Hey guys! Does anyone here do duolingo? Post below if you do! What do you think is better. Duolingo or Memrise? [poll type=multiple min=1 max=2 public=true]
- Duolingo
- Memrise
[/poll]
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both are good enough for me
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They are both rather different, I think.
Also, even within Duolingo, the quality of the courses varies quite a bit form course to course since they’re all made by separate teams – the Hungarian Duolingo course is quite different from the Welsh one, for example; I like the latter but hate the former.
You can’t really compare the two, I think.
And in fact I use both sites together.
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I disagree. The methods may be slightly different, but the goal remains the same. :: To learn a language :: and Memrise does this much better. Nothing wrong with using both, but if one was forced to choose one over the other, you would be foolish to choose duo over mem. The audio is superior to duo’s weird computer audio. But the real advantage Mem has over Duo is the open source aspect of it. Where the community can make their own courses or try other peoples. What bugs me about Duo is that the advertise they are a open learning community but a very small team of people make the course (and many times they don’t communicate very well from feedback). They will even shadow ban you without warning if you go off topic in the comments sections of the exercises.
You are forced to complete level one before two and so on which let’s admit, is completely arbitrary and pointless. All in all, one is confined and funneled in a stricter learning process with Duo and here at Memrise, you have the freedom to roam about. Now, nothing wrong with the linear process of Duo, but it is hard to take it seriously when they have mistakes all over their courses and refuse to explain exactly the science behind the reasoning for what they do. I mean, how do they even select the teams that make the courses?
Honestly, I just can’t find a single thing that Duo can do better than Memrise. If we were to put a student who has only learned say spanish 1 - 7 on memrise vs a student who has only learned spanish on duo completing the tree, I will tell you right now who will be much better off in just about every aspect…
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I use both through the mobile apps, and I couldn’t choose one since they complement each other for me. For example, the comment sections for each exercise seems better explained in the Duolingo (at least the courses I tried), but I can find more variety in Memrise, that doesn’t mean all courses shares the same quality than the made by Memrise team itself. Still both are great tools to start learning languages and practice them.
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I agree, the flexibility and variety is vastly superior on Memrise. But there’s one thing that annoys me on Memrise that I haven’t encountered as much on Duolingo and that’s inconsistency. In Memrise, you may have two courses with the same word, but a different answer for each course (or even within the same course). Fortunately, Memrise allows you to ignore those words, but it’s still something that I would like to see improved.
I did duo for a while (503 days to be exact). In that time they removed learning features while adding more and more useless shit. Their forums became a complete waste of time - they used to be good for language related discussions - now its just children begging for lingots and trolls.
Questions go unanswered and the original courses have too many mistakes. Beyond a couple of teams - Swedish and Norwegian - it seems pretty neglected.
I voted for memrise. Sometimes I feel memrise may be slipping by putting more time into new graphics and gaming function but at least they are adding the Meet the Natives to the official courses and taking feedback on issues within the course. Duo is making the mistake of putting quantity of users over quality of courses. In the end they have more people learning less.
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hey! I do both as well : )though I don’t do much duo now : /
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yep I am doing both course. You really cann’t compaire them. I like both in it;s own way.
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I am using many user scripts from the wiki on DuoLingo to extend the learning / usage and forum functionality.
And yes, these are badly required.
Now the DuoLingo team has rewritten the website with a new programming language and in one big forum thread they announced that these new portal changes will be rolled out the NEXT WEEKS, instead of waiting 6-12++ more months.
They have been already A/B testing the new website a bit (many bugs, e.g lessons locked, etc.).
So some forced users had to play alpha/beta tester
The old user scripts working THAT GOOD for the old portal site will NOT be compatible with the new portal website.
Some users nevertheless tried that and failed badly (as expected).
Instead of a 1:1 website rewrite (keeping ALL features) or at least ADDING missing functionality which user scripts extended for a long time, DuoLingo IMHO did a complete fresh rewrite with only rudimentary functionality at this time.
They also seem to even SKIP some features, which have been there before (e.g review lesson).
And still miss extended features, which user scripts extended (DuoLessonsFix: add timer, add forum thread links to each review panels to view discussions later).
How long may it take to rewrite all existing user scripts to regain full functionality 6-12++ months?
They are talking about faster speeds because of the rewrite in a different programming language.
I would say: I could live with the speed of old DuoLingo portal, as it is right now.
Activity streams have been turned off, so that should already give a hugh performance boost on the old portal on the old servers.
