Polyglot Reacts to Popular Language Learning Apps 

Duolingo stories are lit tho. They go so hard with the storyline plot twists.

would love to see him try this video style again with languages he doesn't already speak, which is the point of these apps in the first place

Duolingo's basics are the reason why I understand the complex sentences in Memrise. Duolingo's awesome.

I've noticed that a lot of language-learning type channels and journalists tend to not like Duolingo so much, and I think it shows the difference in general language learning experience between them and the general public. Xiaoma is clearly ready and willing to start with full sentences. Duolingo is great because it does its best not to scare away absolute beginners. It says, "See, you learned how to say 'I am a man' in German! That wasn't so hard! Now, this is how you say 'He is a man.'" Baby steps, never more than you can handle at one time.

Him: I can speak fluent Chinese Him: These Chinese lessons are far too easy for me, it’s ridiculous

Dude, if you’re going to test out languages, don’t choose one that you’re already fluent in!

For someone with almost no experience with other languages, I think Duolingo's approach is good for training the ear and eye. I'm an almost 40 year old English speaker trying to learn Japanese and I don't feel nearly as intimidated as I did when I started a little over a week ago. The app keeps me motivated. It might not be the most efficient system, but it is effective at keeping me coming back every day. And that's the most important thing in my opinion.

Duolingo turns into full sentences and sentence creation when you get past level 1 lol

How many of you are tryyna learn a language over this quarantine?!

He enjoys the one where he's learning Spanish more than the ones where he's learning Chinese. Try Spanish on all the apps for a better comparison.

Duolingo is probably my favorite, even though I only get like 10% of my learning from it. It makes me be consistent cuz I really care about my streak (my family might be at risk if I break it too) and on days where I don't feel like learning doing some duolingo can really inspire me to actually study that day.

Not everyone can learn and memorize whole conversations in one minute. Some people need a slower pace. Duolingo is the best for me.

Duolingo is good for starting from absolute zero, that's why the first lessons are insanely basic.

By the way, Duolingo doesn’t do the best job at Japanese and Chinese, but it does extremely well in french (from someone who knows french) Spanish and german

The best thing about this is only spending 10 mins on each without seeing their entire program. It's like rating a book based on the opening sentence. Super useful 😂

My vote goes to Duolingo. My journey in French started with Duolingo. Today I speak at near native fluency. Though, I guess its a matter of personal preference as to which platform works best for you.

Duolingo has a diagnostic test you're supposed to take at the start. You skipped that and went to the intro lessons.

"I'm just not sure how much I'm learning" Try languages you have no idea about, get an ACTUAL experience.

I used pimsleur to learn russian, and its awesome. It really makes u pronounciate and u also have The spelling and memorising. I recommend it strongly. I makes u listen to conversations so its More like real life.

You need to use the same language on each app to get a true side by side comparison. Also, duolingo does get much better past the first lesson.

Duolingo gets more complex the more you learn

Duolingo starts with very basic stuff for Chinese & Japanese because it’s trying to familiarize you with the writing system before it dives into complex syntactic structures. It actually does a very good job of teaching grammar in later lessons. You can also test out of skills you already know based on prior knowledge.

Pimsleur is great. I love how audio focused it is because it gets you to actually speak.

I’ll precede by saying that you are a brilliant polyglot, and most of your videos are highly entertaining. I feel that you got wayyyyyyyyy too excited about learning so much Spanish from Babbel in only a minute or so; You should show us with a language that you aren’t YET fluent in.

I’m 21 days into Pimsleur French and I feel like I’ve learned way more than a month of Duolingo. It really gets your brain thinking in the mindset of the language and teaches you how to speak casually, and not so much like a textbook

I'm about 4 months into learning Spanish on Doulingo and can converse with my Spanish coworkers now. It's very simple and slow conversations but they are super patient and encouraging.

