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A friend sent this lifehacker article to me:

"Mandarin Chinese Is Now Available on the Language Learning App Duolingo", by Patrick Allan (11/16/17)

Duolingo claims that it "is the world's most popular way to learn a language. It's 100% free, fun and science-based. Practice online on duolingo.com or on the apps!"

After reading Allan's article, I sent the following note to my students and colleagues:

Judging from the description in this article, I'm dubious about the efficacy of their method. Never mind about misleading statements emanating from the author of the article (e.g., there are 1.2 billion native speakers of "Chinese"), they seem to overemphasize individual characters, downplay words, don't talk about sentence structure, grammar, and syntax, and don't give any indication of how or whether pinyin is used.

Has anyone checked this app out?

I received the following response from an undergrad who has been taking Mandarin for one and a half years:

I have been using Duolingo to supplement my French for a while, and I have often been quite annoyed at the fact that Duolingo did not have Mandarin (though it had Esperanto, Klingon, and other such languages). So, I was pretty excited when I saw that they were "hatching" Mandarin and, as soon as it was in beta, I started using it. I took a placement test, then started a lesson, but was disappointed with the format because it seemed oddly structured, as it introduced characters without saying their meaning. Also, some of the translations into English are a bit awkward and particular.

After seeing your email, I remembered that the online version of Duolingo is more comprehensive (than the phone app version) — it generally has grammar and pronunciation notes for each lesson set. I went through some of the grammar notes for the lesson sets, and I think they're somewhat helpful. Also, when looking around, I saw that they did not have a comprehensive explanation of pinyin. I was pretty disappointed about that because pinyin was incredibly helpful when I started learning Chinese and continues to be. After seeing how Mandarin works on Duolingo, I'll probably only (sparingly) use it for review and extra vocab.

To be more positive, Duolingo's Mandarin is only in beta right now, so in a while it may be better.

Silas Brown then sent me this evaluation: I tried saying I was a beginner. It put me into a multiple-choice test, asking if 你好 is nǐhǎo, hǎo or zài. Then it did similarly for just 好. Then played recordings of nǐhǎo and hǎo, and had me select the pinyin from a multiple-choice list. Then had me select the correct character for hǎo out of 再, 好, 你 and 见. Then it had me type the English word for 好. And pair up 你好 with nǐhǎo and 好 with hǎo. Not exactly what I'd call "learning Chinese" .. but it might give some people a 'nice feeling' that they're making progress. Then I tried the "placement test". It asked me to translate 你叫什么？ and 我也很高兴认识你, then asked me what means "incorrect" giving me buttons to insert 哪, 对, 国, 都, 不 or 香港. Then similarly asked me to translate "is tomorrow Sunday?" from a set of hanzi, and "He drinks coffee at 6:15 in the morning." etc. (When asking to translate sentences like 你认识到医院的路吗 into English, the source is presented as hanzi with no pinyin, but with audio available.) I hit the first snag when I translated 我的朋友都喜欢跳舞 into "My friends all like dancing" and was told this answer is incorrect because the correct answer is "All my friends like dancing". (I didn't think my style of English was the thing under test here. If this is supposed to be a self-study aid, then there really ought to be a button saying "I was close enough, mark that one correct please" for this kind of question.) All answers have a "report" button, which suggests it's been crowd-sourced. I hope the test doesn't just keep getting bigger as people add more questions / answers to the database. Because there's no way to finish the "placement test" early. That means if you're starting to find it too difficult, the only way to say "OK, you've found my level, don't ask me any more questions I can't do" is to press the "skip question" button AND acknowledge that your 'blank' answer is incorrect, One By One For Every Single Question Until The End Of The Test. Nor is there any way to take the questions out of order (i.e., stop asking me easy ones, I want to see how hard it is at the very end). With all that "5 minutes a day" advertising, they ought to warn people that the 'placement test' has to be sat in sequence, in its entirety, and could take an hour if you're not very fast. Need to get on with things, so I haven't sat it through to the very end to see what happens.

Taking these two reports and my initial reaction into consideration, I have little doubt that Duolingua Mandarin is better than ChinEasy, but it still leaves much to be desired as an effective means for becoming fluent in Mandarin.

On the difficulty of learning to read and write Chinese and how to cope with it:

Tips for how (and how not) to learn Chinese:

Learning Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese is a rather different matter from learning spoken and / or written Mandarin, but with some of the same problems:

Make no mistake about it, learning how to read and write Chinese is extremely hard, though I personally think that learning to speak and understand Mandarin is relatively easy (I haven't forgotten that I need to write a follow-up to this post [and I will!]):

So, back to Duolingo. What's the verdict? Let me put it this way:

Bad apps are worse than no apps because they waste time, while frustrating and misleading the user.

Bad pedagogy is worse than no pedagogy because it wastes time, while frustrating the learner and destroying their confidence that they can realize noticeable progress within a reasonable period of time if they make an honest effort.

Best: substitution and pattern drills, build-up exercises, and anything else that encourages the student to compose and understand phrases, clauses, and sentences beyond the mere lexical level.

Worst: dictation and focus on words and characters in isolation, which, alas, are emphasized all too often by old-fashioned pedagogues.

Two basic rules:

Emphasize spoken language (pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, etc.) during the initial stages. Utilize the best and most advanced electronic aids for reading and writing after you have acquired a solid foundation in the spoken language.

[h.t. Michael Carr; thanks to Rhosean Asmah]

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