Stuck.
I was learning with Duolingo, and it definitely gave me a leg up in Berlin last month, but frankly I’d already seen the cracks in its design long before I left for Germany.
I uninstalled it the moment I got back and now I’m in the market for some genuinely helpful tools to continue improving my very basic German.
That said, I can’t say I’ve been looking very hard. Motivation in general has been hard to find these past few weeks.
I know that feeling. When I was in Germany on exchange I felt like I made significant progress, but let it fade away by not using it and studying afterwards. And yes, Duolingo is fun but for German it also lacks stuff like proper grammar rules and it really doesn’t help that it doesn’t force you to learn definite articles…
I hope you pick it up again at some point - it will come back faster since you have made good progress already before :)
I’ve spent a lot of time in Spain and in China and can now comfortably order food and coffee in both of those countries. Unfortunately, being an introvert, I can’t actually carry on much of a conversation outside of those domains. Once I’m back in the USA, I do essentially nothing to maintain my progress.
That’s an awesome achievement! I get it with the lack of motivation once you are back in your home country, really hope you’ll find the motivation / need again at some point to continue learning.
Still looking for a good replacement for Duolingo, currently considering paying for Rosetta Stone, anyone got experience with it?
This is interesting, had never heard of that business.
Hope we get some answers here. If not then maybe a post in this community would help to give it some more visibility!
Some I’ve tried/heard of (sorted by amount I’ve used them):
- Language Transfer (Audio-based course in the format of a teacher-student conversation with explanation of concepts etc. Completely free but takes donations)
- Clozemaster (Mostly fill in the right missing word, small challenges format)
- Memrise (Memorizing common phrases, spoken by a cast of real people with distinct dialects etc.)
- Mango (More feature-rich, similar to Duolingo but better IMO. Many libraries offer this, worth looking into)
- Babbel (Barely touched this one but think it’s similar to Duo)
- Lingonaut (New thing, don’t think it’s live yet but I think it’s focused around community-driven features that Duolingo cut out to replace with AI)
It’s coming along better than before. I’d mostly attribute it to immersion training with podcasts, books, and video games in my target language. I am horrendous when it comes to sitting down and taking the time to study deliberately, but I do learn quite a bit from procrastinating in my target language.
I can vouch for gaming also! I did have to sit down and pick a book at some point though, I was struggling with grammar. Glad to hear you have had productive procrastination sessions :)