I'm genuinely annoyed how little this person did in these systems and then judged them off the bat. Duolingo ive used often and it builds as I expect others do too

Duolingo gets more intense later. For Korean I felt they crammed too much into too little actually, but they have a section for just learning the characters that I started using and it helped immensely.

I've actually been learning Chinese with Duolingo, and it has turned out to be really great.

Pimsleur has been incredible for me. I am a truck driver and I spent a couple months ( have slacked lately) learning japanese (until I got scared by the writing) and I still months later find myself able to spit out full sentences as well as understand random segments of japenese I hear from time to time. It's the "13th Warrior" approach.

I have been enjoying learning Spanish with Pimsleur. I'm just about done with level 5, which just makes me feel really good and accomplished. It's gotten way deeper into grammar with past tense and subjunctive than I would have thought possible with just audio. It's also great that they do have reading lessons at the end. Absolutely would recommend.

Oh, this is nice! Thank you! I was toying with signing up for Rosetta Stone and jumping into Duolingo again, but your section on Babbel changed my mind.

Him : I can speak fluent chinese Also him: I just wonder if Im learning anything

This could've been a good series of videos. You could evaluate deeper how each app teaches chinese and which you think is better for begginers, intermediaries and advanced students. You could even make one video for each app saying what you like and what you don't like. I mean, we're on quarantine, you're also. It would be great content. But don't evaluate them so superficially by one single lesson dude. It's so incredibly misinformative.

The Babble where he is getting all happy about, Doulingo has the exact same thing called STORIES. Doulingo offers podcasts, guidebooks to teach you rules, and memorizing words is pretty damn important if you ask me. You kind of have to study for B1 in any given language on these websites before you can give out an opinion. Also best to purchase out the premium subscription out of any given website because teachers don't work for free.

I really love Pimsleur, it helped me improve my korean pronunciation and gave me a sense of confidence I didn't think I could reach. Pimsleur can definitely improve, but yeah, you always have the feeling of beeing part of a conversation, plus they gift me every program they have.

Please re-do this video once you’ve used these apps for one month, starting from 0 with a language you aren’t already familiar with. I usually like your videos, but this one is way off bc no real time was invested 😬

Dude, the reason the first lesson on Duolingo gave you so little information is because they were tutorials that essentially teach you the layout/format of how it works. Later, it requires you to translate sentences on you own, it has longer stories where you get questions to see if you actually understood it, etc. Imagine reviewing a video game by playing 30 seconds of the tutorial and being like "yeah, this isn't that fun", or looking at the intro to a movie and being like "yo why is there just the earth with the words 'universal studios' on it? this movie sucks!". There are plenty of criticism to be made of duolingo, but honestly it has some good features. The stories work well as comprehensible input, they have a podcast thing with a very easy to understand level, they have a feature that's like anki but better, because they take all the words you have seen on duolingo, and do the spaced repetition thing, and ofc, before each lesson you can click on the tips to see more technical grammar stuff, and later lessons obviously get a lot more complicated. The first lesson is literally just for showing the layout of the lessons. The fact that you literally couldn't spend more than 10 seconds before saying a service was dumb is really weird.

I would say it’s probably easy for you because you are fluent in most of these languages but for new people that want to learn to speak a new language I’d say Duolingo is amazing! I’m practicing my Norwegian because of family up there and it’s awesome. It gets more complex the more you start learning.

“I don’t think I’ve learnt much” yeah cos you already speak the language and you’re doing a beginner lesson?!?

Me: Learns basic Korean from Duolingo from scratch Him: Is fluent in Chinese and judges these apps cuz they start from scratch Me: ㅇ ㅡ ㅇ Edit: BY ODIN’S BEARD 500 LIKES WHATTTT THANK YOU AYO WHAT

I use Pimsleur for French and it has helped so immensely with my speaking and confidence talking with someone in French! I had three years of French in school, so I had a solid foundation, but it clicks in my brain so much more to forgo the reading/writing and solely focus on the speaking. Started to think in French instead of translating English to French in my head, if that makes sense. But I like to use Pimsleur in conjunction with HelloTalk just to chat with real people.

