Finished Doulingo English course (+Review)

Rate: 3/5 

I finished my English course (89 levels) with an 80-day streak. It's only good for beginners; there's not much to learn. Some sentences are too simple, but they are repeated a lot. Some of them are even not practical. And I don't like the translation model of language learning.

I may use this app to learn another language in the future, but not English.

Some review from Quora:

Duolingo’s objective is not to turn people into qualified interpreters capable of understanding complex language related to specialist fields. It is designed to take people from zero knowledge to being able to recognise a few signs, notices and announcements when visiting a country, and have a short conversation with someone, maybe write a few sentences for whatever purpose.

Duolingo:

+ A lot of exercises. Most of the words and constructs are repeated many times, so you will remember the words reliably.

+ Vocabulary is expanded incrementally, so that you usually encounter only one new word in a sentence.

+ Free version is good enough.

+ An option to type in the whole sentence.

- Majority of grammar topic are not explained or are explained very badly, exercises for a grammar topic also do not always clearly demonstrate, how it works.

- Significant fraction of sentences in the exercises is ridiculously meaningless. Quality of content is lower.

- Use of vocabulary is not balanced: some not very useful words are repeated a lot (e.g. animals), and others are only used in a single exercise and never again.

Busuu:

+ Grammar is explained adequately.

+ Sentences are meaningful, describe realistic situations, which helps understanding and remembering the words better.

+ Pictures help remembering.

- Much less content (exercises) then in Duolingo.

- A sentence may include several new words.

- Only some of the new words are included in the “vocabulary review” exercises.

- Vocabulary review exercises are not effective: they do not show the correct spelling or translation, after you typed in yours (more precisely, not always, and the is no clear logic).

- Usage of articles in vocabulary review is inconsistent: sometimes they expect a definite article, sometimes they do not. So to pass the exercise, you need to remember, if Busuu wants the article for the given noun, which is absolutely ridiculous.