I learned 5 foreign languages different ways, and the one I'm most proficient in, Italian, I learned the hardest way, doing grammar excercises, where for every of 31 paragraphs of the manual (each paragraph containing 2-3 grammatical phoenomena), I had to articulate ~200 sentences, each from scratch. I abandoned flashcards on the 2nd or 3rd month of learning. I also attended a discussion club, which gave that tiny bit of "coffeeshop" language the author speaks about. 1,5 years into learning, I passed CILS exam for level C (it would be C1 nowadays).
My worst language in is German, where every manual is well elaborated in terms of graphical design, but every exercise askss you to insert a word or two into a sentence. Or pick an answer from a set. Basically, Duolinguo sent to printer. So after couple of years of working with teachers and taking intensive courses, my level is B1..2. I can listen to radio and understand something, I can read something. I actually can speak in a shop -- they'll understand my level and speak accordingly -- but I can't do a normal conversation. I couldn't find a teacher that doesn't just drill you through these same fancy books.
"A friend who had been learning some language in Duolinguo and then couldn't say a sentence to a native", should be proverbial nowadays.
So, despite the app idea being interesting and compelling, this teaching approach, picking correct options from lists, are good for testing (if the subject is given little enough time), but futile at teaching.
For once, the Italian fascination with grammar and sentence analysis comes useful.
For some context, when moving abroad I felt that most other countries don’t really teach grammar and language analysis to the point that we do in Italy. I did attend a language-focused school, which obviously leaned even more towards this tendency; but I get the impression that most competent teens graduating italian schools have a more extensive grammar-related vocabulary than other cultures.
It makes sense then that Italian learning books would be more focused on grammar compared to other languages. I felt it extended to how we were taught English as well (i.e. the opposite direction). I don’t think it is the absolute best tactic for language learning, but perhaps it is the best one when restricted to purely written exercises.
I’d be curious to know whether you had a similar impression. My evidence is all anecdotal, mostly from talking to various people around Europe.
> For some context, when moving abroad I felt that most other countries don’t really teach grammar and language analysis to the point that we do in Italy.
Yep, I have to agree, as an Italian living abroad. In my case, I now have kids on the verge of finishing primary school and - maybe they will start next year who knows - I haven't seen grammar taught that much. Ironically they have more grammar exercises when studying English than the native tongues. But maybe it's just a "modern school" thing...
I'm a native English speaker and taught myself Spanish. I focused heavily on grammar and verb conjugation such that I can explain verb tenses and their uses to someone else learning Spanish, yet I struggle to explain the same to an English learner. Either I didn't care enough to pay attention during my English courses or it's not taught.
To be fair, verb tenses in English are so easy compared to Spanish, it's not really the same required effort. As a native English speaker I found learning other languages a shock for how verbs change so dramatically according to context.
Maybe an unpopular opinion but I especially find verb tenses to be the least important part of learning and having a conversation. People will get the meaning if it was in the past or the future if you know words like yesterday/last week/tomorrow/next week.
Of course this is just a stepping stone, but why try to duplicate (or more) everything when what you most need is proper sentence structure in the present tense and vocabulary.
Although maybe there are some languages where this is not true, not the ones I studied (briefly or not). But in my experience it is also true for people speaking bad German (talking mostly self-taught or from basic courses, not for white collar jobs with large amounts of written text) - perfectly understandable, just no tenses.
The Italian textbook was actually written by a Russian, Yulia Dobrovoskaya, in 1960s (with refrences to Rodari, Togliatti, and partigiani). But I guess she learnt from the native speakers and the literate culture. (After learning Spanish and Portuguese, the sophistication of Italian speech and writing outshines every other language to me.)
> "A friend who had been learning some language in Duolinguo and then couldn't say a sentence to a native", should be proverbial nowadays.
I tried picking up some German via Duolingo once. I thought it was going great, pretty soon I was up to full sentences. Then one day I realized (because my voice teacher sometimes makes me translate the foreign language songs) that I wasn't learning German sentences, I was learning English sentences substituted with German words. German grammar is completely different. I haven't touched Duolingo since.
At least with Duolingo's Spanish course, the differences in grammar are among the first things they teach. Weird that it would be different with German.
It's been almost 10 years so maybe they do it differently now. I just remember they made a big deal about the gendered nouns but nothing about the fact that sentences weren't even close to correctly structured. And too be fair, maybe that was coming later and they didn't want to overwhelm people, but a quick explanation would have been nice.
I haven't tried since that one attempt. I've picked up a few words from learning German songs as part of my voice training, but otherwise it's not useful enough to me to take the time and effort.
I learned Hebrew in Duolingo and I've in fact spoken many sentences to natives. All the Israeli women we know are always negatively comparing their American Jewish husbands to me, the goy who learned Hebrew from Duolingo.
Granted, those natives are either married to me or related to someone who is. So maybe that component is essential.
Ok, it may work if you're in the language ambient, IDK. The situation of most learners is different: we live in our countries, there are very few if any speakers of target language, or they're too busy.
When I was an adolescent boy, my teacher gave me a beautifully looking "scientific" encyclopedia, translated into Russian from a British original. Graphically it was a masterpiece; I think it was used as one of samples in in Alan Hurlburt's "The Grid". Yet as I tried to read it I was somewhat puzzled and disappointed. Normally as I read a scientific book for my age I could form a coherent big picture. If I could not, then the material was hard, so I had to re-read, write things down, explain to myself and I would finally get it. Yet with this encyclopedia I could not get even a glimpse of the big picture. A factoid here, a factoid there, all very well illustrated, the whole book in full color, which was rare those days, but without any links between those factoids. As a Russian saying goes, it all flew into one ear and flew out from another. Nothing stayed. I've got much more from a modest physics schoolbook where I re-read every topic and derived every formula.
You could try the opposite angle with German - watch movies and shows in German, no subtitles. Maybe start with something aimed at children. Sprinkle in some Dutch to mix it up. It can be useful in real-world situations, depending on region.
These passive approaches don't work at all. I tried this with Portuguese, French (which I don't consider learnt at all), and German as well.
Before I took a good teacher's classes, I had been listening German radio for 2 years, learned nothing of substance.