Better that, and postponing the rollback for ALL users (migration of the user base to the new portal website) instead of loosing all functionality which I can make heavy usage of in my learning.
So I will probably have to concentrate more and more on Memrise, 5000 frequency lists, Portuguese 4-7 and more advanced user created courses in the soon future and will probably go back to real language books with audio CD’s.
However, having to freely type in complete sentences with some prepositions and that grammar type stuff is a great feature of DuoLingo.
DuoLingo allows multiple parallel sentences / words which is a GREAT FEATURE, where Memrise often even fails to even accept 2-3 single word alternatives (e.g asking for the translation of “to leave” and you NEVER know which one of the three words the question is prompting for without given a single hint), either in the Portuguese Basic course, official PT 2/3 or the user created PT BR DuoLingo course on Memrise (or the mix of all of them).
So learning / reviewing multiple courses on Memrise is even more difficult because of the missing alternatives.
Of course there is a feature missing on Memrise which DuoLingo has:
Report the question and provide detail information what is wrong or missing and being able to “auto adding” a single word alternative (DuoLingo: Accept my answer for the course creator / contributors to be reviewed).
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@Thomas.Heiss - Thanks for the thorough report on Duolingo changes and plans. I had noticed things were different, but hadn’t yet spent time in the forums to find out more…
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I pretty much agree with everything you said about Duolingo esp. the forums which I ignore completely now because they are useless for language discussion. French is still a good course as Sitesurf makes sure questions are answered.
I’ve been there almost 480 days and I thought I would give Spanish a shot - it is shocking and the sentence discussion forums are up to four years old! Questions are rarely, if ever, addressed on this course. Apparently Italian is even worse!
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I could never use Duolingo - the sentences are simply stupid…ish…
I am trying to take one duoling on memrise and have to ignore stuff such as “me gusta el calendario mundial, es un hombre moderno, él está vivo hoy, un elevado número de bebés, estoy limpia, soy muy particular, comà varias veces”
i beg your pardon, huh? HUH?
(not to mention my suspicion towards companies fed by google and feeding google in exchange; hope memrise does not do such… )
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Some of the languages have more ludicrous sentences than others. I think the difference is that the Memrise official courses attempt to teach useful sentences while Duolingo wants you to understand the grammatical structure of the language being learnt.
There is a lot of useful Tips & Notes in the French course (through the web - not the app) and these are not explained in Memrise at all. However, Memrise is a highly efficient flashcard system for learning specific areas of a language such as verb conjugations, nouns, adverbs etc. I find the two useful used in partnership.
BTW what did you mean “fed by google and feeding google in exchange”? I didn’t understand.
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thanks (is that a Hoya flower, btw?).
(I don’t really need anything like Duolingo, I’m above intermediate in French and Spanish)
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Frangipani. 
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I’ve used both, and I can’t say which is best. They both are great, and i’ve learned a lot through them.
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Same, I also am using Quizlet which has online flash cards and is very helpful 
(By the way, I love your wolf profile pic it’s so pretty!)
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Hi everyone!
I used Duolingo for a year and a half, an hour or more a day.
You can see, even if I deleted it, my activity stream, partially saved at duome
I was very happy at the beginning but finally it was a waste of time. Not at all, of course.
For example, I completed the Portuguese course, all the lessons. I spoke that language previously but my spelling was not very good. And I didn’t feel an improvement after completing it.
Duolingo, theoretically, is very good, but in fact it is like a Swiss knife: a lot of tools but nothing of good quality.
An example, the forum. Duolingo has thousands of sub-forums: a general, a troubleshooting and for every course, for every sentence in several languages. A very good idea, but, usually, only inexperienced people is active. The moderation is very bad and the internal search machine very useless. Result: a mess of repeated topics of very poor quality. Of course, there are sometimes good posts, but only sometimes.
You get a lot of achievements but your learning will not progress the same way, too many distracters.
Doulingo’s goal is to get money. It is not my opinion, is what the CEO and co-founder Luis von Ahn wrote 5 years ago at State of Monetization at Duolingo
EDITED: I apologize, but the post I wanted to link to was State of Monetization at Duolingo II. It has almost the same title. Please, read this one instead.
That is my experience. Maybe it works for other people, try it.
Memrise is simpler but more efficient. I have used it since a few weeks now. I just learn here vocabulary.
I read and listen outside Memrise, as much as possible, for 2 hours a day usually: articles in LingQ, in Learning English of the Voa, for example.
Note: Partially edited with the free version of Deepl
Regards
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