The BEST and WORST Languages on Duolingo (w graphs!)

What kills me about Duolingo Spanish is that every time there's an update, they shuffle things around and I get weird vocab words I've never seen before pop up like I should know them, and concepts i covered months ago show up as new content. I have no idea what I've missed because there's no real patch notes for me to go back and see. I do really like it because although I'm motivated to learn Spanish, my wife isn't as much so, and it's easy to turn it into a game between us to keep her motivated to learn every day. Note: I'm not some monster forcing this poor woman to learn Spanish, we have plans to visit Central America in a couple years and want to be prepared.

"Toilet time language learning market", I'm dying!

I'm a Duolingo veteran and completed 11 courses between 2014-2018, mostly Germanic and Slavic, in many cases not long after the courses first went live. The Dutch and Danish courses were good enough to get me near-fluent, and I sat A-level Dutch in 2016 and got the highest grade. The Polish course is also excellent, really rigorous and comprehensive. All the courses were volunteer-made which is why the quality and length varies a lot - the only reason the Norwegian course is like that is because the volunteers were really passionate and added so much content. The Hungarian course is notorious for being broken and was stuck in beta for years (I don't know if it still is) - learners would reach a point about two-thirds of the way through that was basically impassable. The main complaint long-time users like myself have is the "enshittification" of Duolingo. So many good features have been gotten rid of or made pay-only. The whole thing is way more cartoonish, ad-infested and dumbed-down than it was a decade ago.

"made up languages ...like Latin" LOL

Duolingo isn't gonna get me to learn languages on it's own but it optimises the 5-20 minute downtime I have on public transport and keeps me productive . It's a great bonus to my language learning experience . I compare it to Tajin . I can't live off of Tajin but a little bit goes nicely with a lot of different foods . That being said I'm always happy to check out new language learning resources and love your content

It is my understanding that the US military did not simply use Navajo as a code. They used a "normal" code but instead putting English into code they put Navajo into code.

Great video! For anyone looking for a specific language: 10:38 Scandinavian languages 11:00 German 11:08 Yiddish 12:45 Dutch 13:04 Hebrew 14:27 Arabic 14:47 Russian 15:11 Czech 15:49 Ukrainian 15:57 Polish 16:07 Romance languages 16:21 Romanian 16:34 Latin 17:44 Celtic languages 18:20 Mandarin 18:56 Japanese 20:24 Korean & Vietnamese 21:19 Greek, Hungarian & Turkish 21:30 Indonesian 21:40 Hawaiian 21:53 Hindi 22:15 Swahili & Zulu 23:06 Navajo 23:46 Valyrian 23:53 Klingon 24:26 Esperanto

Something I’d like to add is that for some reason, the duo Japanese course doesn’t start consistently teaching you the kanji form of words until like 50 hours in, which means that until you get there, you won’t be able to read almost any Japanese outside of duo, even extremely simple sentences.

Apparently the quality of the Norwegian course is a legacy of a very involved and knowledgeable volunteer group back when Duolingo relied on that.

"pardon my French" "pardon my Yiddish" I feel that you have a goal to be pardoned in as many languages as possible. Can't wait for the F bomb followed by "pardon my English"

I have to admit that I indulged in the "shock locals" kind of video for a little bit. The best thing that I got from that is that I eventually landed in this channel. So, I guess it wasn't a complete waste of time haha

As an Irish speaker, the audio for Irish is actually horrendous, the AI voice is really really bad and mispronounces even the most common of words

Can I just say as a language learning content consumer that I HATE ai generated voices?! Just hire a voice actor; it’s not even that expensive.

Oh great algorithm please shine favorably on this content creator he's dope

Hearing your rendition of Tennessee-accented Shakespeare in the midst of a discussion of Yiddish gave me flashbacks to my own high school production of Fiddler on the Roof. Our Yente sounded exactly like Minnie Pearl, bless her heart. And, well, the less said about my take on Tevye, the better.

I've been on Duolingo for a over a decade and have used it to brush up my French, Italian and German and learn Welsh, Dutch and Arabic from almost scratch. I also tried Turkish but gave up after a couple of weeks. In the Welsh learning community there is an enormous amount of debate about the value of Duolingo. The course used to be a lot better when the comments were included, ie before enshittification, and the Welsh government have supported the course and ensured it links well with the government supported and subsidised live courses. For me, it got me to A2 when combined with watching TV (especially kids TV) during lockdown, so that I could skip the first couple of years of classes. The main competition in Welsh is Say Something in Welsh, which some love but which was too audio based for me. For Arabic I felt it was never going to teach me to speak, only to understand the script. After months of using it daily I hadn't learned any real verbs! Great analysis anyway.

I enjoy Duolingo less as a language study tool, more as a language mobile game. With that in mind, I enjoy it quite a bit. I think your conclusion is on point. It's a great way to try out a language, and learn a few hundred words for a foundation, and give you a boost toward more serious study.

"Maybe you can order in a restaurant and SHOCK locals" 😂

"dogwater" - language simp mentioned 😎

Can't wait for the 'why I don't like Esperanto' video.