Meet your new language tutors: the Duolingo Bots

exactly. disappointed, but not at all surprised.

It's pointless not to add these features on the website when the apps rely heavily on internet connection in the first place.

Y'know this app is FREE, right?

Ads are on iOS too, I've seen them anyway and have screenshots to prove it.

Ads? As in adverts?

The classroom Luis described was my classroom experience through years of school. I supposedly had 5 years of French in school, but learnt almost nothing.

And now it (...) ends up being limited to those who are rich enough (...) ... to own an iPhone.

Actually, this was pretty standard in my school, and three foreign languages were compulsory. One year I had a Welsh teacher who only allowed talking when answering her questions (in the entire year, I don't think we had a single change to practice conversations) and another year I had a Spanish teacher who didn't let us write anything down; seriously, in a whole year I filled up ~20 pages of my exercise book, whereas in most other subjects I went through two or three books. They were extreme...ly bad teachers, but even the "good" language teachers only allowed us a five minutes converstation practice about once a fortnight, if we were lucky. It's no surprise that everyone hates taking languages in schools if my classes were anything to go by lol.

I've never seen a lecture based language class in any of the classes I've been in. Wherever these are the teachers should be fired.

I think this might be changing. My classes were very interactive and involved lots of conversation when I was in school, and when I became an English teacher, it was almost all speaking, mostly from the students.

My thoughts exactly.

True. I did secondary school French in the early 1970s and we had weekly sessions in the school's "language lab" and with the French speaking "Assistant", who, from memory, variously came from various French regions, Switzerland and Tunisia. No doubt the students learning German had access to the same facilities. When I did a year of Spanish in 6th Form we had a Spanish Assistant from Seville. As she was lodging near my home we spoke Spanish whenever we happened to meet.

Well, hate to rain on your parade, but that is in fact the norm. Even in privileged or potentially rich schools one can't really force an introvert (or average speaker) to speak as easily, and they might just utter some nonsense just to get the teacher to get off their case.

Just to consider the math for this, a teacher might be lecturing an average of 30 - 40 students or less (if they are lucky). A regular weekly lecture may last 1 or 2 hours , and so even if a teacher spends as much time as possible speaking with each student, that would mean 120 / 40 , 3 minutes (perhaps 15 minutes weekly) for conversing with each student (worse case scenario). That's not counting regular assignments, and course work required, and repeating some sentences due to them not understanding. That's not even taking into account how much harder it is to learn languages that have nothing in common with each other.

Schools and teachers aren't always bad because they don't have adequate resources. The problem is that the current education system was created by applying a mass education system to a originally traditional system of master and apprentice (1:1) that would generally be more successful than any school. This means that the needs of the group outweigh the needs of the individual, and stragglers get left behind.

Other living creatures don't place such educational constraints, and so can reproduce a lot without such issues, humans on the other hand don't have that privilege.

This was my experience even in a small class at a very prestigious private school. Our teacher was a fluent German teacher, but we had to rely on one another for conversation. 15 unskilled students with low vocabularies have trouble challenging each other to speak and think in a language.

My son is fortunate to be in a dual immersion class for Spanish, where he is required to speak only in that language for half of every day with his native tongue teacher and all his classmates. He has the benefits of "living" in a Spanish-speaking environment four hours a day.

That describes the U.S. Here, Spanish is one of the most common second languages to study, but, because of the, at best, horrifyingly bland teaching style of most Spanish teachers, people rarely continue it past high school. I remember being in Spanish 3 my senior year of high school, about four years ago. I was legitimately the only person in the class who cared about Spanish whatsoever. I can guarantee that not one of my peers(who wasn't already a native Spanish speaker) probably only remembers the very basics, if even that. Because all Spanish was in the classroom was just another thing to be drilled in for credit so people could go to uni. Lectures were done entirely in Spanish, but the teacher spoke like a robot and people around would constantly ask what she was saying because, obviously, not caring about it and having the system fail them meant they struggled with it. Here, in California, you have to take three years of a foreign language to get credit to go to a university and that's all people wanted, just the credit.