Babbel ALL day. My husband and I both started Norwegian at the same time. He started on Duolingo and I started on Babbel and within 2 months I was SO much further ahead of him it was insane. I had already learned grammar, the building blocks of how sentence structure works (like where to put adjectives and nouns and how the imperative forms of words work and all the confusing stuff that actually matters in a language lol) all of that I learned in the first month and I was moving onto actually making sentences and stuff, and by the time I checked in with him after 2 months, he was still learning vocabulary and barely making sentences…We both were doing an hour everyday and Duolingo barely got him into sentence structure after 2 months🤦🏼‍♀️ He ended up canceling and just using my app after that Lol. Babbel is WAYYY better. I feel people are sleeping on that app for surrreee.

Duolingo: just plain fun, good for sampling languages so curiosity doesn't distract you later. Memrise: similar to Duolingo but in a different way. Basic grammar emphasis traded for vocab and phrases. Mango: a lot like Babbel but with far more choices like Quebec French, Cherokee, Tuva, Ancient Greek, Tamil, etc. So far that's my app experience. All free (Mango is through my library's membership), so if you're broke or want to play around until feel serious enough to pay, you have options.

Duolingo also forces you to speak, write and build sentences. Pretty quick/early too. Then you have stories for many of the languages, and intuitive tips sections for each of the parts (grammar).

I am learning Russian with online videos with a teacher, then using duolingo as practice in-between lessons. So far it is going very well for me.

Hey I gotta say I appreciate you and this video I’m a subscriber on both tiktok and RU-vid and have loved your videos and loved how much people genuinely appreciate people taking the time to learn their language. Always watch with a smile and am trying to learn Spanish as I am a car salesman and I feel a lot of people in my area are missing out on genuine treatment and honest business because of a language barrier and I see a ton of folk trying hard to learn English and I feel like more Americans should meet in the middle.

I've also used these apps with similar opinions. Rosetta Stone does get better as you progress and has things like stories to read, videos to watch and monthly video chatting with a foreign speaker, and if you're learning to read and write/gain random vocabulary then Rosetta Stone does that as well. I have to agree that Pimsleur is the best at teaching you a lot quickly. If you're preparing for a vacation and need to be able to ask for directions, order food, and go shopping then the first CD of a pimsleur audio course from the library will get you there pretty quick.

xiaoma: "I just Dont feel it was an efficient use of time"(inserts usb into back of his neck) "thats better"

I learned Swedish to an intermediate level from just using Duolingo. :D

Haven't used the others but Duolingo has done okay at reminding & expanding my forgotten German from school as well as starting Welsh. A friend who speaks about 4 languages already said like it'll never get you to any advanced level but as you say the fact is it's fun, and the leaderboards and streaks that it adds with the other gamification means that for a lot of people it's a good way to at least learn something where they otherwise may have been learning nothing. Same reason they have a low minimum study time, to make learning languages as approachable as possible even if you're not ready to commit a lot of time/work.

This video was very useful. I love your content because I have a passion for languages. I personally use Duolingo. It was the only one that I found that teaches Arabic. Doulingo works well for me because I need those basic because there is a new alphabet to learn plus pronunciations. But I think that the best method would be a mix of all of these depending on how proficient your are in that language. Keep up the great work!

TLDR: This review is seems skewed by your beginning knowledge of a language, and you didn't try each service enough to get an accurate feel for them. Any of these services might work for different people. You looked at beginner lessons for the first two for a language you already know, so of course it was boring. I used Duolingo for German, and the first thing I needed to learn was the sounds and what basic words meant. If you're thrown into a conversation like Babbel where they haven't taught you any words, it can be more difficult and time consuming to understand. Duolingo, from my experience, builds your knowledge slowly and steadily, course after course. Later on, it can feel quite conversational. After about 4 months of inconsistent Duolingo, Germans were shocked at how much I could speak.

