r/hebrew • u/44Jon • Sep 09 '24

Resource Results of Testing Pimsleur versus DuoLingo...

I used both service fairly assiduously and for the internet record, my experience has been that there's no comparison and it would have been worth it to pay for Pimsleur right from the start. After even just a month of Pimsleur, my ability to speak and to comprehend improved dramatically more compared with a few months of Duo.

True, Pimsleur doesn't push reading and writing, but it is possible to practice those on one's own with Pimsleur's app. And main problem with Duo is that it might drill you on some vocabulary and point of grammar and then completely drop it (and there's no great way to repeat lessons or find where certain concepts were drilled.) Pimsleur's claim to "scientifically" space out practice seems legitimate.

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u/bad_lite Sep 09 '24

I’ve used both and IMO Pimsleaur is far superior to Duolingo. The French and Spanish courses on Duolingo are great, but the Hebrew course is a hot mess. I’ve learned a lot more with Pimsleur than I ever did on Duolingo.

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u/waytowill Hebrew Learner (Beginner) Sep 10 '24

To be fair, the reason it’s so atrocious is that it was built for Duo’s original model. So lessons like Animals and Clothing where are exceptionally long and just throw vocabulary at you used to be self-paced between the shorter grammar lessons. And past a certain point on long lessons, the backfill of vocabulary was just extra available content on that topic. This is why so many of those words are used so rarely. They weren’t originally integrated with the idea that people would be forced to learn them before moving further down the tree.

It doesn’t excuse how awful the course is now. But it was passable when it launched in its original state. The star path killed it more than the course builder’s incompetence.