I saw this app recommended in posts here already ran into 4 errors by day 2. How can anyone justify paying them? -was told a correct answer was wrong -was given a listening exercise with no audio -was given a tip irrelevant to the exercise and I think actually about French instead of Spanish
Has anyone else experienced this? Any better apps? I did Duolingo for years but still can’t speak Spanish so I gave up on that.
The je in mujer. It's just a tip
While "Yo soy de México" is grammatically correct, the most natural and common way a native speaker will say it is the answer given bellow, "Soy" already includes the subject I, honestly the translation you wrote might not rise many eyebrows, it can even be used in situations where you really want to emphasize.
The app should be more clear on why the error, it could also very well just be the way you wrote Mexico.
As a Spanish speaker I use the first person pronoun with verbs most of the time unless I have a reason not to. It feels a bit non sequitur to start a sentence with a bare verb unprompted.
Right! Like yeah sure it's more common for most people to just start with "soy", but it's not incorrect to start with "yo". I, as someone who's learning and actively speaking Spanish every day with native speakers, always say "yo soy" because yeah, as a native English speaker I'm used to putting a pronoun to a verb. But even my coworkers do it occasionally. So for the app to outright say it's incorrect is just plain wrong.
Actually in some places putting that yo can be a bit aggressive. It very much is emphasize I, because the I was already conjugated into soy. When I read it, almost like yelling. I'd flag it as error too.
Putting yo before soy 100% changes emphasis
Perhaps the first one was due to writing "mexico" instead of "México" since it is the name of the country.
Then it should be marking me wrong for every other time I don’t capitalize or use accents, but it never has once before
I used Busuu for a bit until I found out they stop putting effort into their A2-B1 courses (most of it is just vocabulary dumping courses with 0 handholding or explanations, it's the case for Russian, they simply stop trying after A2). Though, Busuu is great for it's community feedback feature. That's about it really
Other than for vocab, apps are a waste of time honestly. You're better served getting a tutor, or if that's not feasible then textbooks and tons of listening to spoken language.
I got all the way to the end of the "B1" course in Italian on Busuu before I finally quit. More like a B1 at mindlessly pushing buttons, I was nowhere near a B1 in the language lol.
I think the only thing I can genuinely say I learned from Busuu is that I should try out aperol spritz in Italy, and sure enough I quite enjoyed it haha.
I don't think they're useless, and have used them to good effect in the early going. They're obviously not remotely sufficient in and of themselves.
I actually use Duo about 5-10 minutes a day for a bit of practice/vocab so I enjoy it as a small supplement that I use while waiting for the bus or for the kettle go boil etc, but OP seems to be hoping for an app for a primary source of learning and I really don't think any of them (I've tried pretty much all of them lol that offered Italian at least) and I don't think a single one of them is a good primary source for learning.
I think that's fair, but really, even my #1 go-to, which is iTalki and Preply classes, needs some supplementary work. So I would say that no single resource is sufficient.
It's hard to build up vocab on my own, and tutors aren't all that great about explaining grammar. I use some apps, some YT channels talking about grammar, some podcasts when I get better, and other resources to go along with the one-on-one classes.
Apps are too low exposure for vocabulary. You need comprehensible input
No disagreement there, I'm just saying the only thing they're useful for is vocabulary, not that they're the best source for it 😊
I usually recommend it over Duolingo, which has similar problems of not accepting correct answers. I think Busuu is trying to teach you that the pronouns are optional here. If you don't put the pronoun in earlier exercises it marks you wrong.
Other thing is that this is the latin american Spanish course right? That's a new course, might have some issues not present in the original Spanish course.
The tip you were given is on how to pronounce je in spanish. I don't see how that isn't helpful to a beginner
I did the italian course on busuu and don't remember having issues like this but I tested out of the beginner lessons
it doesn't like that you're dropping the pronouns.
It's the opposite actually.
I realized that and was editing while you replied whoops. It has the same intent tho, to teach that you don't require the pronouns
I actually had it tell me I made a mistake with the same sentence once when I had the pronoun and once when I didn’t.
And there was another time where it said in a sentence “yo muy bien” so I assumed you didn’t need to use estoy, and then when I wrote that it told me I was wrong for not using estoy even though they had left it out before
I was wrong about the third pic that went over my head I thought they were saying the word “je” and all I thought was French
You spelled México wrong in your first picture so that's probably why it marked you incorrect.
I ran some tests and busuu just gives you a warning if you don't put them.
I don’t type any of the accents and have never been marked wrong
I really don't like any of the language learning apps. They don't do a good enough job explaining the language. I would recommend getting a good grammar book, or for Spanish there are probably some good websites that go into grammar lessons. Though I'm not the one to make specific recommendations for Spanish.
I think the tip on the last exercise is relevant? The word is mujer, which has a -je- sound which is pronounced like -ge- (/x/) and unlike -gue- (/g/). I don't know if the exercise had anything to do with pronunciation but it still is fine to remind you.
And as for the first one yeah all apps will have problems accepting all possible sentences for a given translation, and maybe your not accenting México made it harder for the app to detect it as close enough.
The second error is serious though.
The Tipp was relevant look in the background the word mujer Mu-JE-r 😅 I hope you now see the relevance of the tip how "je" is spoken
Yes 😂🤦♀️
Busuu really has no forgiveness for spelling errors, even accents. But at least theres no lives
True, the lives are obnoxious
Love me some downvotes for…answering a question
el error está en que te faltó el acento en la palabra "México"
Gracias, yo penso que es possible pero en las tiempos otros el app no la dice
I was doing okay until it refused to understand a simple sentence with no difficult sounds. After many attempts I had to skip. Even my bf who doesn't speak the TL (Dutch in this case) understood me.
