Why wouldn't I? I'm frustrated at getting so little return on my investments.
What about it became awful?
The lessons consist of a number of pre-generated problems. If you miss one you come back to it. The lesson ends when you complete them all. Do you not see a problem with this sort of repetition? I've also seen the exact same problems return on "refresher" lessons, which is completely pathetic since they are all machine-generated anyway. There are also no translations or lists because the idiots who designed it subscribe to the "learn like an infant" bullcrap that plagues language learning (Google Translate has dramatically accelerated my progress on Rosetta Stone). This also means that I don't get the root words first; I have to figure them out through all the conjugations.
The gamification is clearly nonsense. There's zero variation - the entire thing consists of slogging through level after level. Why not throw in an actual story to read or something more interesting at checkpoints? You know, actually feel like you accomplished something? But the thing that really killed it for me was the utter insanity of word selection. Maybe that's a consequence of Hebrew being in beta, but I was definitely not learning from a list of the thousand most common words here.
Aside from all that, it fit my reading/writing learning style perfectly in the beginning and I had probably doubled my vocabulary (as well as reduced my need for diacritics) by the time I quit.
You'll know the grammar. You'll have a dictionary of maybe 1000-1500 words. You'll be able to see and read basic things, but more complex stuff will be difficult for you to get through. Essentially you'll get to the same place you would if you made it through 2 years or so of formal language education in a classroom setting. But that's after using the software for a year to a year-and-a-half. As I said: there is no cheat. There is no workaround. I've now been learning Spanish for 12 years, including 6 years of formal classroom education, multiple years of everyday program watching, and 4-5 years of being in settings that require me to converse in the language every day conversationally. I'd say I'm only just now arriving at a point where I'd be comfortable calling myself fluent.
I don't want to push you down here... but I get the feeling that you have not been learning in an optimal fashion. That's
definitely not what you should expect from a language like Spanish. Maybe take this
test and compare the results to how you've been studying?
(Pro-tip: I've stayed briefly in wi-fi-less environments where I could only speak Hebrew and the distance between that and "having daily conversations" can be measured in light-years. Removing your ability to communicate in English is invaluable. It's not something I can do right now, but when the opportunity arises...)
Bah. A prepositional language with mostly rigid SVO word order, no case system, a relatively basic subjunctive, and no simple/progressive aspect distinction(?). I'm not saying Hebrew isn't a difficult language, nor an uncomplex one. All languages are equally complex, because all languages exist to fulfill the same essential function. But it seems to me to not be such a morphologically complex language compared to some of the more intensely inflected synthetic languages like Latin, Ancient Greek, Old English, or Sanskrit. That usually means that the complexity is passed off elsewhere though. English has also lost a lot of its morphological complexity, but that means that the complexity was handed off to other parts of the language. In particular there is a great deal of subtlety and nuance in its use of preposition, word order, accent, particles, and modal/auxiliary verbs to help account for its loss of a robust case system and conjugational forms. From the looks of it, Hebrew is much the same.
Er... okay? I didn't understand most of that. All I'm saying is that you could scrap grammatical gender and plural verbs without losing a whole lot. And then there are the diacritics, which aren't used in anything outside low-level learning environments, so forget reading a paper.
If you're having such a hard time with conjugations, why are you moving so quickly? It's not a race.
Not all of us learn languages for fun. I can't expand my social circle outside English speakers, can't get a number of jobs, get held up with everything I do, etc.
This is one of the things Duolingo does particularly well, and one of the reasons I would still recommend it despite the problems I have with its teaching philosophy. Its game-ified system encourages and rewards regular interaction.
After the initial rush I started binging on Duolingo for two or three days at a time (racking about 400-600 XP each day) and than abandoned it for weeks. Consistency is definitely not something I associate with it.
Because it isn't necessary. Between free apps and Paradox games I think I'm probably set, but even if I'm wrong there are an incredible amount of programs and websites I can use. Hebrew is only a problem because of the scarcity of learning resources and how it uses diacritics.