Luis is right. Call the West "privileged" all you want but we don't get a lot of things that are necessary for learning a certain subject. Public schools are preoccupied with having you pass your standardized tests in English and math and then getting you out in 12 years. If you want to learn something meaningful beyond the factory that is our education system, you either need money, connections, and/or creativity. Of course, I can only speak for the U.S. as "the West" is made up of a lot of different countries and there are obviously exceptions.

School is trash. 90% of the reason why I hate French is because of school. The way languages (and anything else) is taught in schools is trash, even in countries where the schooling system is considered "good".

Inefficiency and wasted time on useless subjects reign on schools.

The lucky ones aren't those "privileged" to go to school / "good" schools but those who enjoy private teaching. Which allows them to learn at their own pace rather than being forced to endure the snailpase of many schools.

Without exaguration I've experienced school as torture. Even to the point where I developed what I call a "sleepmode", I'd sit up and look as if I'm paying attention in class but I'd not be listening at all with my brain in a zombielike state. Going home drained of all energy and with a headace. And for those who don't get what I mean: try to listen to somebody explaining why 1+1=2 for 8 hours. And then image having to endure that for years. There's no other name for it than torture.

I guess he was speaking about the 99% of schools in the world.

As a current high school French student in the US, I agree fully with Luis.

Don't you know Duolingo loves leaving things half done?

Why make it available to all users when they can get it to the richest users out there. That is their mission isn't it?

It really is, and it is great practice to try out new vocab.

):

Many of us suspect Immersion is going to be removed - in fact I had half expected it to happen today. Still here though.

However, unless you have personal contacts in Duolingo, I don't think you can make the claim that it is being removed.

...what? What?! WHAT?!?

Does that mean my Javascript bookmark will yield 404 errors because Immersion won't exist at all anymore?! And my favorite part of Duolingo will be crunched to dust?!

Agreed. I could not even include "please" or "thank you" in certain responses because it wasn't part of the accepted answers

Well, after a first try, bots are not that amazing. They are certainly a great idea. Maybe too good to be true. My experience is quite the same as yours: I missed a way to skip forward. The chats may be good for absolute beginners. But at an intermediate level everything is far too limited. In a French chat I tried to add "n'est-ce pas" (isn't it) and it was refused. That is a common figure of speech! Trying around with other possibilities felt like everything except the expected straight answers to the simple questions is not understood. I agree that the possible answers are far too restricted. Let's hope for improvements, but with the promises given at the introduction of the bots, I am quite disappointed. Sorry!

Then why you say its amazing?

It's going to be "coming soon" I can tell you that much.

Don't forget about the characters, which a year ago they said "will be coming soon to other platforms" beside for iOS, and I am still waiting...

I heared that it is much easier for app-developers to create their apps for iOS than to Android.

But he hasn't provided "us" with the wonderful free chatbots, he has only provided them to those who are rich enough to own an iPhone, the same people who are most likely to be able to afford to travel or to pay for teaching services which include speaking practice.

What happened to making language learning accessible to all, particularly those who have the least money and the greatest need?

I also did that one and it came up with all sorts of countries, like Laos, until it finally accepted 'Allemagne'. When I declined to have my picture taken, a mean looking 'agent' with sunglasses appeared to take me away. Lesson learned: Don't mess with French customs officers.

ah, so it's on iPhone and not iPad? That'd be the reason why i couldn't find it…

I've been frustrated, looking for the new feature on the iPad. I see I'm frustrated because it isn't there--sheesh.

mmhm, me too!!!

agreed!

I think the issue is that if they're coding this, they can't actually accommodate all possible answers that somebody could give and verify that those answers are correct. I was wondering how they were going to handle that, but it seems "not an accepted word" is the route they took. Basically, if the answer you're about to give isn't in their (albeit very large) list of responses, you're not even allowed to type it.

Not accepting certain answers has put me off this quite quickly, otherwise it would be great. But i try several perfectly good answers and it won't accept them ... I give up and use the "help me answer" function because i've no idea what they are looking for, despite my answers being perfectly fine! Frustrating.

A 'report' button (either on the web or within the bot) where you can note problems would be good; for instance it just threw "d'accord" back at me as "not an accepted word". Peuh?