Very frustrating as I was just gaining the courage to speak the language. It was fine with the previous sections too.
These apps aren't going to teach you anything if they're your only resource. Sorry for not answering your initial question, but yeah. Get a language partner, and ingest content outside of the app(children's books and TV shows and gradually get more complex).
I use Duolingo but I also take private lessons. Duo has taught me a decent bit about Japanese grammar and some new vocabulary, but I feel like it needs the ability to review words you've learned and mark them as weak words manually
It’s just like a textbook in a language class, it has good content but you won’t be able to speak a language just from that singular resource! Anki is really good for that kind of thing, would love to see these apps implement that strategy in some way.
Edit: this wasn’t targeted at you lol, just a statement.
I find I've picked things up quickly using a variety of sources. Wanikani is amazing and I quite like the Genki books. Tuition is a huge help and motivator for me though
Anki helped me, it’s an app with flash cards
Yo soy de México is kinda redundant.
Why is everyone so dedicated to learning everything from an app? People have learned languages for thousands of years without apps, so why is that now suddenly the best way to go about it?
Get a textbook, make some flashcards if you want, and then USE THE LANGUAGE (read, listen, speak, and write). If you need outside help, book an iTalki teacher. Spend 30-60 minutes a day on these activities and you'll make progress. If you want to keep doing the apps for fun on top of that, fine, but you could spend 24 hours a day for 10 years trying every single language learning app and you still wouldn't be fluent.
Apps are popular because unfortunately not everybody has a passion for languages, and without passion chugging textbooks is a hell to get through. Better an app than straight up quitting
I think apps make people quit. Like OP says, they spend years on Duolingo and still don't know the language. That's where a lot of people get frustrated, think they just aren't good at it, and quit. I don't think apps are evil, but they give false promises and then people beat themselves up when it doesn't work. At least a textbook gives a natural form of progress. You finish the book, you're done. Now you move onto something harder. A lot of these apps are designed to keep you using them at a basic level for as long as possible (years!) because they're subscription based.
No, people don’t quit because of apps. They quit because learning a language is hard and they take a lot of time. If anything, apps help people to continue further than other methods.
I think they're useful for developing a basic vocabulary and provide some useful things that just memorizing word lists in a textbook doesn't. Trying every app would be silly because 99% of them are trying to go from 0 to A2 vocabulary. obviously you outgrow the apps quickly. But that's why I don't like the really slow apps. Gotta move on to output/input activities as quickly as you can.
I don’t learn well with memorization and textbooks, so I’m looking for another way. App seems simplest. I don’t have the time or money for a tutor. I work closely with Spanish speaking people everyday at my job
Try Dreaming Spanish and Language Transfer, both are free. You need to use the language so that your brain will start to acquire it, not memorize it. You don't need to memorize a textbook, just follow the structure of it and use it as a guide and a reference.
Don't worry about forgetting things. Forgetting is a natural part of learning. If you forget something, just look it up to remind yourself and then move on. People get obsessed with trying to cram the language into their heads, but with enough repetition in different contexts, your brain will absorb the words and patterns on its own. I've found myself using words in conversations that I didn't even realize I knew. I just picked them up over time through a lot of reading and listening.
It doesn't need to take forever, either. I averaged 1.5 hrs a day and went from A1 to B2 in about 2 years.
Because most people realize that apps like DuoLingo and Busuu are easier bite sized ways to do everything a textbook and flashcards do and more. Yes, there are people that love telling people to do textbooks and calling people lazy and stupid if they don’t follow that method. But I personally know zero adults who have completed a grammar textbook on their own. Generally, more people seem to get further with an app. And isn’t getting further the point?
OP said they spent years on Duolingo. Are they farther than they would have been if they had just done 30 minutes from a textbook each day for that same timespan?
I'm not saying everyone needs to be slaving away over textbooks. But they are laid out better and have more information than most apps. They are often cheaper than apps ($40 for a Spanish textbook vs $90/year Busuu membership). They often have audio, reading passages, practice conversations. Some even come with online access to digital versions and exercises. Even if you don't do all the exercises, they can be a valuable resource to use as a reference.
In most cases, people doing years of an app without accomplishing something have never spent many hours doing it. A year of 15 minutes a day is less than 100 hours. Two years of a lesson a day is very little.
I have done textbooks, mostly as part of a class of older people trying to learn Spanish. We never finished one before jumping to another. The textbooks were boring and people did not understand the explanations well. We also found that the two of us that did DuoLingo were far beyond the others.
Both Busuu and DuoLingo can be done for free. And DuoLingo has a lot more content in Spanish than most textbooks.
I recommend Lingopie and dreaming in Spanish for immersion style sites
Also if you’re desiring an app to give you a classroom style experience with deeper emphasis on grammar I recommend Babble. It’s worth paying for if you are a serious dedicated student. If duolingo is the most casual game for fun language app, then babble is the least flashy visually speaking but most comprehensive app for learning and building a strong foundation in a language. Babble scores higher than Busuu in grammar instruction.
Well, the app should've probably explained it but no, it's not an error. Spanish is a pro drop language, that is, the Subject is often dropped. The object and the verb are only retained and that's Spanish speakers do as well. Writing in Soy there isn't technically wrong, but it's not something that you'd want to do either.
I don't see any obvious mistakes here other than the audio not loading.
The third picture is correct. The combinations "je" and "ge" make the same sounds, but "gue" makes a "hard" g sound