Portuguese, which I do speak, probably even at B2, is the language that I learned through radio, thanks to similarities to Italian and Spanish, and in which I feel the least confident. All my progress with it was when I was actually using it -- spoken or written, looking up dictionaries.
I think YMMV here. If you watch a movie without subtitles, you are sort of forced to pick up understanding, or you won't get anything out of it. This is maybe not the best way to get started, but it helped me getting to a fluent level when talking to people, specifically the "listening and understanding" part. Before, I could read and write (horribly, but legibly, mostly), but would very often draw a blank when it came to understanding what people said.
or have subtitles in German at first. Also helps if you repeat some catch phrases aloud. Especially fun if you're watching together with someone.
One cool effect is that your vocabulary can be heavily concentrated on what you're watching. Like police procedures. (in Alte they speak very clear German, can recommend.)
The only case for me, when subtitles helped, was watching British TV series, first without subtitles, then with them, and improving listening. But only after all the grammatical heavy lifting.
That's a nice story, but I think restricting yourself to exactly one teaching methods is needlessly limited.
Yes, you probably need a proper textbook and (ideally) a teacher to learn grammar and the language rules. This is hard work, but IMO gamified apps make users a huge disservice by handwaving this and hoping the user magically figures it all out. But, like the author found out, grammar alone won't make you fluent.
I'm personally very fond of flashcards (Anki). Yes, memorizing words is just a part of language learning, but it's important and FSRS is extremely good at it. Way better than repeatedly reading a textbook.
I personally hate duolingo for many reasons (it doesn't work for me), but some of my friends use it. This touches another important thing: regularity. Gamified apps and flashcards make it easy to form a habit. You can complete your daily lesson in a bus. And they are (more) fun. Even ineffective learning method is better than nothing.
Finally, ymmv and there's no one size fits all. I got pretty good (fluent and communicative) by in Russian by initially just studying flashcards (followed by reading and listening - another very important component) - because grammar is similar to my native (Slavic) language and I could, actually, figure out most of it. Textbooks came much later. It was not as easy with German...
PS. worth noting that the author explicitly says that this app is meant to teach you just the very basics and numerals, not for language learning
Italian is also very easy to learn while German makes absolutely no sense.
A turnip is female, the fishmongers wife is neutral, a boy is male, a girl is neutral, the wife is female. Plural of Tür is Türen plural of Öffnung is Öffnungen, plural of Vogel is Vögel plural of Fenster is.. Fenster.
Hundreds of unspoken rules regarding word order, some verbs that can be separated and others cannot.. Completely random.
And good luck even being able to hear the difference between spucken and spuken if your language doesn't have long vs. short vowels.
To this very day I can't hear the difference between e.g. "sit" and "seat", or "eat" and "it". I can pronounce them no problem, but hearing it? Nope, those two are the same sounds. Well, whatever, the context is always disambiguating enough.
But I can hear the difference between short/long (as in, differing in actual temporal duration) vowels just fine, e.g. in Finnish/Latvian ― although those languages kinda overextend it IMHO.
The reason you're not hearing any difference between the words in those pairs is because they are pronounced the same. At least according to Wiktionary and my own subjective judgement as a German native speaker.
I've actually messed with Audacity once, extracting the vowels, lengthening them and overlaying, and there is definitely a difference in quality (the length is pretty much the same), it's just that it's very minor to my ear. But native English speakers apparently can pick them up with little trouble.
The difference is much easier to spot in pairs like "bead"/"bid", but that's mainly because before the voiced consonants the long vowel is actually longer than the short one, and the speakers usually add a small glide of "y" at the end of it, so it's more like "beeyd".
I had a native English coworker who used to pronounce it Ü-Bahn and when corrected he insisted that it sounded exactly the same then when I said U-Bahn.
He was perfectly capable of making the same (German) u sound when saying other English words. Apparently it is very subtle, sometimes even for specific things like start of the word and length of the vowel. I just don't know.
I had a teacher of German with whom we learned the rules and drilled just articulating sentences, and in that half year my progress was enormous. Then me and he got busy, he didn't teach anymore. And I see you indeed can learn and improve German to level C if you're lucky to have a good teacher.
I can compare that to Goethe institut's intensive courses: 6 weeks by these fancy colorful textbooks. Waste of time.
If your native language is similar, for example, Romanian or Spanish, sure it is. For the others, not really.
> while German makes absolutely no sense.
Mark Twain also complained about it.
> A turnip is female, the fishmongers wife is neutral, a boy is male, a girl is neutral, the wife is female. Plural of Tür is Türen plural of Öffnung is Öffnungen, plural of Vogel is Vögel plural of Fenster is.. Fenster.
So as in basically every language that has a grammatical gender. If it's not the same as in your native language, it won't make sense, and you'll need to learn it. After some time, you'll notice the pattern and will be able to guess accurately.
> Hundreds of unspoken rules regarding word order, some verbs that can be separated and others cannot.. Completely random.
The rules are well understood and clearly written. You just need to learn them.
> And good luck even being able to hear the difference between spucken and spuken if your language doesn't have long vs. short vowels.
Isn't that the case about every foreign language? I was never able to distinguish or pronounce correctly French diphthongs. I'm pretty sure half of the people here wouldn't be able to pronounce a couple of sounds from my native language even if their lives depended on it.
> A friend who had been learning some language in Duolinguo and then couldn't say a sentence to a native, should be proverbial nowadays.
I tried to learn Mandarin via Duolingo, and whilst I agree that the "multi choice" style isn't great for learning a language I did notice that I was picking up fragments of what native speakers were saying around me.
I've had excellent results for French with a series of books called Grammaire Progressive du Français. Self-contained lessons of grammar. Vocabulary is easier because I already spoke a language with significant cross-pollination with French vocabulary.
It's not an "app" and doesn't have a "streak" or an "HP bar", so...
From the title, I assumed this is about an app distributed as a binary blob.
Regarding learning languages, I'm not a fan of this style of learning. It seems to me this is still Duolingo, just with a different interface. I had good success with https://www.languagetransfer.org/
Yeah I heard a criticism of e.g. Duolingo the other day; even after two years on it daily, you'll know plenty of words and I suppose simple sentences, but you can't actually speak or comprehend the language, not unlike what the OP mentions.
