Cool idea, unfortunately the example on the front page has errors in both Danish and French.

In Danish the third line is translated as "Du kan vende tilbage til oversættelser ved at holde musen over dem." which means "You can return to translations by hovering over them." i.e. the opposite of what happens. As a native Danish speaker I'd write "Du kan vende tilbage til originalerne ved at holde musen over dem.". I've had a hard time finding a translation that more accurately matches the wording of the original. The best I could come up with is "Du kan reversere oversættelserne ved at holde musen over dem.", but that just sounds like you're speaking English with Danish words to me, so I don't know if it's useful.

In French the second line is translated as "Plus la difficulté augmente, plus la traduction est importante" which means "As the difficulty increases, translation becomes more important.". Kagi Translate proposes "Plus la difficulté augmente, le volume de traduction augmente" and a few other things that don't look quite right to me.

I don't know how much this matters, since you'd probably end up exposed to a lot of different translations of many different sentences with this tool. Statistically, most of those will be correct and so you'll end up good enough understanding of the other language anyway.

In any case, you'd probably want to make extra sure that the examples on the front page are absolutely correct, so I hope you find my two corrections useful.

Oh! One more thing... when you select Japanese it says "Supports Furigana", but there's no furigana shown in the example. It would've been cool to see that on the example page as well.

This looks really useful! Wish I'd had something like this when I was learning Mandarin.

I'm curious what determines whether or not you add a given language to the list. DeepL and Claude, at least, have usable translation ability in more languages than the app currently supports. Is there a lot of manual effort required for each language, or do you want to keep the list limited just to avoid overwhelming users?

this tool is really nice...

Suggestions: Can I get some transliteration when I hover over it, rather than translation? Maybe a Alt+ ?

Good tool, I like it so far.

My biggest progress in English was when I started to read the English internet (HN, Reddit, etc.). I used an browser extension to translate words that I didn't know.

I'm learning Spanish now, but there is no content that interests me. Maybe the Spanish Wikipedia sometimes.

So this extension gives me that language exposure.

I like your approach here, thanks for posting

I completely agree with everything you have mentioned in the first paragraph.

You NEED to consume tens of thousands of words repeatedly used in different contexts for the brain to make those automatic connections. Random sentences do not maintain the context which would have otherwise helped you figure out the possible meaning of some words in the following sentences/paras. That is one of the biggest flaws of any translation method.

The thing is, the input hypothesis all by itself is not enough. It's arguably close to where the modern paradigm of second language acquisition started, but it's not where we still are nearly 50 years later.

For example, one big thing that Duolingo's method completely misses out on is the importance of a rich communicative context. This was implicitly there in Krashen's original monitor model, but wasn't fully appreciated until closer to the turn of the century.

Yeah I think Duolingo is a great vocabulary expanded. But it's not going to get you to a conversational level.

> If you just keep sprinting through such exercises, in a sense, mindlessly, without asking yourself how each new sentence really differs from the ones you have already seen, then yes, IMHO you are likely to fail.

This is where comprehensible input shines.

- you start reading actual long form content from day one instead of practice sentences

- the content maintains the context across its length, letting the brain use its pattern recognition apparatus

This does not happen with the grammar translation method. You lose the context. I would compare it with RAM being swapped to disk repeatedly in a low-ram situation on your computer.

I have never studied the grammar of my mother tongue. But I can speak complex sentences rapidly because my brain managed to recognize the patterns in the language and store the sequence information somewhere.

If they expend deliberate effort on it, some people might find methods like the ones Duolingo uses somewhat useful. However, I believe if you are capable of doing that, comprehensible input might give you more bang for the buck. It has, at least for me, provided faster results and a better vocabulary than grammar translation and half-hearted attempts at CI. I felt more confident with the language after 10 days of CI-based learning than the previous six months of memorizing noun and verb forms and meanings and translating random sentences.

They might have found it useful enough to attempt their own spin on it, I guess.

I don't think that Duolino is absolutely useless. But my reason for learning languages might be different from those of others. Some people want to be able to say a few words in the language they are learning. I want to read novels, poetry and philosophical texts.

The approach you take and the kind of vocabulary you want to acquire will differ accordingly.

Yeah, I've seen my wife's time with the owl not translate into understanding much of the Spanish she sees around town.

