Duolingo sucks though.
Duolingo sucks though. So does Memrise. And you can build an anki deck, sure — but not all decks are created equal. If you don't make a frequency list from a large corpus, your Anki deck sucks too. Duolingo and Memrise seem to have the philosophy, "There are many words in the language you're learning. Here are some of them." This is really bad. Because word frequencies follow a Zipfian distribution, if you learn the top 1,000 words in a language you're a long way forward. If you learn an arbitrary 1,000 sample of words in a 40,000 word vocabulary, you're much further back. These guys seem to have this as their specific value proposation. I was going to do exactly this myself. I'm a computational linguist who's recently moved to Germany. I got about 2/3 of the way through the Duolingo course, but it's basically a waste of time. They taught me the words for "duck" and "ceiling" and "handyman" as part of the first 1,000 words in the course.
Posted by syllogism on Jun 5, 2015, 5:43 PM
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Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.6,000 issues0 comments
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I mean that's the problem though.
I've always believed the opposite: get conditionals deep in your code so that the higher level control flow is regular.
The biggest problem with AI isn't being able to do things.
I am a 3D printing maker type nerd (I make my own tools for other creative tasks, rather than as their own outcomes) and I saw an incredi...
Of course not, those are clearly scams.
Claude makes more detailed plans that seem better if you just skim them, but when analyzed, has a lot of errors, usually.
Effectively everyone is building the same tools with zero quantitative benchmarks or evidence behind the why / ideas … this entire s...
> creating and operating a small company in Germany is a nightmare To be fair, I think the problem operating in Germany is its federated...
Duolingo sucks though.
Duolingo sucks though. So does Memrise. And you can build an anki deck, sure — but not all decks are created equal. If you don't make a frequency list from a large corpus, your Anki deck sucks too. Duolingo and Memrise seem to have the philosophy, "There are many words in the language you're learning. Here are some of them." This is really bad. Because word frequencies follow a Zipfian distribution, if you learn the top 1,000 words in a language you're a long way forward. If you learn an arbitrary 1,000 sample of words in a 40,000 word vocabulary, you're much further back. These guys seem to have this as their specific value proposation. I was going to do exactly this myself. I'm a computational linguist who's recently moved to Germany. I got about 2/3 of the way through the Duolingo course, but it's basically a waste of time. They taught me the words for "duck" and "ceiling" and "handyman" as part of the first 1,000 words in the course.
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