I haven't learned a new language since high school, but I think to learn one you need immersion. Individual words for sure, but the focus should quickly go to reading whole sentences / paragraphs / books, listening to native speakers in their natural environment, and (probably the most difficult one to do on an app) speaking / conversation practice.
I only know English well because of daily exposure through media and twenty years of shitposting on the internet.
Yeah, I tend to think for the specific case of languages that share a common root, language transfer is unbeatable value (especially since it's entirely free).
I also didn't understand the point the authour was trying to make about this method being superior at allowing a learner to remember things under pressure.
(Off-topic) I'm convinced that the ideal language learning app should look like this:
1. A HUGH repository of raw materials, both in text and in audio. They are all written/recorded by native speakers, not non-native language teachers.
1.5. (Optional) The materials come with supplemental vocabulary lists and grammar guides.
2. You take a test.
3. It recommends materials for you to read/listen to, according your proficiency level shown in the test.
3.5. (Opt-in) it can read your YouTube history and social media to recommend materials that you might like.
4. Every month or every N hours of reading/listening, you take a new test to recalibrate your proficiency level.
That's it. However due to copyright issues, I don't expect to see such an app in near future. What a bummer.
(Not-so-off-topic) Personally I consider all the apps that don't resemble the above workflow "dictionary-like" (useful but as a reference tool, not a learning tool) or "Duolingo-like" (a healthier alternative to doomscrolling, but nothing more). The article sounds Duolingo-like.
It's basically a podcast player where you can browse a database of podcasts filtered by spoken language, and listen with transcriptions and translations.
For each language I made a podcast to learn the most frequent words.
You can also get audible feedback on your pronunciation.
I am in the process of building a YouTube database of channels by spoken language to play youtube videos on the app.
> Every month or every N hours of reading/listening, you take a new test to recalibrate your proficiency level.
I slightly disagree with this part, I think the moment you add some sort of "test" or drills it can become tedious or dreadful to learn in the long term.
That lets you turn the problem of figuring out which part of your content is badly machine-translated into the problem of figuring out which of your users have enough attention to detail to spot badly machine-translated content in a language they themselves are still learning. Though I guess if you show paying users only content that lots of people think is good, at least it reduces the chances that a paying user notices an issue and complains, so it could still work in that sense.
Look at the app ISSEN. The "best" would be to somehow have a hypothetical LLM that actually works. For now it's only at the beginner level. We can use raw input and spaced repetition to guage progress instead of tests.
I've learned 2 languages to fluency, and the only thing that ever works for me is immersion with comprehensible input, and conversation. I've been generally disillusioned with language learning apps that aren't "language exchange / penpal". And I've tried all of them. I don't think language learning is easily "gamified".
I built a language app when it first became viable with GPT and also went the avatar as UI route. It presents a unique set of challenges nd constraints, but I spent the most time just trying to get the mouth to sync with the audio. Fun experience for sure. Regarding learning languages, I have stopped building and relying on apps, as I spend too much time mucking with the app and not enough time on the language. The highest potency practice I have found is transcribing podcasts. It’s a major headache, but it really pushes you forward regarding listening, writing, and spelling.
No, it's a French thing. They're rather infamous for making your life difficult if you don't speak fluent French. Anywhere else in Europe people would at least make an effort.
In my experience as a tourist, you can skip the fluent part.
But the quantity of smiles goes up 300% when you talk to them in bad French with finger pointing as opposed to fluent English, even in tourist trap areas.
Maybe slightly better service too.
Edit: hey HN, can we have the option to post one anonymous coward comment every couple days from our regular accounts? We're going to run out of throwawayNNNNNN ids sooner or later.
That's totally a cliche.
Everywhere in the world you can meet people that :
1. Only speak their native language.
2. Speak several languages but not yours.
3. Speak your language but are assholes.
4. Speak your language but are afraid of talking because they are afraid of sounding ridiculous.
5. Are very happy to speak your language.
6. Hate your country for absurd reasons.
7. Love your country for absurd reasons.
Nowadays young frenchs learn english by overexposition to the language through various medias (school is of no help) and in the past, even if english was taught at school, I think the majority of them didn't learn it properly beyond "my taylor is rich", "The cat is happy" and "I love you".
I didn't "learn" english and it is a mystery why I can express myself and understand others in this language, I guess I have been overexposed to the language when I was young.
That said, I worked in museums at a time in my life and was actually surprised by the huge amount of people travelling in the world with no knowledge of the language of the country they are in, expecting everybody to be able to talk their language like if it was universal, be them italians, frenchs, americans, chinese or whatever.
Quand vous voyagez chez nous, vous vous rendriez service en faisant un premier pas en français. C'est une marque de respect que nous apprécions beaucoup, même si la suite de l'échange se fait en anglais.
That’s an unhelpful take, if you expect everyone to be fluent in the language of the country they’re traveling to.
Another note: I live in Cambodia, where many French people live, and nearly none of them speak the local language, and a very decent amount of them don’t even speak English. Worse yet, the older generation is still hung up in the idea that it’s better for the locals to learn French than English or Chinese.
This is really a very French thing, and you don’t see the same behavior in eg Germany or Italy.
I'm from Poland, but my grandma was living in Germany (Essen). When I was (rarely, she was visiting Poland much more often) visiting her I definitely experienced similar behaviour from Germans.
My German is very poor, I used to somewhat understand what was spoken to me (if simple language was used), and to speak is short, basic sentences with shortage of vocabulary. This is just to provide some context - I never actually tried to learn German.
So I was trying to use English as often as possible. A lot of people - and I mean persons like clerks, salespersons, not random passers-by - either straight-up ignored me, or issuing comments like "Du solltest Sprachen lernen".
On the other hand, I never had similar experience when I was speaking broken French in France (or Marocco).
Please note that I don't want to bash Germans or to defend French. But it all depends on who you encounter - but these encounters might on some level shape your opinion on the whole nation no matter of you want it or not
Since I'm also from the region and familiar with local issues: are you sure this was not the good old anti-immigrant hostility? Germany has (or had) a lot of immigration from Poland and some locals could think you're an immigrant who refuses to learn the language. In my country I sometimes see similar behavior targeted specifically at Ukrainian speakers.