I have seen some people do this successfully. But I find the BG to be too complex as a learning tool. It is too dense for me to concentrate on the words rather than the content.

I prefer short stories. I have acquired hundreds of laghukathā collections over the last couple of years and read from them as time permits.

I am working on two Sanskrit-related things at the moment:

- a website where I am putting up proof-read stories from scanned copies of old issues of the Sanskrit Chandamama

- a "Sensible Guide to Samskritam" that will use the Baroda Critical Edition of the Valmiki Ramayana as the foundation to construct a single story told across 100-odd bite-sized chapters. This will essentially be a Sanskrit version of Lingva Latina.

I read a story by Roberto Bolaño recently where the Spanish-speaking protagonist reads novels in French, a language he cannot speak. He said that even though he couldn’t understand most of the words, he usually understood the plot. For some reason your comment made me think of this.

Frankly, people do not have the time to deeply research this topic. You want to learn French or Spanish for fun. Duolingo claims that it can help you. So you join, try for a few days and give up.

This happened to me about ten years ago.

I too had not bothered to understand pedagogy. It is only when I wanted to learn Sanskrit, and struggled with it, that I got pissed off at the lack of progress and began looking around. There are some people on YT who talk about this stuff:

- Alexander Argüelles

- Steve Kaufmann

- Luke Ranieri

I might be missing a few others.

You first have to know what your problem is, before you can solve it.

> no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages

True. In culturally homogeneous countries, you don't need four languages to make yourself understood.

It becomes somewhat necessary in places like mine where different groups of acquaintances/relatives/friends speak different languages and finding a single language at the intersection of those groups can be hard.

>they even cite at their FAQ about the need of going outside the app if you want 'fluency

Sure, they've got that fig leaf covering them.

Caecilius who, spoiler for a decades old Latin textbook, dies when Vesuvius erupts, is from the Cambridge Latin Course. The dog, who survives, is in fact named Cerberus.

I am not sure about the names of the characters. But a Roman family is definitely involved in the first part (Familia Romana).

> I like to think it's worked

It works as long as you do some slow and steady work at it. I don't think it will work if you drop-in for a couple of days every few months, read something, and then disappear.

You might remember a few sentences here and there. But we want to be able to understand as well as use those sentences in the applicable context.

Things are much better today, I feel. If the publishers do not feel that there is a market, then the gap must be filled by enthusiasts. Some time for creating the content and $6/m on DO, and hundreds/thousands of people can benefit.

In my experience, knowledge of grammar gives you a false sense of knowledge of language. You might know what the form of the word is, but you may not grasp its meaning in context, or be able to use it in your own sentences.

Grammar is the analytical part of language. It is not the language itself.

Try reading Spanish texts for a few days without doing these drills and you will notice a massive increase in relative comprehension.

Try Spanish in Latudio [0]. It is not quite for beginners, you need to have at least basic vocabulary, but regarding immersion, it should fit what you are looking for. It uses a listening-first approach and contextual translations with vocabulary and lets you explore words you didn't get in other contexts.

[0] https://www.latudio.com/

I built https://nuenki.app, which follows a fully immersive approach by immersing you while you browse the web. It translates entire sentences at your knowledge level into the target language, and you hover for definitions/the original sentence/etc.

I feel that Duolingo has the same issue. Not enough immersion.

Skritter is good for stroke order

An even basic Chinese is better learned from a Chinese-specific app like Lingodeer or HelloChinese.

I tried all three when I was first getting started. I didn't end up going with any of them (I bought a textbook instead - gamification just isn't my jam), but I was at least fairly impressed with Lingodeer and HelloChinese. Both were clearly made with love. And I've met several more advanced learners who got started with them. By contrast, for all its users, I've yet to meet a single person who went with Duolingo and subsequently made it to an intermediate level in Chinese. I'm sure there's someone out there somewhere, but overall it seems that people's success rate with that app is bleak.

I know several people who're trying to learn various languages via Duolingo for several years now, and not a single one has anything to boast about.

Competition or rivalry is probably the single best motivating factor.

The people who prioritize learning a foreign language over some of the things that you prioritize.

who are these people who have 30 minutes in the morning to make a smoothie and develop software to learn a foreign language

Yeah. I've been doing Spanish on Duolingo for about 2.5 years, and just started Section 5. I find that I can read Spanish reasonably well, in that I can usually at least work out what the underlying meaning is for any arbitrary piece of Spanish text I see. But my ability drops off quickly for listening to spoken Spanish, and even more quickly for speaking it myself. Which makes sense given how the site works.