Hi. I agree. I use swype and cant see what I'm typing. The bots are a great idea though

Sorry, but what's Immersion? I hear of it for the first time here.

Yes please!

Just before I gave you a Lingot on that I got the dialog box asking me "are you sure you love this comment so much that you want to give away a Lingot"? Let me put it this way; I don't think I have read any comment, in any group, that I feel more entirely in agreement with than this one. Every nail, hit squarely on the head.

Thanks for the link to the Guardian article - most informative.

I gave it a try on my iPhone with French (since it isn't available on iPad yet) and like you I found it very good, quite enjoyable in fact, but experienced similar limitations. It took a while to get used to what they were trying to achieve, but once I got that I got really drawn into it. The first problem I hit was with the small screen size I thought the guy was eating cheese in the picture. Then I thought perhaps it's a quiche, but finally discovered it was supposed to be a slice of pizza - should have guessed, they are Americans, after all. :-)

The next problem I hit was, despite my limited conversational skills, I tried to answer ’tous les trois' which I thought was a more natural answer. Instead, I found it required me to repeat the list of food-stuffs. Hopefully, if the Guardian article you referenced is correct, it may incorporate that as a future answer. Presumably, it requires above a certain quorum of people to give similar answers before it will incorporate it as an answer? If they can get the automatic adding of alternative answers right, perhaps they might even be able to roll it out into the normal Duolingo tree - although I can also forsee some potential pitfalls with that - especially given some things some people wish added in the discussions! ;-)

The other issue I thought I had with it turned out to actually be an iPhone issue and not with the Bots. Since I normally use an iPad for Duolingo, I am very used to using the built-in keyboard up-swipe (flick, is it seems the Apple preferred terminology) feature to enter accented characters and certain punctuation marks. I thought at first it was because Duolingo were using a custom keyboard, but unfortunately this doesn't appear to be available on the iPhone keyboard. I tried it in the Notes App, and it doesn't work there either. It makes it much slower to enter accented characters by requiring the hold-and-select method, instead. I was convinced this feature was previously also available on the iPhone. I was sure I'd tried, but it definitely doesn't work in iOS 9.3.5, so I either imagined it, forgot it didn't work or they took the feature out. I guess the smaller keys would make it more difficult. I would be interested to know if anyone else knows whether this feature used to work on iPhone prior to 9.3.5? I should point out that the flick feature only works for those keyboards for languages which have accented characters. With an English keyboard selected it only works with punctuation.

The big limitation with the Bots, is that I fear it may take a very long time before they become available in the other languages. It appears, as with the normal Duolingo, they have gone first for the 'core' languages courses that the good folks in Pittsburgh created themselves. Therefore, I suspect all the other courses created by volunteers will require a similar set-up to that needed for creating the normal course trees. I would love to be proved wrong and I am personally very keen for the Bots feature to become available in Italian, especially - but obviously it would be even better if they could be available in every language.

On a positive note, the Bots feature is a fantastic idea that does go a long way to fill a major limitation with the standard Duolingo course trees in providing practice in conversation. I just hope it won't be too long before it appears on iPad. I'm not entirely sure why it is limited to iPhone at the moment. Perhaps they wanted to trial it there first before roling it out more widely?

One enhancement I think would be good is to allow tapping the good answer message to reveal what might have been considered a better answer.

Also, it really needs a report a problem facility.

Great write-up. Duolingo would have done well to have included something similar in their announcement! Along with a note that it only (currently) works with iPhone.

I agree with all the positives Lou772780 has posted. It's a great idea and I think eventually it will work very well. However, in the current form I find the bots increasingly frustrating, because of the limited responses allowed. I've finished the tree, so I'd like to practice more advanced sentences. I'd also like to practice NORMAL conversations, and that simply isn't allowed. Of course, they have to start somewhere, they can't possibly plan for every single conversational angle, and I see from the article linked above that the bots are learning from the answers people try to type in. I think it was wise that they started with a limited rollout, because the requirement that I guess precisely what the bot wants to hear just tests my patience to the "throw-the-phone-across-the-room" point.

Yes, please. Italian!!!!