FWIW, I only ever experienced the discussed issue (locals who clearly understand English but refuse to acknowledge me or respond in their language) in France. I really suspect it's specific to french speakers. They uniquely feel that their language was lingua franca and lost the status to English.
Could also be anti-immigration sentiment, because I'm from the US, but I traveled to Germany a few years before the pandemic and while there was only ever one German person whom ever gave me crap about English, there was indeed one and it was a very inconvenient person to take such a harsh stance on. It was in a little airport (which, if it matters, was very close to france) that we were taking to leave Germany and head down toward Italy. The person looking over the bins for carryons was herding people through and she pointed at me and said something I didn't understand in German. So I guessed and pointed at a thing or two, and when she kept saying "no", I finally gave the ol' "es tut mir leid, mein Deutsch ist schlecht. Sprechen sie englisch?", to which she replied slowly and aggressively: "noooo. sprichst du deutsch?"
Which... is certainly understandable! I'm sure she sees a lot of tourism and tourists. But for a neurotic person, being singled out as someone holding up the line by someone who is ostensibly there to help things move faster, because I didn't know a language that I expressly said I didn't know and apologized for, was quite jarring. Up until that point, every single person I met with talked to me like I had a second head that they were generally aware of but didn't care about while they tried to be as polite as possible about not bringing it up. It was a kind of clipped politeness that I have been told is just "german". Nobody cares to be friendly, everyone just wants to exchange only the information needed and, while they do so, they would be as happy and pleasant as a person could be. But as soon as the information had been exchanged, they were right back to bewildered disinterest ("why are you still talking to me? we've finished.", while smiling and nodding).
Anyway, whatever it was that she was trying to tell me, the message never got through. When I answered "no" to her question, she just moved me on through. So maybe she was trying to be polite and I showed my ass or something. Or maybe she was just trying to make a joke and then moved past it when there was no way to make me get it. Whatever the case, I left with the distinct feeling that the author described about that French street. "some people here, sometimes, are going to be very uncharitable about your lack of cultural integration. beware of that." Which, on the one hand is pretty obvious; people are just people all over. But on the other hand, it's probably something most cultures would aspire to minimize.
Je ne conçois même pas en quoi cela serait une marque d'irrespect que de ne pas le faire ?
Quand je peux aider quelqu'un qui échoue péniblement à trouver des interlocuteurs et qui ne parle pas français, je suis ravi de le faire et je ne m'en sens pas insulté par ailleurs.
L'absence de marque de respect ne constitue pas en soi un irrespect, ce n'est pas une variable booléenne. En revanche cette simple marque de respect change toutes les dispositions de votre interlocuteur, quel que soit le pays et la langue d'ailleurs. Visiblement vous avez eu la chance de ne jamais tomber sur des touristes balourds voir suffisant, tant mieux pour vous. Pourtant ils existent et peuvent être une plaie (oui, les français à l'étranger aussi peuvent l'être). C'est heureusement une minorité, tout comme les français qui refuseraient de parler anglais "par principe".
Je ne conçois non plus comment me parler en français devrait m'amadouer.
Je ne me sens ni respecté ni bafoué par avance, quelque soit la langue dans laquelle on s'adresse à moi.
Qu'un touriste soit stupide, balourd ou suffisant, sa capacité à parler français ne lui sera d'aucun secours s'il souhaite échapper au jugement que je lui imprime.
Vous savez, j'essaie principalement de comprendre qu'est ce qui peut faire exister le cliché sus-mentionné "les français font exprès de ne pas parler votre langue".
Quand je lis "Vous devriez parler français, nous apprécions cela comme une marque de respect" j'ai honte !
On appelle ça la déférence. C'est ce qui met un peu d'huile dans les rapports humains. Avoir honte de ça en dit très long sur l'époque malheureusement.
Je pense qu'il faut que vous soyez un peu plus explicite sur le fond de votre pensée parce que je trouve au contraire que ça peut être un archaïsme social tout à fait paralysant.
Le respect est un archaïsme social paralysant ? De mieux en mieux. Ou de pire en pire. Je crois avoir été parfaitement transparent et je ne vois pas bien ce que je pourrai ajouter d'utile à partir de là.
Je répète, car le message semble ne pas être passé:
Je trouve que "la déférence" est un mécanisme social dépassé, or cela n'a pas grand rapport avec la notion de respect, si ce n'est que c'est un témoignage forcé et niais de cette dernière. Je trouve l'honnêteté plus respectueuse que sa mise en scène, et je préfèrerai l'absence de déférence car cela signifie que je suis en présence d'un semblable qui m'est égal, qui m'invite à la rencontre plutôt qu'à ce rapport perclus de domination et de soumission.
Vous n'êtes pas transparent, jamais tant que vous n'expliquez pas vos propos plus en détail, c'est tout ce que je pourrais vous dire.
Yeah, with this line the author completely lost me. What did he expect them to do? Does he think of himself as steadfastly committed to not speaking Japanese, Bantu, Hindi, and Algonquin?
(I realize it was (hopefully) meant in jest-ish, but there are better ways to make the point.)
This might be a British humoUr thing - as a local it read very much as a self-deprecating jab at our own English-centric travelling. Taken literally obviously it would be offensive, but it's not meant that way. I note that the author lives in Edinburgh, a place which has a reputation for quite dry, understated and self-deprecating style to start with - understandably, as the only way to stand the hordes clogging the Mile and other picturesque spots.
He expected them to speak the barest minimum of English, so speakers of Japanese, Bantu, Hindi, and Algonquin do not have to learn more than one foreign language when vacationing abroad.
Honestly, I myself learn one emergency phrase in the native language, "I am sorry, please repeat this as if I have a learning disability". Upon hearing this my vis-a-vis would either actually switch to a slow and dumbed-down register of their native language or realize they won't lose face by speaking bad English to me.
>He expected them to speak the barest minimum of English, so speakers of Japanese, Bantu, Hindi, and Algonquin do not have to learn more than one foreign language when vacationing abroad.