But flashcards that connect words and concepts are still much better than flashcards where you merely translate.

duolingo doesnt do grammar but it does translation. Unless you want to become a translator then theres no point in learning how to translate from language A to B. What most people want is to understand and speak which is a different skill than translation

I do agree with a lot of what you write. I maintain that Duolingo is the wrong approach to actually learn a language (even though there are differences between the various languages covered by Duolingo). However, I did somewhat successfully use Duolingo to refresh some intermediate-level Italian grammar (not grammar training, but I could observe various grammatically different sentences), after having been away from the language for fifteen years. This was some twelve years ago, and Duolingo has changed so much for the last few years (mostly for the worse, while I was still wasting time on Duo for for another language), so I don't know the state of the Italian course now.

Using AI for conversations is really interesting approach - it generally speaks the language correctly (not like classmates).

Next time pay enough for a class or have a good private tutor and all you've said becomes true.

But hey, the alternative is pretending classes are not better than Duolingo so go do that and you'll have the same results.

> traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first" approach

That's not better than Duolingo, no.

Duolingo is OK initially (especially if you need to learn a new alphabet), but then quickly move on to

* https://www.languagetransfer.org/ (will give you a good understanding of the principles of the language but without feeling like a grammar book)

* https://www.pimsleur.com/ or similar audio courses (expensive, but thorough, seem to be informed by spaced repetition principles, I remember what I learn here)

* and when you've got the basics down, slow speaking podcasts or youtube which will increase your vocab and understanding greatly

* lots of youtube/netflix (use https://addons.mozilla.org/fy-NL/firefox/addon/youtube-dual-... or one of the many addons that give more control over subtitles, eventually only foreign subtitles or none)

* simple translated stories (I don't know what these are called, but you'll typically have first a story with translations interspersed, then the full story without any guide). https://www.lingq.com/en/ is a site that does this for you, though I guess you can use llm's this way too now

You want lots of input. You also want some deliberate practice making sentences, though in smaller portions than the input.

This is a falde dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite.

If you follow the approach in "Fluent forever" by Gabriel Wyner you will focus on 1) sentences and 2) speech from day one.

The idea is that you really don't want to focus on learning translation but learn the language. Ie. It is not important that you know how to translate horse to Pferd. What is important is that you know how communicate the concept of "I want to ride a horse" in German.

The only method worse than Duolingo for language learning is possibly the traditional classroom, in my humble opinion.

My background is that I've studied Korean for ~8 years now, as a native English speaker. Like most US citizens I took Spanish classes in middle & high school. I did the traditional classroom method with 3 semesters of German in college. And I forgot most of Spanish and German aside from some words and grammatical rules, because neither got me to a level of conversations with native speakers or being able to engage with media.

Duolingo and most classrooms (I know there are exceptional curriculums and exceptional students) don't prepare you to actually speak to people. They prepare you to engage within their systems, aka answering tests or whatever. This is not speaking a language but moreso learning about it academically.

There is a lot to discuss but I've never been able to recommend Duolingo, even before they reduced their staff and replaced them with AI. Why? Because it's inefficient with regards to your time, and the content is too insubstantial. It's possible to spend a year of your time on Duolingo and barely be able to speak the language at all with someone... which is kinda the whole point of studying a language?

I love the hobby of studying languages and things like Duolingo and the classroom method put people off when they can't speak very much even after a long time investment, which is damn shame.

My point is neither should really be looked towards for substantial language learning methods.

> recently started to learn another language with Duolingo

Duolingo feels great when you're starting. You feel like you make a lot of progress quickly, and it's fun, so you do it every day. Before you know it, you've done it for half a year, and then you try to talk to somebody and realize that you've learned very little.

>the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first"

Yes, this is also a bad approach. They're both bad.

Research has figured out that grammar is the wrong thing to focus on in a classroom. There are better ways to teach in a classroom that work. However many schools are not following the latest research so you need to find a good one.

grammar is good in the classroom - but not until every lesson gets you thinking so that is why I do X. If you are not used to the grammar don't learn it. So don't start until you have had around 50 hours in the classroom.

