It's True: Duolingo won't make you fluent in Cestina

[sethym]

I don't need any more research or proof that Duolingo cannot make you a fluent conversational speaker of Czech (or any other language?)
I've been studying Czech on Duolingo for 5 months, commitedly, never miss a day.
It's great for building up a vocabulary list and hearing proper accents/pronunciation.
As a result, in the earliest lessons, when Duolingo asks you to translate a phrase/sentence form Czech to English or vice-versa, as long as you have memorized the vocabulary, you can post the correct answer.
But soon, the endings on all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, etc. change with added vowels due to case/declension, and the word order gets quite confusing - not always SOV.
Duolingo never explains any of this. All the sudden Katerina is Katerinu or Katerino, and "I am looking for my sons’ dog" becomes Hledam psa nasich synu ("I am looking for dog, my sons?) or even more confusing "Neznam jejich jména" - I do not know their names, is correct, but Neznam jeji jmeno is incorrect for "I do not know your name." You have to rearrange it to Její jméno neznam or Duolingo faults you.
The fault in the program's claim that it can teach you how to truly speak the language, is that none of this is explained. Declension, cases and sentence order just start to change about two 'leagues' in, but there's no sidebar offered that explains why these changes are necessary.

[Thomas.Heiss]

@sethym

Did you read through the Web Tips&Notes created by the former volunteer contributor team?
https://duome.eu/tips/en/cs

Sorry, I don't learn Czech to know if the written tips explain things a bit more formally.
Staff's mobile tips (French, Spanish, Portuguese,..) usually are less detailed, barely scratch the surface.
PT Web T&N (which I've been using) were much more detailed, same for French volunteers (ZZ at the end).
Maybe it helps.

Else you need to find external Czech grammar resources, grammar books, etc.
For French I've installed a special grammar app (on Android) which goes much into detail and shows a content list with links between topics, sub topics and concepts incl. further grammar examples, so you can hop back and forth.

New path/snake often misses guidebooks, especially for former volunteer courses which had no mobile tips given by staff.
AFAIK your Czech course was NOT created by staff, unlike Spanish/French/English from Pt/Es.
So it's probably the case you didn't know that these T&N do exist for the Web?!?

[sethym]

Thank you, Thomas, for this link.
It provides a very long list of Czech basics, which, unfortunately, are needed but never provided in the Duolingo app.

I am also taking tutored lessons from a Czech native through iTalki, that has over 200 students..
He is very kind and hesitant to bad-mouth any other service, but he did say many of his students have found that, ultimately, Duolingo, with it's missing basics, it's gamey-ness, and its emphasis on progressing through 'leagues,' has actually served more as a distraction from actually mastering the language, than as an aid.

I am also finding this to be true, and considering dumping my subscription.
FWIW, he suggested an alternative called EasyLingo, and I'm already finding that to be more useful & practical.

[PtolemysXX]

The duolingo Czech course will not bring you to fluency just like any other Duolingo course, however it is a really good start.

The course is short compared to the flagship duolingo courses, yet it still gives you a base set of 2000+ lexemes and covers the grammar to a satisfactory level. The vocabulary selection is not bad. Make sure you read the sentence discussions. The course moderators did an absolutely fantastic job responding to questions and going into language details; the discussions are highly professional and fun to read. The proportion of sentences and expressions that duolingo teaches you and that you may find useful in real life is quite high and you are going to learn a lot. Some grammar skills are pretty hard so you just need to close your eyes and go through them but then you will be rewarded with lots of funny stuff when you continue. The database for correct translations was set up well so you will not have to memorize “that only one Duolingo translation” as is the case in some other courses.

The tipps & notes from the link provided by @Thomas.Heiss are a must-read. That textbook matches the course program quite well. In the past the chapters in the textbook matched the course "skills" directly; unfortunately after the recent redesign of the user interface and a change from "skills" to "units" this correspondence was lost so when you learn a lesson you need to search the appropriate passages in the textbook.

I've been studying Czech on Duolingo for 5 months, commitedly, never miss a day.

The US Foreign language institute (FSI) classifies Czech as a category IV language requiring 1100 class hours (for native English speakers).

(https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/bl ... ifficulty/)

This amounts to 44 weeks learning Monday – Friday 5 hours per day (self study after the classes not included). Having that in mind, if you have not learned a slavic language before, 5 months of Duolingo training is really not that much.

Learning word declension in slavic languages is a daunting task but don’t despair. Even if you don’t get it right in most cases you will be understood by natives. Duolingo engine is more stringent than real life: on one side they do want to teach you the proper language constructs; in addition the artificial intelligence is not quite there yet in recognizing what would still be understood and what not any more. To get all the endings right lots of practice is needed. No software will teach you that. You can memorize all declension tables (good luck ) but when you start talking you won’t have the time to recall what ending comes when. This needs to be automated and the automated use comes only with practice.