Why are speakers of Japanese, Banty, Hindi and Algonquin vacationing abroad a problem of locals who just want to live their own life?... Most people do learn English for one reason or another, but "entertaining tourists" is not one of them.
This writing had an interesting effect on me. I went in knowing nothing about the app or author and frankly having no need for whatever it was he might be selling. But by the time I finished reading I was significantly amused and interested that I’m going to go check his stuff out.
What I’m trying to say is that this is someone who can really, really write - he’s deeply funny and self deprecating, but obviously also knows his shit, big-time. And that’s a massively powerful skill, maybe as much of a skill as being able to write Swift or make great interfaces or ship an app.
> “If you grew up with Tamagotchis, you already understand why this was tempting. Not the “cute pixel pet” part. The part where a device the size of a digestive biscuit turns into a low-resolution hostage negotiator.”
This is irritatingly good and it makes me want to buy his products and subscribe to his RSS feed. Great writing is powerful magic.
Funny, that was around the point in the article where I was beginning to get irritated reading it because it felt like reading LLM output. LLMs love melodramatic headers ("THE CHILDHOOD TRAUMA"), outlandish and not particularly coherent metaphors ("hostage negotiator"), the overly terse arrow constructions that I've never seen a human write in my life ("something that feels less like “open app → consume lesson” and more like “tap creature → it looks at you → you do a small thing together”"), the segue into a redundant list of bullet points, the pointless not x but y ("The blob wasn’t a mascot here, it was the interface") which poorly establishes a contrast where it doesn't make sense to.
The funniest part to me is that I suspect the LLM generated the line about the 4th of July, and the suspected prompter being British, felt the need to insert an explanation for why "they" would reference it, in a voice/cadence that doesn't really match the rest of the article:
> "Confetti, fireworks, the whole 4th of July experience (I've seen it only in movies though, not sure why but it's not celebrated in the UK)"
I can't definitively say this is LLM-generated, but it resembled it enough so that I still came away annoyed for having read it.
I guess to each their own. I enjoyed the style and even laughed a bit at the part you highlighted (writer humorously pointed out the obvious fact that 4th of July is not something UK celebrates).
I think you look for AI too hard. Perhaps that kind of dry humour is not too your liking, or you're not used to this style? FWIW i lived in the UK a bit, so I'm rather familiar with the way locals speak casually.
Btw. you can check his pre-chatgpt writing style, for example [1]. Looks similar enough to me!
To be clear, I found the dry quip about the 4th of July amusing, and specifically pointed out that I thought that specific parenthesised line was inserted by the author. I don't think a British author would naturally reach for "4th of July" as their frame of reference for bombastic celebrations in the first place, though. My point was that seemed to be something the LLM generated and the author riffed off of.
I'm not about to go into a deep dive analysing the author's past writing style, but there is a clear difference just from glancing at the headers alone. Looking at older articles, such as this "featured" one[1], they all share a commonality: the headers are boring. Matter-of-fact. Plainly descriptive. "The reasoning". "The background". "The research".
Then a sudden spate of activity in late 2025 after years of not having written anything other than yearly recaps, and all of the new posts share a different commonality: the headers are 'creative'. "The Childhood Trauma". "Teaching a circle to care". "47 seconds: a villain origin story"[2]. "The uncomfortable engineering truth".
It is quite a noticeable shift to go from always writing useful headers that clearly communicate the purpose of the following text, to always writing clickbait headers that try to hook the reader's emotional attention.
Fair. I understand where you're coming from and you have some good observations. Investigating this in depth is probably not a good use of our time, but who knows, maybe the text is indeed AI assisted? In this case kudos to you for being having a sharp eye and being vigilant. This thought didn't even cross my head.
Wow, that's interesting - maybe I'm totally naive about spotting AI generated writing but my gut feel was it is incredibly human - didn't even ponder for a second that the robots had touched it! Will have to go re-read...
Not only is it pretty obvious why US independence day is not celebrated in the UK (although maybe that was tongue-in-cheek?), but we do have a fireworks night on a different date.
The interface equivalent of ten sad fireworks and a pack of sparklers in a rainy back garden probably wouldn't have the same addictive effects, though.
Slightly off-topic, but when learning to speak a new language, it is helpful to actually speak the language as often as you can.
There are a couple of websites that make it easy to book short conversation practice with native speakers. The one I use to practice Spanish is italki.
I find the practice of actually speaking, no matter how badly, helps way more than any app.
Agreed. I'm learning Chinese and while apps are lovely, nothing will prepare you for the pure amount of variation in accents across the world. Real world immersion becomes important for your brain to get used to mapping certain sounds to certain words.
I've also realised it's same for English, except we don't really think about it since we're used to the sounds, but the way we'd say "I went to the market" in daily speech is night and day to how it would be enunciated during an English speaking class (e.g. uh wen tu-th markt vs eye weynt too thee marr-ket). To the unpracticed ear they can just sound like different sentences.
An interesting story, a tech post with a rich intimate personal story, I enjoyed it pretty much.
But, in my first attempt to read it, I got totally lost in the very first part. I had to go back and forth to understand where it was coming from and where it is heading. I think a little bit of guidance at the beginning would not hurt, for example something like: “this is my personal journey related to the design of an app,” maybe in light gray and italic.
This is definitely not applicable to every app, BUT that's a very clever way of solving UX problems with "face"- based animations and expressions, giving users feedback. At the same time, you do stuff in the background.
I have seen this for the first time in the Airbnb apps, but only in 1-2 cases, and they use Lottie animations, not directly tied to UI events.
Idea for an app is quite nice. My kids would love it.
I just can't understand how can adult person be so traumatized by silly mistake in a coffee shop, so they will build an entire app to learn a language so this will not happen again.
I mean, I understand you made an error and you could not understand native speaker. Happens to me a lot of times with English and British people. But situation that you may not understand someone speaking foreign language abroad is expected. For me at least. How can you call it a humiliation? Just smile and ask politely to repeat because you do not understand. Point at you ear, which should be understand by everyone that you did not hear. Or look at register and check the price. Or just give them much more that you think it really cost and wait for a change. Awkwardly looking at your phone seems a bit rude.
