Duolingo Chinese Course

[NextLevel]

I am finding some success with the Spanish course and was wondering what people thought of the Chinese course - anyone assessed it and come to any conclusions about its strengths and weaknesses?

Ni hao!

 

[CPH_Tiny]

There are better options. I would personally recomend "Hello Chinese". Altough it's paid when you finished the first course, it's actually good and not just random words.

 

[piligrim]

I am finding some success with the Spanish course and was wondering what people thought of the Chinese course - anyone assessed it and come to any conclusions about its strengths and weaknesses?

Ni hao!

You mean you learned Spanish with this site?
You can find tutour for $15-20 an hour here: https://www.italki.com/en

 

[NextLevel]

There are better options. I would personally recomend "Hello Chinese". Altough it's paid when you finished the first course, it's actually good and not just random words.

Thanks, for the recommendation, I will check it out.

I do pay for Duolingo basic tier so it offers a lot of stuff so money is not the main problem. It is actually me experience with Duolingo Spanish that expanded my perspective that maybe learning is still possible. But the feel of the Duolingo Chinese is a bit challenging, so I wanted to know if other options were available.

 

[NextLevel]

You mean you learned Spanish with this site?
You can find tutour for $15-20 an hour here: https://www.italki.com/en

Duolingo is much cheaper and is reasonably effective.

 

[Helanren]

Personally I'm not a fan of those apps. Podcasts and flashcards have been my go-to. Pleco is a great free dictionary app that has paid add-ons like screen OCR and flashcards that you can organize yourself or you can get premade packs like fur HSK exams. For podcasts there are many. ChinesePod is the obvious one. On Spotify you have transcripts to read along as well.

Once you're beyond their upper intermediate level you should just search for things on YouTube you're interested in and find Chinese content on it.

 

[chandyrandy]

Duolingo is much cheaper and is reasonably effective.

For chinese specifically duolingo is really not a great option, It fails to really provide an understanding of grammar and also learning how to write. You might think writing is unnecessary but once you realise that each tone is its own word and not a variation of the pinyin linking the pronunciation to a character is wayyy more effective than linking to just the meaning.
Ive been learning for a year now and can talk with people at my club and with my friends in chinese,
Heres what id reccomend:

• Anki - Basis for learning vocab (best used on a laptop and also free on a laptop)
• Pleco - very useful dictionary
• Podcasts - Useful only if you use mimicry to copy pronunciation, a great one is mandarin from the ground up on spotify, it helps you learn understandable intonation.
• Visualising tones on a music staff - your accent is inherently tonal if you know it or not, using a stave can significantly help with making sure your tones are correct, remember a different tones is a whole ass different word, my favourite example is 问 and 吻 one means kiss and one means ask, both have same pinyin of wen but with different tones and both can be used of talking to another person hahaha. imagine somone comes up to you and wants to ask if they can ask you something but you hear can i kiss you hahaha
• (edit) Use AI to provide resources and help correct your sentence structure

 

[Helanren]

For chinese specifically duolingo is really not a great option, It fails to really provide an understanding of grammar and also learning how to write. You might think writing is unnecessary but once you realise that each tone is its own word and not a variation of the pinyin linking the pronunciation to a character is wayyy more effective than linking to just the meaning.
Ive been learning for a year now and can talk with people at my club and with my friends in chinese,
Heres what id reccomend:

• Anki - Basis for learning vocab (best used on a laptop and also free on a laptop)
• Pleco - very useful dictionary
• Podcasts - Useful only if you use mimicry to copy pronunciation, a great one is mandarin from the ground up on spotify, it helps you learn understandable intonation.
• Visualising tones on a music staff - your accent is inherently tonal if you know it or not, using a stave can significantly help with making sure your tones are correct, remember a different tones is a whole ass different word, my favourite example is 问 and 吻 one means kiss and one means ask, both have same pinyin of wen but with different tones and both can be used of talking to another person hahaha. imagine somone comes up to you and wants to ask if they can ask you something but you hear can i kiss you hahaha
• (edit) Use AI to provide resources and help correct your sentence structure

Writing to some extent is useful. But in reality most is pinyin input, so your writing skill depends a lot on your reading skills since most combinations of two characters will only leave a few options to pick from. I guess some people use zhuyin but in mainland I've only really encountered people using pinyin.

I like writing from an aesthetic point of view but it's not useful on a daily basis. If you only had a limited amount of time I'd focus on flash cards and lots of listening/reading. Grammar is relatively easy.

 

[CPH_Tiny]

If you are paying, I would avoid Duolingo like the pest. It's horrendous. What I would add to those above, it's to get some "ao vivo" experience for the first courses, so you get a hang on the pronunciation. There are a lot of ways to practice those "online", but some phonems are particularly challenging to get a grasp on depending on your native language (I can't really say which ones would be for you, I'm a spanish native speaker).