Stop doing it in Chinese... You're already advanced in it, so you don't get the true experience.

Yeah I was use duolingo along with some other things, and it is indeed very slow at the start. It picks up speed later in and it lets you form whole scentences and learn to comprehend them, even speak on mobile. There are also a lot of negatives as it isn’t that time efficient and things like that but yeah. Great vid! Thanks :)

Just started pimsleur a week ago and I absolutely love it! It’s really motivating and I love that you can do it while doing other things.

Dude, even though you said 1 hour a day would be a good time for learning, you didn't get to use the apps for not even 30 minutes. You didn't get to see the evolution of each app and its features. You were really harsh on some of them for a person who only made it through the very first lesson in each app... I don't think your analysis was objective enough to make a rank out of it so quickly... or at least without clarifying that that's your personal analysis and how it suits you personally or something like that. The way you said stuff was like you were giving an expert's opinion, since you're a person who learns a lot of languages. You were really universal, saying the apps weren't good, by the way you said it. People who never used those apps might get the wrong idea and start bad-mouthing stuff based on your judgement, as an influencer. I like your content, your channel and yourself very much, dude, but this time I have to disagree here. P.S.: And I'm saying that as a person who likes all of the apps you mentioned, each with its own approach to language learning and I thought your analysis was a little shallow, without taking the necessary steps to clarify that it would be your personal opinion and it should be took as such, not as a serious analysis, otherwise it's unfair, unscientific and opinion generating without proper basis.

One thing that I've found, having used Duolingo longer, is that each level you increase on a particular course will increase the difficulty and length of sentence usage, especially further down the tree. That said, I feel like I've gained more out of having leveled up some of those skills and going for more repetition.

Fr, I love pimsleur. I've tried Rosetta, duo, and pimsleur. Pimsleur is the best for me. The content they teach is so relevant and they teach the cultral aspects of language as well. Duo alone won't get you far in conversations or anything (but its also free), but it is fun. What I do is use pimsleur as my main mode of learning and do extra fun practice with duo. They each focus on different things too, so I can learn a lot more. I've been practicing Korean for 3 months with pimsleur (not consistently) and I'm not scared of being thrown into South Korea to fend for myself. I'm not fluent by any means, but I understand the basics so well now that learning more of the language is super easy!

I have Rosetta stone for free with my company benefit, I wanted to improve my French (the starting test said I'm a B2) and I can say at that level it's quite challenging sometimes, maybe too easy if someone starts with the total basic like you though (but as I said the more you go on, the more it gets difficult)

This video feels like an inefficient use of time...

My concern with Babbel and other overload learning sights is retention. You're being taught so much all at once and you don't really know why it's formed like that; you're just expected to accept this, remember it, and move on.

Yo thanks so much for this vid! Very helpful as i didn't know which to go for.

Duolingo has a lot of listening and speaking as well. You have to go further then one minute

Duolingo is dope asf idk what you’re talking about. How do you expect to learn a language without starting with the basics

“You could be walking around..well not in coronavirus territory.”😂😂

Thanks so much for your review of common language learning apps. This review was very helpful when considering which language app I should sign up for.

Duolingo allows you to skip specific lessons if you already have a foundation, letting you learn grammar, sentence structure fairly quickly when YOU are ready. Love your vids ❤

Also an obsessive language learner: I agreed with a lot of your rankings! I was super impressed with Pimsleur as a good start in speaking a language - but I would always recommend people supplement it with a text-based beginner source. Pimsleur to train your listening and speaking skills; and then the book for your raw knowledge and grammar of the language.