Canada is bilingual by law and primary school curriculum, so I would personally not feel embarrassed or that I was imposing on others to converse in English.
It looks like the developer was so hooked on the idea of making it minimalistic, he forgot to make it a language-learning app. So it's a blob with a backstory. Design with no substance.
My worst language in is German, where every manual is well elaborated in terms of graphical design, but every exercise askss you to insert a word or two into a sentence. Or pick an answer from a set. Basically, Duolinguo sent to printer. So after couple of years of working with teachers and taking intensive courses, my level is B1..2. I can listen to radio and understand something, I can read something. I actually can speak in a shop -- they'll understand my level and speak accordingly -- but I can't do a normal conversation. I couldn't find a teacher that doesn't just drill you through these same fancy books.
"A friend who had been learning some language in Duolinguo and then couldn't say a sentence to a native", should be proverbial nowadays.
So, despite the app idea being interesting and compelling, this teaching approach, picking correct options from lists, are good for testing (if the subject is given little enough time), but futile at teaching.
For some context, when moving abroad I felt that most other countries don’t really teach grammar and language analysis to the point that we do in Italy. I did attend a language-focused school, which obviously leaned even more towards this tendency; but I get the impression that most competent teens graduating italian schools have a more extensive grammar-related vocabulary than other cultures.
It makes sense then that Italian learning books would be more focused on grammar compared to other languages. I felt it extended to how we were taught English as well (i.e. the opposite direction). I don’t think it is the absolute best tactic for language learning, but perhaps it is the best one when restricted to purely written exercises.
I’d be curious to know whether you had a similar impression. My evidence is all anecdotal, mostly from talking to various people around Europe.
Yep, I have to agree, as an Italian living abroad. In my case, I now have kids on the verge of finishing primary school and - maybe they will start next year who knows - I haven't seen grammar taught that much. Ironically they have more grammar exercises when studying English than the native tongues. But maybe it's just a "modern school" thing...
Of course this is just a stepping stone, but why try to duplicate (or more) everything when what you most need is proper sentence structure in the present tense and vocabulary.
Although maybe there are some languages where this is not true, not the ones I studied (briefly or not). But in my experience it is also true for people speaking bad German (talking mostly self-taught or from basic courses, not for white collar jobs with large amounts of written text) - perfectly understandable, just no tenses.
I tried picking up some German via Duolingo once. I thought it was going great, pretty soon I was up to full sentences. Then one day I realized (because my voice teacher sometimes makes me translate the foreign language songs) that I wasn't learning German sentences, I was learning English sentences substituted with German words. German grammar is completely different. I haven't touched Duolingo since.
I learned Hebrew in Duolingo and I've in fact spoken many sentences to natives. All the Israeli women we know are always negatively comparing their American Jewish husbands to me, the goy who learned Hebrew from Duolingo.
Granted, those natives are either married to me or related to someone who is. So maybe that component is essential.
Before I took a good teacher's classes, I had been listening German radio for 2 years, learned nothing of substance.
Portuguese, which I do speak, probably even at B2, is the language that I learned through radio, thanks to similarities to Italian and Spanish, and in which I feel the least confident. All my progress with it was when I was actually using it -- spoken or written, looking up dictionaries.
One cool effect is that your vocabulary can be heavily concentrated on what you're watching. Like police procedures. (in Alte they speak very clear German, can recommend.)
Yes, you probably need a proper textbook and (ideally) a teacher to learn grammar and the language rules. This is hard work, but IMO gamified apps make users a huge disservice by handwaving this and hoping the user magically figures it all out. But, like the author found out, grammar alone won't make you fluent.
I'm personally very fond of flashcards (Anki). Yes, memorizing words is just a part of language learning, but it's important and FSRS is extremely good at it. Way better than repeatedly reading a textbook.
I personally hate duolingo for many reasons (it doesn't work for me), but some of my friends use it. This touches another important thing: regularity. Gamified apps and flashcards make it easy to form a habit. You can complete your daily lesson in a bus. And they are (more) fun. Even ineffective learning method is better than nothing.
Finally, ymmv and there's no one size fits all. I got pretty good (fluent and communicative) by in Russian by initially just studying flashcards (followed by reading and listening - another very important component) - because grammar is similar to my native (Slavic) language and I could, actually, figure out most of it. Textbooks came much later. It was not as easy with German...
PS. worth noting that the author explicitly says that this app is meant to teach you just the very basics and numerals, not for language learning
A turnip is female, the fishmongers wife is neutral, a boy is male, a girl is neutral, the wife is female. Plural of Tür is Türen plural of Öffnung is Öffnungen, plural of Vogel is Vögel plural of Fenster is.. Fenster.
Hundreds of unspoken rules regarding word order, some verbs that can be separated and others cannot.. Completely random.
And good luck even being able to hear the difference between spucken and spuken if your language doesn't have long vs. short vowels.
But I can hear the difference between short/long (as in, differing in actual temporal duration) vowels just fine, e.g. in Finnish/Latvian ― although those languages kinda overextend it IMHO.
The difference is much easier to spot in pairs like "bead"/"bid", but that's mainly because before the voiced consonants the long vowel is actually longer than the short one, and the speakers usually add a small glide of "y" at the end of it, so it's more like "beeyd".
He was perfectly capable of making the same (German) u sound when saying other English words. Apparently it is very subtle, sometimes even for specific things like start of the word and length of the vowel. I just don't know.
I can compare that to Goethe institut's intensive courses: 6 weeks by these fancy colorful textbooks. Waste of time.
If your native language is similar, for example, Romanian or Spanish, sure it is. For the others, not really.
> while German makes absolutely no sense.
Mark Twain also complained about it.
> A turnip is female, the fishmongers wife is neutral, a boy is male, a girl is neutral, the wife is female. Plural of Tür is Türen plural of Öffnung is Öffnungen, plural of Vogel is Vögel plural of Fenster is.. Fenster.
So as in basically every language that has a grammatical gender. If it's not the same as in your native language, it won't make sense, and you'll need to learn it. After some time, you'll notice the pattern and will be able to guess accurately.