English grammar (my native language) has always been a mystery to me. Any time I hear about participles or present perfect or infinitives or passive voice etc… my eyes glaze over and I have no idea what any of it means. In school I failed those units.

Learning a new language from grammar principles wouldn’t be a very effective path for me…

As someone learning Japanese I'm really appreciating tools built for JP specifically: Renshuu and Wanikani. Both use SRS (same as duolingo) but spend a considerable amount of time actually teaching the grammar and nuances, they both avoid starting from everyday phrases like "I would like sushi" to instead build a foundation first, and many other little things that make it a much nicer experience than Duolingo who's trying to use a very generic approach that maximises small term satisfaction in exchange for painful long term learning.

My learning finally picked up speed again when I started using CCI (Compelling Comprehensive Input). How easy it is to find material differs a lot between languages. Way way back in time I learned English that way, though I didn't think of it as "learning" back then - I was so focused on what is now called "compelling input".

However, you'll need some kind of foundation, otherwise it'll be hard to find anything to start with. Though at the language school my wife attended the teachers had methods for that too, when there weren't any common language to "teach" in. Show and tell, basically. Point down and say "This is a table". Point away and say "That is a window". And so on. The Krashen initial method basically, though the one teacher I talked to had never heard about the guy.

When I started Japanese I didn't use textbooks or classes, I used an app called "Human Japanese", which teaches structure and a little grammar, but mostly through show and tell. No conjugation tables or other boring stuff. It quickly gives you enough to start acquiring other material. My own huge mistake was to switch to Duolingo.

Yeah, I really don’t get all the hate towards DuoLingo on this site. Granted, it isn’t going to make you fluent alone but it is very good at keeping you sharp and getting your feet wet.

Name one sole app/course which will teach you absolutely everything there is to know about a given subject. There are none. All learning needs multiple avenues in order to be effective.

Even if you take part in a course with tutors they will you to practice out of the course and in your own time. Personally I found DuoLingo to be extremely helpful in getting the basics of Hindi down.

I think the pre-internet ways are just fine - textbooks, phrasebooks, other kinds of books geared towards self-learners.

With them, one must be just a little bit more proactive, though.

You can also sign up to in-person classes.

Italki, LingQ, Languagetransfer, StoryLearning...

You're a little too kind to Duolingo. It is useful for the very, very beginning, but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language.

Making something as fun to use as Duolingo but that actually teaches you the language is an open problem.

> and even AI chat bot interactions in recent version.

If you have that, you don't need the other things.

One task a language model is naturally suited to is... using language.

(You might want to give the bot a voice, or I guess you'll still need the listening exercises, depending on your goals.)

Well, you can also understand it as "while you are at it, maybe try to fix the fundamental flaws in DuoLingo?". DuoLingo is great at keeping learners motivated, but at learning - not so much (in my experience).

> What are the modern methods

It depends on the community, but the current meta among serious (non-casual) language learners is 1) comprehensible input, 2) extensive reading, 3) sentence mining, 4) spaced repetition + active recall

> what's to back up they're better?

Unfortunately... just the anecdotal experiences reported by these learners. I've talked with hundreds of successful language learners who reached actual fluency using these methods and I'm also one of them. Unfortunately, as many people online like to point out, these anecdotes are not technically scientific so there is a bit of "faith" you have to put into these methods. (Also, there is some debate in the field of SLA (second language acquisition) as to whether we will ever have a truly scientific model of SLA. If you're interested in this question, I'd recommend checking out the book "Key questions in second language acquistion")

In general, my advice to any serious language learner is you're gonna have to experiment a lot to reach fluency. Language learning takes on the order to thousands of hours and requires a vocabulary of over 10,000 base words for functional fluency (don't believe the youtubers who say you only need to know a couple hundred words. I've run the math on this way too many times)

Military translator bootcamps and Mormon mission preparations are the most consistently successful methods in broad use for getting people good at a new language.

I have lived in a foreign country for 25 years and have started picking up the local language. There might be faster methods.

I'll answer the opposite question: the worst way to learn a language is to spend all you effort learning all the different ways to learn trying to find what is best.

unfortunately the above is not a joke. It is what many people are really doing. The question itself is fine but don't let it consume you. Or if it does at least do as I do: confine your research to the language you are trying to learn.

Anki cards comes to my mind, diploma from local university, preparing for TOEFL/IELTS equivalent. Also some languages have better alternatives than jack of all trade, Duolingo.