I'm 104 days into Duolingo and feel like I am really learning from it, steady at 20 minutes a day. Although I have learned a lot of words and sentence structure, I'm not at conversational level yet but I attribute that to being an introvert and the fact that when I am faced to speak Spanish to someone, I instantly revert back to grade school level grammar...of English. 😑 Edit: I tried Memrise and found it repetitive.

I love Pimsuler and think I took away more from it than anything else I tried. I think it is particularly useful for getting some basics down before switching yourself over to italki lessons (which I also think are one of the best ways to learn on the internet)... That said, with Pimsuler I find you need to have total focus on the audio and they do sometimes get a tad boring. I've done a large portion of their German, Greek, and French courses and with all 3 I tried to walk around, cook, and drive while listening to them but I constantly had to replay the lessons since I would zone out or be too focused on my other tasks. They also tend to use very formal language and not very much slang... I found it semi-difficult to break out of formal speech when talking to friends in Germany because it was deeply engranged through the course. I haven't tested the waters with French and Greek yet since I'm still a high beginner in those two but it seems these courses are similar.

As somebody who is fluent in a language, it's kind of difficult to judge a learning website.

I've been learning Japanese on Duolingo. I love it! The repetition helps me remember the words and common sense helps me figure out the sentence formation.

I really wanna know how polyglots learn because he got pretty amazed as if he never use these apps so what do they do

I took a year and a half of Chinese in college and then did four months of Pimsleur and got soooo much further in the my speaking and comprehension than I ever did with college. Granted I had a foundation cause the college came first, but I’ve used it for languages I had no experience with before and felt like I actually knew and understood the way the sentences in that language were supposed to be formed. It’s weakest point is probably sheer vocab because it’s really focused on helping you to understand the landscape of the language so you can just slot in any new word you learn. Obviously they don’t really touch reading and writing so you will need to supplement something for that, but honestly I’d wait on it until a month or two in once you really understand the pronunciations and phonotactics in whatever language you are learning. I’ve invested a decent amount of time into a few different language learning programs and I feel like Pimsleur definitely gave me the most return.

Helpful review. Thank you for sharing!

Duolingo and Rosetta Stone may have only taught you “boy” and “hello.” But Babbel didn’t even teach you “boy” *or* “hello.”

Memrise is more like a flashcard system. Not an app to learn a whole language.

I’ve been using Pimsleur before I seen this glad you said that one! I’m learning Spanish and it’s going great

I've used mostly Pimsleur for learning Russian. Definitely would recommend, like he said in the video it's great for popping in headphones and doing the lesson on the go. A lesson fits in great with a walk to work in the morning. It's also very good for building on the original conversation and having you repeat the vocabulary. I'm on lesson 30 now but occasionally they'll still have you utilize words from the earlier lessons in new sentences/context. That way it ensures you don't just forget them. Also to Pimsleur will slowly start having the instructions being spoken in the language you're learning. By lesson 30 half the instructions are in Russian however because they've been repeated so much and the context they're understandable. Again would highly recommend Pimsleur for anyone who isn't so much concerned with the writing and reading aspect of the language and is looking for just speech/understanding fluency. спасибо, хорошего дня!

As a person interested in learning another language for general use and in games like VRChat, thanks! Really like how you stressed the importance of conversation for language learning.

I can promise you duo lingo is actually worth it. Not in isolation but it’s taught me sooo much Spanish. The first few lessons are really basic though

I really love your honest enthousiasm !

I have been using Duolingo to learn Hebrew for more than two years and I have tried the other apps too. I think Duo is the most suitable for me.

Just a note for babbel: They do have speaking recognition now; however, the feature where you listen to a conversation and it quizzes you is sadly not available for the French course 😔

I've always loved Pimsleur! I haven't used Rosetta Stone but I know there's an Anki deck with 1000 words/sentences that has sentences for each and it's great!

Xiaoma could definitely make millions if he would get a sponsorship from one of these. But he stays genuine, gotta thank him for that.

