Why I Don’t Use Duolingo
As is usually the case, there are a few points that I didn’t have time to make in this week’s video.
There’s a big temptation to buy into the marketing out there about language learning. In fact, there’s a kind of frightening combination of the fear of missing out, artificial scarcity, and this idea that there’s some sort of secret that will turn you into the ultimate language learner if you manage to buy into the right program.
I can assure you that none of that marketing is true. And I know it’s not true because I’ve experienced it for myself.
If you’re really serious about learning a foreign language, the thing you absolutely must do is take control of your own language learning experience.
That’s not easy, of course. It means that you have to move away from the comfort of a textbook or a computerized course and start taking steps into the dark.
It means doing things like making friends with native speakers of your target language, or even spending money on language tutors. After all, the point of learning a language is to actually speak it with somebody else, not to complete arbitrary video game tasks or to reach a high score on some random app or whatever.
This is particularly true when it comes to learning difficult things, such as classical Chinese poetry. As much fun as it might be to try to tackle this sort of thing on your own, or to rely on the assistance of artificial intelligence, the truth is that you’ll make the most progress and will have the most success when you have somebody you can actually talk with about what you’ve been reading and learning.
We’ve seen a lot of poetic allusions here in chapter 17 of Dream of the Red Chamber. The truth is that you can find the “right answer” to the puzzle of what in the world is going on and what all of this means if you do a bit of searching on Google, Baidu, Bing, or other search engines. And, if you’re not interested in searching for yourself and would rather have the answer given to you, you can always ask AI chatbots to do the searching for you.
However, to really get a feel for what the poems mean and what the chapter is actually about, you need to talk with someone. It’s only when you’re able to bounce ideas off of somebody else that you’ll start understanding what all this stuff really means, and why certain poems are seen as beautiful while others are seen as so-so.
And that’s the sort of thing that no language learning app can teach you.
Hey man, just want to say that I really appreciate your human-centric approach to language learning