I wrote https://thehardway.guide just about that, in case it helps.

> but that they do not communicate two things clearly: > this alone won't make you a fluent speaker

Pretty sure that they say it, repeatedly, on their blog. I only read a handful of their blog posts and more than one mentioned it.

> at what point you should move on from Duolingo

I won't blame them for assuming common sense. If you haven't reached a level where you can e.g. read news in the language you are learning, then you probably won't try e.g. while waiting 10 minutes for a train. And there, it's better to do 10 minutes of Duolingo than 10 minutes of TikTok.

> Duolingo is obsolete.

I have to defend Duolingo a bit here. After only 60 days of short, daily 15-minute lessons, I was able to start forming valid (albeit simple) sentences such as "where is the bathroom in this building?" that were never explicitly presented on Duolingo and thus must have been assembled, not memorized, by my brain. I don't think it's reasonable to ask for anything more.

I think the trick is to push yourself and - as soon as you can - attempt to ignore sentence building blocks and hints provided by Duolingo and always try to build all exercise answers entirely from scratch in your head. That forces your brain to create "a set of rules" for using a language as opposed to memorizing "a set of samples" of a language. I'm usually good at remembering how things work and notoriously bad at memorizing all the samples of things that exist.

Just make very, very sure you have a good multilingual LLM. Probably don't even try this with low resource languages even at the best models. Speaking in languages other than English (maybe the top 5 next or so as well, I wouldn't know) seems to be a skill that quick to be sacrificed if a model is quantisized, distilled, fine tuned or otherwise adapted. Take the top Qwen model released today, all the versions I can run locally totally trash Norwegian grammar. And they even claim it (both written forms!) as one of the languages they explicitly trained on.

I mean, the AI partner is probably getting paid, so I can see DuoLingo needing to increase their rates if you use that service.

> I want to learn Russian and I can't find anything with this quality.

You could give Refold a shot! https://refold.la/how-to-learn-russian/

(disclosure: I also used to work there.)

Some of the most annoying, that's for sure. I uninstalled it when it started to uglify the icon on my desktop when I neglect daily exercise. I mean, it's totally fine if it's just me, but since it was an impulsive action on my part, I would be curious to see if I wasn't one of the many. I wouldn't be fond of my company's PR department if they lose customers over stupid jokes.

That said, after spending too much time on DuoLingo, I should have dropped it anyway. First off, one should be honest to himself and admit that it is a game, not a language study material. Which is ok, but still, I would really like to have an app that is a bit less of a game and a little more of a interactive textbook (I don't know one). Second, honestly, most of the course materials are surprisingly low quality. They kept adding all these gimmicks, animations, icon uglifying, etc., yet the core content was barely worked on. After a couple of years you start really wondering what are they spending money on. I mean, literally, do they even have paid staff working on some less popular languages, or it's just community?

> In addition, the multi-modality also differs a lot. Finnish and some other languages simply don't have speech exercises (where you have to read something into the microphone).

They have the speech exercises in Spanish, but they are ridiculously bad. It often says I'm correct before I get to say half the sentence. Other times, I'll need to repeat a word 10 times until it gives up and says it's fine.

German and Arabic course.

So in other words, the course is programmed by a human?

Well I hope with today's AI tech the course should be highly customizable. I don't want to learn "The cat is a viking" 100 times.

I strongly advise against Preply. They employ basically all dark patterns possible. You pay for a "subscription" that can expire if the teacher needs to reschedule lessons. It's difficult to cancel. It really is a nightmare.

Did you learn the kanji for the first 1000 words? Looking into learning Japanese as well. I tried the Remembering the Kanji by Heisig but that felt rather abstract after a while.

I used the app for 6 months (granted this was around 5 years ago) and the problem never disappeared for me.

To answer the question, it depends on which language you're learning. Japanese and Spanish probably have the most resources for English-speaking learners.

No, it’s a series of audio activities framed as a conversation between someone who knows the new language and someone learning. You pause the audio and play the part of the student when required and it focusses on the positive language transfer aspects between languages and how they can be used to build up sentences and phrases.

Grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and comprehension are all practiced and developed through the courses and, for me, it has been the most effective way to learn Spanish.