You definitely need to memorize the personal and posessive pronouns otherwise you may not be able to get your message through and you will misunderstand what you hear/read. Have a look at the spreadsheet linked to this post:

viewtopic.php?t=9-archive-the-czech-course-spreadsheet

See sheet “grammar” columns AE-AJ. The advantage of Duolingo over a live tutor is that it has infinite patience so use it for practicing as much as you can while your tutor can give you fine guidance and explain difficult items.

"Neznam jejich jména" - I do not know their names, is correct, but Neznam jeji jmeno is incorrect for "I do not know your name." You have to rearrange it to Její jméno neznam or Duolingo faults you.

• Neznám její jméno – I do not know HER name

• Neznám tvoje jméno – I do not know your name (informal singular you)

• Neznám vaše jméno – I do not know your name (formal singular you or formal/informal plural you (“you all”))

(Dear Czech native speakers, please correct if something is wrong)

As for the gaming nature of Duolingo - if you do not feel like it helps you one thing you can do is to disable league notifications so they do not pester you with messages of the sort “xxx has just passed you, are you going to do something about it?”. Or you can switch to the private mode and you won’t be bothered with competition and XP any more. Hunting XP’s is one of the worst temptations of Duolingo that can kill your learning progress – most activities that give you the largest quantities of XP’s have little to none didactic value.

[Thomas.Heiss]

Hi PtolemysXX,

it's very nice that you make the FSI comparison so a beginner can see how much he/she would actually have to put into their own learning process.
We all don't do this but still expect some magic to happen and that we somehow naturally have to pick up all the given content and more complicated grammar rules like a native child who is daily immersed for 24 hours in their new language.

So Sethym make sure you only set smaller goals, else you will be disappointed too quickly.

I've been studying Czech on Duolingo for 5 months, commitedly, never miss a day.

To be honest: I was NOWHERE in Portuguese after only 3-4 months.
The old tree (pre-crown era) took me one year in 2017 to complete.

Do you use Memrise (Web) or another SRS application for reviews (recalling / 100% typing tests in the TARGET language) in parallel to Duolingo?

The US Foreign language institute (FSI) classifies Czech as a category IV language requiring 1100 class hours (for native English speakers).
This amounts to 44 weeks learning Monday – Friday 5 hours per day (self study after the classes not included).

Learning word declension in Slavic languages is a daunting task but don’t despair.

This means a 1.83 difficulty factor for Czech is involved compared to Romance languages of FSI category table I).
Don't forget the self-study specific "personal factor" PF if you want to compare a classroom course with teacher drills and group exercises + corrected homework to your own process (at home).

Alone for Portuguese - an "easier" Romance language (well, not really; clearly didn't feel like that in the beginning) - I think my PF is at least around 2.5-3.0x, maybe 3.5x.
But only if you would use the very same FSI / DLI study material (I don't use it), to reach the same study / proficiency goal.
For Romanian or Slavic languages I realistically would have to go a bit higher with the PF when I'm only on my own.

In my opinion: Comparing these given FSI classroom hours are very far off when you directly do this only with a Duolingo course or when you just buy a book for your home but you don't enroll into a personal or group class.

The good thing: FSI declares their estimates for reaching ILR 3 "professional working profiency".
I don't think that I have reached that very high level for Brazilian Portuguese yet as Busuu had put me at B1 section - lesson 1 after 5 years with their placement test
(I jumped over A1 and A2 PT sections and only did the final two Busuu exams - want to review the A1+A2 Busuu lesson content a later time).

Classroom tables for ILR 1 or 2 levels are a bit less (than those mentioned 1,100 classroom) hours.

I added a few links and more background info about a potential PF self-study factor or general difficulty tables about the FSI estimates here (incl. ILR 1+2 estimate tables I found on blogs): https://archive.ph/L4FrZ

(is an archived old Duolingo community forum thread written by me, mainly for 900h German and French 750h vs 600h Portuguese/Spanish/Italian and to make difficulty or "personal factors" more transparent).

Keep pushing forward!
After 1.5-3.0+ years it will very likely get a bit better.
A Slavic language probably needs more patience from you than I had with Brazilian Portuguese or French

[Thomas.Heiss]

The US Foreign language institute (FSI) classifies Czech as a category IV language requiring 1100 class hours (for native English speakers).

(https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/bl ... ifficulty/)

FYI: That link and table category is not valid anymore for German.
FSI has already updated their official website table and estimates now 900 hours for German.
Some blogs, based on the previous FSI tables, still give the same old data (which is still valid for Czech).

See my given link, included the archive Duolingo community thread.

[PtolemysXX]

(...)
I added a few links and more background info about a potential PF self-study factor or general difficulty tables about the FSI estimates here (incl. ILR 1+2 estimate tables I found on blogs): https://archive.ph/L4FrZ
(...)

It is an interesting topic that you had started the other day. I think it might be worthwile to revive it in one of the general threads.

Since we are here in the "Czech corner", I'll mention something that I found in that FSI-blog:

German also has neuter nouns, but Czech even has a fourth grammatical gender, adding an extra layer of difficulty.

Indeed, Czech masculine gender has two sub-types: masculine animate and masculine inanimate. I did not realize this can be viewed as a fourth gender. Interesting!