> Hundreds of unspoken rules regarding word order, some verbs that can be separated and others cannot.. Completely random.
The rules are well understood and clearly written. You just need to learn them.
> And good luck even being able to hear the difference between spucken and spuken if your language doesn't have long vs. short vowels.
Isn't that the case about every foreign language? I was never able to distinguish or pronounce correctly French diphthongs. I'm pretty sure half of the people here wouldn't be able to pronounce a couple of sounds from my native language even if their lives depended on it.
I tried to learn Mandarin via Duolingo, and whilst I agree that the "multi choice" style isn't great for learning a language I did notice that I was picking up fragments of what native speakers were saying around me.
It's not an "app" and doesn't have a "streak" or an "HP bar", so...
Regarding learning languages, I'm not a fan of this style of learning. It seems to me this is still Duolingo, just with a different interface. I had good success with https://www.languagetransfer.org/
I haven't learned a new language since high school, but I think to learn one you need immersion. Individual words for sure, but the focus should quickly go to reading whole sentences / paragraphs / books, listening to native speakers in their natural environment, and (probably the most difficult one to do on an app) speaking / conversation practice.
I only know English well because of daily exposure through media and twenty years of shitposting on the internet.
Yeah, I tend to think for the specific case of languages that share a common root, language transfer is unbeatable value (especially since it's entirely free).
1. A HUGH repository of raw materials, both in text and in audio. They are all written/recorded by native speakers, not non-native language teachers.
1.5. (Optional) The materials come with supplemental vocabulary lists and grammar guides.
2. You take a test.
3. It recommends materials for you to read/listen to, according your proficiency level shown in the test.
3.5. (Opt-in) it can read your YouTube history and social media to recommend materials that you might like.
4. Every month or every N hours of reading/listening, you take a new test to recalibrate your proficiency level.
That's it. However due to copyright issues, I don't expect to see such an app in near future. What a bummer.
(Not-so-off-topic) Personally I consider all the apps that don't resemble the above workflow "dictionary-like" (useful but as a reference tool, not a learning tool) or "Duolingo-like" (a healthier alternative to doomscrolling, but nothing more). The article sounds Duolingo-like.
It's basically a podcast player where you can browse a database of podcasts filtered by spoken language, and listen with transcriptions and translations.
For each language I made a podcast to learn the most frequent words.
You can also get audible feedback on your pronunciation.
I am in the process of building a YouTube database of channels by spoken language to play youtube videos on the app.
> Every month or every N hours of reading/listening, you take a new test to recalibrate your proficiency level.
I slightly disagree with this part, I think the moment you add some sort of "test" or drills it can become tedious or dreadful to learn in the long term.
[1] https://www.langturbo.com
I've learned 2 languages to fluency, and the only thing that ever works for me is immersion with comprehensible input, and conversation. I've been generally disillusioned with language learning apps that aren't "language exchange / penpal". And I've tried all of them. I don't think language learning is easily "gamified".
Ah... those pesky people speaking their very own language instead of the (ahem...) lingua franca.
But the quantity of smiles goes up 300% when you talk to them in bad French with finger pointing as opposed to fluent English, even in tourist trap areas.
Maybe slightly better service too.
Edit: hey HN, can we have the option to post one anonymous coward comment every couple days from our regular accounts? We're going to run out of throwawayNNNNNN ids sooner or later.
Nowadays young frenchs learn english by overexposition to the language through various medias (school is of no help) and in the past, even if english was taught at school, I think the majority of them didn't learn it properly beyond "my taylor is rich", "The cat is happy" and "I love you".
I didn't "learn" english and it is a mystery why I can express myself and understand others in this language, I guess I have been overexposed to the language when I was young.
That said, I worked in museums at a time in my life and was actually surprised by the huge amount of people travelling in the world with no knowledge of the language of the country they are in, expecting everybody to be able to talk their language like if it was universal, be them italians, frenchs, americans, chinese or whatever.
Another note: I live in Cambodia, where many French people live, and nearly none of them speak the local language, and a very decent amount of them don’t even speak English. Worse yet, the older generation is still hung up in the idea that it’s better for the locals to learn French than English or Chinese.
This is really a very French thing, and you don’t see the same behavior in eg Germany or Italy.
(I’m originally from The Netherlands)
My German is very poor, I used to somewhat understand what was spoken to me (if simple language was used), and to speak is short, basic sentences with shortage of vocabulary. This is just to provide some context - I never actually tried to learn German.
So I was trying to use English as often as possible. A lot of people - and I mean persons like clerks, salespersons, not random passers-by - either straight-up ignored me, or issuing comments like "Du solltest Sprachen lernen".
On the other hand, I never had similar experience when I was speaking broken French in France (or Marocco).
Please note that I don't want to bash Germans or to defend French. But it all depends on who you encounter - but these encounters might on some level shape your opinion on the whole nation no matter of you want it or not
FWIW, I only ever experienced the discussed issue (locals who clearly understand English but refuse to acknowledge me or respond in their language) in France. I really suspect it's specific to french speakers. They uniquely feel that their language was lingua franca and lost the status to English.
I am trying to understand the situation you were in, because I read that a lot and I cannot imagine why such rudeness.
Which... is certainly understandable! I'm sure she sees a lot of tourism and tourists. But for a neurotic person, being singled out as someone holding up the line by someone who is ostensibly there to help things move faster, because I didn't know a language that I expressly said I didn't know and apologized for, was quite jarring. Up until that point, every single person I met with talked to me like I had a second head that they were generally aware of but didn't care about while they tried to be as polite as possible about not bringing it up. It was a kind of clipped politeness that I have been told is just "german". Nobody cares to be friendly, everyone just wants to exchange only the information needed and, while they do so, they would be as happy and pleasant as a person could be. But as soon as the information had been exchanged, they were right back to bewildered disinterest ("why are you still talking to me? we've finished.", while smiling and nodding).
Anyway, whatever it was that she was trying to tell me, the message never got through. When I answered "no" to her question, she just moved me on through. So maybe she was trying to be polite and I showed my ass or something. Or maybe she was just trying to make a joke and then moved past it when there was no way to make me get it. Whatever the case, I left with the distinct feeling that the author described about that French street. "some people here, sometimes, are going to be very uncharitable about your lack of cultural integration. beware of that." Which, on the one hand is pretty obvious; people are just people all over. But on the other hand, it's probably something most cultures would aspire to minimize.
