate the page

The transcription will be translated, the live captions will stay in the target language and the voice on the video will stay the same. You get to practice:

1. Listening
2. Reading
3. Learn new words
4. Learn everything in context

Example from the italian Geopop channel:

How do I find real content I want to consume

Some tips:

• Translate your hobbies, and search on them on youtube to find relevant channels
• Find newspapers
• Change your location with VPN + sign up to netflix from this country. This gives you more movies + subtitles/dubbings
• Find niche websites
• Read wikipedia articles. This can be really useful, because you can read about the subject first in english, then the french article, and without translation you can probably deduce a lot of the meaning.
• Spotify, look at “top 50 ", find 1 artist you like, then look at related artist or use the "radio based on song" to find related/similar songs

Conclusion

After getting a bird’s eye view of the language/grammar: Consume real content. Nothing else.

See an example of a list of content for italian.