The Whole App is a Blob

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.

> "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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

> I had good success with https://www.languagetransfer.org/

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).

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.

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 something similar [1]

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

Yes, the huge repository of raw materials is likely the hardest part. You can try crowdsourced collections ( https://tatoeba.org , https://datacollective.mozillafoundation.org/datasets?q=comm... , https://opus.nlpl.eu/OpenSubtitles/corpus/version/OpenSubtit... ) but you'll quickly run into data quality issues. My personal solution is to do manual data curation on the fly, but I think an app that occasionally throws up garbage and asks its users to pick out the good parts is unlikely to get popular.

Immersion is important, so I'd expect AI in there, or video calls with native speakers.

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.

When I read that it registered as being a light-hearted observation with a healthy dose of humour, and not an attempt at being rude.

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.)

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.

The entire thing is mostly AI written transparently

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.

Yes I would want this person designing my app because it is clear they are very curious and into the craft.

> An app cannot disallow someone's life

Tell that to the folks busy turning every app into a miniature casino...

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.