I'm myself native french speaker and do hate the French attitude on language. It's extremely patronizing and do not benefit anyone
Quand je peux aider quelqu'un qui échoue péniblement à trouver des interlocuteurs et qui ne parle pas français, je suis ravi de le faire et je ne m'en sens pas insulté par ailleurs.
Qu'un touriste soit stupide, balourd ou suffisant, sa capacité à parler français ne lui sera d'aucun secours s'il souhaite échapper au jugement que je lui imprime.
Vous savez, j'essaie principalement de comprendre qu'est ce qui peut faire exister le cliché sus-mentionné "les français font exprès de ne pas parler votre langue". Quand je lis "Vous devriez parler français, nous apprécions cela comme une marque de respect" j'ai honte !
Je pense qu'il faut que vous soyez un peu plus explicite sur le fond de votre pensée parce que je trouve au contraire que ça peut être un archaïsme social tout à fait paralysant.
Je trouve que "la déférence" est un mécanisme social dépassé, or cela n'a pas grand rapport avec la notion de respect, si ce n'est que c'est un témoignage forcé et niais de cette dernière. Je trouve l'honnêteté plus respectueuse que sa mise en scène, et je préfèrerai l'absence de déférence car cela signifie que je suis en présence d'un semblable qui m'est égal, qui m'invite à la rencontre plutôt qu'à ce rapport perclus de domination et de soumission.
Vous n'êtes pas transparent, jamais tant que vous n'expliquez pas vos propos plus en détail, c'est tout ce que je pourrais vous dire.
(I realize it was (hopefully) meant in jest-ish, but there are better ways to make the point.)
Honestly, I myself learn one emergency phrase in the native language, "I am sorry, please repeat this as if I have a learning disability". Upon hearing this my vis-a-vis would either actually switch to a slow and dumbed-down register of their native language or realize they won't lose face by speaking bad English to me.
Why are speakers of Japanese, Banty, Hindi and Algonquin vacationing abroad a problem of locals who just want to live their own life?... Most people do learn English for one reason or another, but "entertaining tourists" is not one of them.
What I’m trying to say is that this is someone who can really, really write - he’s deeply funny and self deprecating, but obviously also knows his shit, big-time. And that’s a massively powerful skill, maybe as much of a skill as being able to write Swift or make great interfaces or ship an app.
> “If you grew up with Tamagotchis, you already understand why this was tempting. Not the “cute pixel pet” part. The part where a device the size of a digestive biscuit turns into a low-resolution hostage negotiator.”
This is irritatingly good and it makes me want to buy his products and subscribe to his RSS feed. Great writing is powerful magic.
The funniest part to me is that I suspect the LLM generated the line about the 4th of July, and the suspected prompter being British, felt the need to insert an explanation for why "they" would reference it, in a voice/cadence that doesn't really match the rest of the article:
> "Confetti, fireworks, the whole 4th of July experience (I've seen it only in movies though, not sure why but it's not celebrated in the UK)"
I can't definitively say this is LLM-generated, but it resembled it enough so that I still came away annoyed for having read it.
I think you look for AI too hard. Perhaps that kind of dry humour is not too your liking, or you're not used to this style? FWIW i lived in the UK a bit, so I'm rather familiar with the way locals speak casually.
Btw. you can check his pre-chatgpt writing style, for example [1]. Looks similar enough to me!
[1] https://drobinin.com/posts/things-i-learnt-in-2021/
I'm not about to go into a deep dive analysing the author's past writing style, but there is a clear difference just from glancing at the headers alone. Looking at older articles, such as this "featured" one[1], they all share a commonality: the headers are boring. Matter-of-fact. Plainly descriptive. "The reasoning". "The background". "The research".
[1] https://drobinin.com/posts/what-ive-learnt-after-sending-147...
Then a sudden spate of activity in late 2025 after years of not having written anything other than yearly recaps, and all of the new posts share a different commonality: the headers are 'creative'. "The Childhood Trauma". "Teaching a circle to care". "47 seconds: a villain origin story"[2]. "The uncomfortable engineering truth".
[2] https://drobinin.com/posts/how-i-accidentally-became-puregym...
It is quite a noticeable shift to go from always writing useful headers that clearly communicate the purpose of the following text, to always writing clickbait headers that try to hook the reader's emotional attention.
Slightly off-topic, but when learning to speak a new language, it is helpful to actually speak the language as often as you can.
There are a couple of websites that make it easy to book short conversation practice with native speakers. The one I use to practice Spanish is italki.
I find the practice of actually speaking, no matter how badly, helps way more than any app.
I've also realised it's same for English, except we don't really think about it since we're used to the sounds, but the way we'd say "I went to the market" in daily speech is night and day to how it would be enunciated during an English speaking class (e.g. uh wen tu-th markt vs eye weynt too thee marr-ket). To the unpracticed ear they can just sound like different sentences.
But, in my first attempt to read it, I got totally lost in the very first part. I had to go back and forth to understand where it was coming from and where it is heading. I think a little bit of guidance at the beginning would not hurt, for example something like: “this is my personal journey related to the design of an app,” maybe in light gray and italic.
I like this article, but statements like this go far too far. An app cannot disallow someone's life. It's not that important.
Tell that to the folks busy turning every app into a miniature casino...
I just can't understand how can adult person be so traumatized by silly mistake in a coffee shop, so they will build an entire app to learn a language so this will not happen again.
I mean, I understand you made an error and you could not understand native speaker. Happens to me a lot of times with English and British people. But situation that you may not understand someone speaking foreign language abroad is expected. For me at least. How can you call it a humiliation? Just smile and ask politely to repeat because you do not understand. Point at you ear, which should be understand by everyone that you did not hear. Or look at register and check the price. Or just give them much more that you think it really cost and wait for a change. Awkwardly looking at your phone seems a bit rude.
Cool app though.
I got to level thirteen having seen only four verbs (aller, faire, être, and parler) and mostly in the present.