this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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Duolingo is better than nothing. But watching movies with subs will help u much more. Writing anything using language u want to learn is also a good way to get better at writing and probably reading.
Watching movies is certainly a good way to help your foreign language skills, but it’s practicing comprehension more than anything.
Being forced to formulate sentences on your own is a different skill that requires practice as well if you actually want to be able to speak a language. If Duolingo is too mechanical for you, there are other apps that let you find and chat with people who are interested in language exchange.
You can try any online app (like lemmy) where you can chat with native speakers.
You can join Discord servers for practicing your speaking (I would like to know a good open source alternative, but I don't) or some chat roulette. But first you need to have good comprehension, if you have it you probably can put few sentences together.
I've found that when I watch something in another language with subtitles, I find myself going by what I heard, and using the subtitles to support or reinforce sections or words I didn't understand. I often end up disagreeing with how things are translated, or there is something said in the foreign language that can't simply be translated. In other words, I think using subtitles as reinforcement can be useful, whereas just reading every line and not thinking in the other language for yourself might not really be helping you much.
Right, I’m not saying it’s useless, just a different type of learning. As you said, it’s more of a reinforcement activity — repeating the words you may have already learned and putting them into a variety of real life contexts helps you remember them better.
However, at least personally, I do find it rather difficult to learn new words that way unless I constantly pause and rewind, which breaks the flow of the story and ends up not being super enjoyable.
When you learn new words, you need to actively repeat them a bunch of times until they stick, and Duolingo seems better suited for that.