After just a handful of lessons I was able to structure many useful sentences based on the teachings that we weren’t taught directly but that I was able to create a fresh as needed in the moment.

It's not really a podcast.

It's closer to courses like pimsleur or Paul noble where a teacher and student are speaking and there is pause before the student answers in which you are supposed to answer.

The thing I love about LanguageTransfer is how he explains _why_ something works a certain way. I find it easier to remember some grammar when I know the background evolution. He also makes an effort to map between languages which is the biggest contrast to things like pimsleur, which try to be more immersive.

Language transfer is rather good. I'm not quite sure what it does differently, but there's a reason people recommend it.

Spanish after hours looks great, thanks.

Do you just watch / listen to random videos or is it more structured?

I am planning a trip to Mexico soon, so I have been listening to how to Spanish, and mextalki podcasts. The latter is pretty difficult to follow, though I feel you need to listen to real native speakers speaking at a normal pace to have any chance of understanding locals.

SAH seems great because she does seem to speak normally and not too slowed down (or it just sounds quick to me :))

I used it for Spanish too, and it really gave me confidence. I went through the course once and was able to travel through rural Panama for two weeks. I plan to redo the entire course (total about 15 hours) soon, to freshen things up after five years.

I think it needs to be supported with other techniques (speaking to natives, watching Spanish TV or movies, etc.), but for taking in and understanding the language it can't be beat.

My wife and I used it for Spanish as well and it’s a game changer for sure. I can now have a surpassingly decent (if simple) conversation with Spanish speakers based on this app and some supporting vocab learning

I found this in the app’s description:

> This app provides the same audio available for free on languagetransfer.org, but allows you to download tracks in advance, save your progress, and listen with your phone locked.

> We collect some anonymous usage data so we can improve the app and learn about how users are engaging with the lessons. You can learn more in the About section of the app, or turn off this data collection in the Settings

The app is really basic, in a good way. There are no ads or unnecessary permissions. It's just a basic media player that lets you download the audio files for offline playback and tracks whan you have already listened to.

I find I pretty convenient.

It doesn't help that the Play Store has no effective way to browse recently developed apps or to filter searches in any meaningful way whatsoever.

Couple that with the Indiana Jones boulder chase known as the Target API Level Requirement plus needing to log in every six months or risk getting your Google Dev account permanently deactivated and then needing to relaunch all of your apps under a new namespace.

A handful of apps I use come from small companies (5 to 40 employees) who should not have a dedicated mobile dev on their payroll. The apps do not pose a security risk (as they don't use internet/network features) and don't need to be updated as they are feature-complete. One such company just pulled all of their free apps and now has a contractor charge users for worse functioning redesigns.

Same, I now speak fluent Spanish and have lived in Spain but I started with Duolingo (although just watching loads of films was by far the best way to learn once you get that far!).

App? I'm not aware of any app that anyone serious about language learning would consider great. If you are going to pay for an app start with netflix or similar which isn't about language learning, but it has native content in your language. Newspapers would be another place to spend your money.

There are a lot of dead tree books that are still perfectly good. There are a lot of language courses that are great, but most don't really have an app. Even if there is an app, you should be getting the app as part of your purchase (or subscription) to a larger language learning system not the app itself.

something like https://michelthomas.com/landing-page/mt-spanish/#start-span...

or https://www.pimsleur.com/learn-spanish-latin-american/

I would probably include duo lingo when I started - but I wouldn’t say “hmm I wish there was something worse but free”.

I am personally quite happy with the Teach Yourself study materials as first step when picking up a new language.

That's a really good point, thank you.

Blender is another good example – incredible product with a great community. It's becoming the default choice for 3D now, unless you're working for a company that already uses something else. (As an aside, I don't use it much but really enjoy reading the release notes as they're well written, engaging and show how they're regularly delivering real value.)

Don't want to seem like I'm being down on open source - I'm not, it's genuinely a beautiful thing, but I would love to see more innovation and not just copying existing things. Or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, like someone complaining about how there's no good new music but never listening further than top 40 radio.

old HelloChinese course is still there in the app... New one in making so far looks more like DuoLingo, however, LingoDeer app is alternative that right now is better for Asian languages if you want a little bit grammar stuff while learning.

How is it different from SRS? If you need to learn the strokes for thousands of characters you will need something like SRS.

How about "Google Word", "GoogleWord", or "Rosetta Stones"?

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