Find solution
Is there any free software available for english grammar checking?

Is Duolingo's killer app really a grammar checker?

  • For example, to correct the grammar of an English document, one could translate it to Spanish and back.  The result could be used as is or perhaps compared with the original to suggest improvements. One might expect English speakers to care more about grammar checking than translating/learning other languages.

  • Answer:

    I feel like this process would lend to fine details of the original text being "filtered out" if being translated back and forth.  Some ideas are more easily expressed in one language than another and thus either some meaning is lost or the meaning is achieved in a round-about way when translated.  When then translated back, it may be unclear what the original intent was. A similar idea to Duolingo to simply use human power to correct grammar is interesting, but in my opinion would not work.  The point of Duolingo is that texts are translated as a side effect to interested humans learning a new language.  I don't think there is as large an audience of people who want to "improve their grammar" than people learning a new language, but I may be wrong.  Also, this audience would most likely be elementary school students, or maybe slightly more advanced second-language English speakers, and perhaps the grammar-correcting would not be as sophisticated as one would like.  Who knows though; human-computation can work wonders.

Daniel Deutsch at Quora Visit the source

Was this solution helpful to you?

Other answers

No. Duolingo's killer app is translation. Nominally improving communication between 375 million people is a far smaller contribution that greatly improving communication between 6 billion people.

Joseph Turian

No, Duolingo is not a grammar checker.  It does not check grammar.  It does not even teach grammar.  The founder isn't interested in teaching people grammar.  Rather, it is about users doing pattern recognition to try to instinctively learn enough of the grammar to translate text.  The lessons themselves are rather unforgiving in terms of the acceptable translations, to the point where fluent, bilingual or multilingual people cannot get Duo answers right, because it is less about "Understand the language and the meaning and the grammar" than it is "Guess what Duolingo wants."  This is particularly problematic near the end of a language tree. Duolingo doesn't teach you that most of the Spanish words that have feminine endings but are actually masculine are because they have greek origins.  Or for that matter that words that end in "ion" are by rule generally feminine. And people who speak other languages may actually care more about grammar because their languages may be less forgiving and flexible than English.  If you cannot get the basic rules, you cannot communicate well.  "soy alta" is acceptable grammar. "alta soy" breaks the rules and may be understood, but would require more thought. "I am tall" and "Tall is I" would both be fine, and generally understood because of the flexibility of English grammar rules.

Laura Hale

Related Q & A:

Just Added Q & A:

Find solution

For every problem there is a solution! Proved by Solucija.

  • Got an issue and looking for advice?

  • Ask Solucija to search every corner of the Web for help.

  • Get workable solutions and helpful tips in a moment.

Just ask Solucija about an issue you face and immediately get a list of ready solutions, answers and tips from other Internet users. We always provide the most suitable and complete answer to your question at the top, along with a few good alternatives below.