The one aspect I don't like is how he said a website was automatically not as good because it started with vocab, and he wanted to jump right in with the conversations; however, it is almost impossible to jump into conversation work when you know zero vocab along with possibly having a new scripture of writing (like Chinese or Russian, etc.) You need to learn vocab and the scripture of writing before just jumping into full conversation work. I find Duolingo good for vocabulary and building beginner sentences, but what it lacks terribly in is grammar rules and concepts.

My favorite thing about Rosetta stone is the fact it pretty much teaches you the entire language without using any comparisons to your mother tongue. It forces you to form the connections to the images without translation, which is dope

I would love to see you get deeper into these apps and make a second video. Just knowing that I use Duolingo and after getting through the basics once you're thrown into discussing politics and topics that help evolve your vocabulary through references you can really appreciate these apps. I would just like to see how you feel about all of them deeper into their more advanced sections since you're more adapt at learning languages and just knowing the time it takes to learn them. Cheers to staying healthy and learning languages while being isolated

my experience with duolingo: I tried learning Korean with it for a year, didn't get me anywhere. I had to start from zero all over again

I am a huge advocate for Memrise. Once you get further into their courses, they integrate sentences and context more but the thing I like most is that you can create your own courses. I almost exclusively just use my own courses as that gives you ful control over the direction you want to go with your learning

i love duolingo’s tips, stories, great visuals, and the way it progressively gets harder but prepares you for it

Thank you Polyglot for the pointers you offer, it has been helpful for me. I would also recommend writing the vocabulary. For a long term learning I say that at some point everything you listen, see, read, and repeat, you've got to write it down, just as you would if you were learning how to write shorthand. This is how I do it: I take 100 previlously selected words that I consider I will use most, then I separate them in five groups of 20 words, I proceed to write them 40 to 50 times each (maybe more if you will), I make a small phrase with each one and repeat it out loud as many times as possible until it feels natural. Do this with the rest of the 100 words. This would be Voc-01. Now repeat the process with 100 new words. This would be Voc-02 (and so on and so forth). Now, 4 to 6 weeks from now go back to Voc-01 and repeat the process all over again. The words will be stored in your long-term memory. Just a thought. Thank you.

I pay for both Babbel and Duo and I think they complement each other really well. I like Babbel's attentions to teaching you about rules and grammar but I also like Duo's emphasis on learning through repetition and trial and error. For Spanish I also find Duo is too Latin America centric, as someone who lives in Europe I enjoy Babbel's focus on mainland Spain (e.g. I got to Checkpoint 5 on Duo and still didn't know what vosotros/vosotras meant. Babbel taught me that on the first day)

Pimsleur has always been my go-to for either learning a new language, or, brush up on 1 of my current languages.

For people that don’t know! Check out HelloChinese for learning mandarin, It’s very similar to duolingo but much better. I am leaning Chinese from scratch and tried both for a month, and HelloChinese was giving me much better results ! ☺️

So far I’m using Memrise for Korean and it’s going really well. If you already know the alphabet you can skip that section and it teaches you sentences and starts mixing them to really maximize your learning.

Great video. Just wanted to add that even for the same app, the style of the lesson plan for different languages can be completely different. I used Memrise consistently for quite a while (a year or two) to learn Dutch. It didn’t have these video clips of native people speaking the language, which was great because in my experience with another language on Memrise, it gets really annoying when the video isn’t novel anymore and you get impatient during your daily reviews. I ended up associating the person in the video with the phrase, instead of actually listening to what the person just said. Also, you’re pretty spot on for how helpful were Memrise eventually was for me. When I moved to the Netherlands eventually, coinciding with after a year of two of using the app, I found that apart from having learnt more new vocabulary, the app doesn’t really hold much weight with sentence forming or explaining how grammar works in the language.

I’ve been learning Chinese and now french. I give credit to Duolingo, it does helps me a lot but I also use other different tools of learning. And I felt quite attacked in this video. Lmao