Speaking as a total ignorant from a coding perspective. But I guess that wouldn’t be the hard part, considering that most of Duolinguo is just boxes and text inputs. How difficult it is to create a database of competent linguists with an efficient training who can progressively enhance your understanding of languages?
The technology is probably the smallest part of the problem. Most of it will be getting it critical mass of users, and expanding that user base, cross multiple languages. So that’s advertising, politics, social networking, promotion.
Yeah and their staff have been very dogged about promotion in language communities, including crowdsourcing the content (i.e. getting their users to produce it for free)
Duolingo is pretty bad at teaching you a language so I don’t think we really need to make an open source alternative. If you want to actually learn a language, just use anki (anki is open source) for flashcards and get a textbook. I say anki because it uses a spaced repetition system which is the only way to effectively study more than 100 flashcards and there are browser plugins that allow you to create new flashcards from a couple clicks on a new word. Once you get far enough you won’t have to use the textbook and will be able to just sentence mine for words and have to google the occasional grammar point.
Repetition of words in isolation (ie flashcards or what anki offers) does nothing whatsoever to teach you a language.
Duolingo is far from perfect but it certainly does more than basic flashcards (which are fine if you’re ok with just vocab). What people constantly miss about Duolingo is that it also offers lessons (to teach you how grammar works for example) but people have to read them and take the time to understand them. Which isn’t what they normally do because it takes time and it doesn’t give you xp (it’s not gamified so everybody ignores it).
It’s how school teaching works (no it doesn’t work great either but that’s because this part is only meant to teach you about the basic layer of language, not the rest).
So Duolingo and anki aren’t designed to do the same thing at all. But if you’re serious about learning a language, Duolingo is certainly a better start IF you do it right. A combination of the two is a better bet.
Duolingo open source? Doable but you need teachers to open source their lessons and vet them. Huge amount of time and probably costly which is where the cookie crumbles.
Well you don’t just use the flashcards, You have to use textbooks and practice on supplementary material. Those aren’t really software that can be open source.
Also Duolingo removed its grammar lessons a while ago, so its really not that different from flashcards now. EDIT: nevermind they only removed grammar on desktop.
Doable but you need teachers to open source their lessons and vet them.
If an OS alternative was trying to completely replace duolingo, it would need far more than that. Duolingo has had extensive work put into listening and speaking lessons. Almost all lessons have a listening componentwhich is a ton of content to make up for. They have significantly better voice recognition than my phone. The amount of effort to get something like that working for a language, let alone dozens of languages is a high bar.
Take a look at any of the job postings that duolingo has, they’re only looking for Google employee level of skill for a reason (aside from how fucked the job market is).
It’s not impossible for duolingo to be replaced with an open source version, but it’s a giant undertaking.
Yomichan (primarily for Japanese but may also work for Chinese and Korean): https://github.com/FooSoft/yomichan
Yomichan itself is no longer maintained, but an actively developed but still beta fork Yomitan exists: https://github.com/themoeway/yomitan
Setup for Japanese: https://aquafina-water-bottle.github.io/jp-mining-note/
Well I used Anki for quite some time during my studies and I really didn’t like it.
- First of all I’m a visual guy and the UI is pretty ugly imo. For example it’s default card formatting feels very unintuitive for me.
- Secondly the spaced repetition algorithm Anki uses isn’t as effecitve for me as Quizlet’s. Which puts me into a bad situation as I refuse to use Quizlet because it’s closed source.
- And finally the learning quality is heavily depending on the deck. Some are really making use of the various features which make Anki so versatile but most decks don’t.
I think it’s highly personal what suits you best but I really like the idea of a rewarding system or some fun repetition options just like Quizlet has it.
Check out LibreLingo and these
I did know about LibreLingo, but it still feels like it’s taking really small steps! And the other alternatives don’t seem to offer the semi-holistic experience that Duolingo provides.
Join LibreLingo instead of creating your own scratch. Unless you’re planning to use Rust lol
it doesn’t live up to his expectations while being made by someone else on their free time. This mentality is rampant in opensource.
Is he going to contribute, not likely
is he going to donate so they can work on it, also no
is he going to vaguely ask others to make an app to compete with commercial companies, Oh yesss
Let’s not overstate Duolingo’s effectiveness for language learning.
The technological challenge to adopting a self-taught language learning method into an app is rather small. You just need the content. Either you develop the course under a Free Culture license, or you purchase the rights for an existing method and you port it. Plus maybe some volunteers to handle user-interaction.
A good example is the VHS Lernportal which implements three levels of German class in a way that actually has some pedagogical merit. It’s killer-feature is nothing technological, but that they have some teachers in the backoffice that will read your occasional text-production exercises and offer corrections (no, language tool wouldn’t be able to replace humans in that case, because language tool doesn’t know what you are trying to say and therefore gives you multiple guesses but no way to know which one you actually need).
I think this question is a XY problem. You want to learn a language and not build an app for learning languages. To learn a language you just need motivation and resolve to stick with it for long periods of time. Just grab a text book, some video courses and flashcards.
