...trying to cram their prepackaged square-shaped tools into a variety of circle-shaped holes. All languages are different and each requires a different approach.
The first half of this is dead on. The second half is wrong.
Duolingo's top languages are in the Indo-European family. (Their most learned language is English, next is Spanish.) Their techniques are perfectly adequate for gaining elementary vocabulary a basic grounding in the grammar of those languages. The most common languages in that language family are positional. You really do need to learn to say "black shirt" in English versus "camisa negra" in Spanish. Saying it in the other order is wrong.
Their tools don't work well for other language families. However they do work for lots of languages that people want to learn.
Funny that you say the example of ADJ+NOUN and NOUN+ADJ, since in Spanish both are valid! But not for every adjective, and many times the meaning actually changes:
- Different meaning: Es un pobre hombre (pity). Es un hombre pobre (poor).
- Same meaning: Tienes un excelente humor. Tienes un humor excelente. [1]
- Emphasis: ¿Ya os habéis mudado a la nueva casa? ¿Ya os habéis mudado a la casa nueva?
In your specific example, "negra camisa", while it is valid it does sound archaic. However this does not mean that ADJ+NOUN are wrong in Spanish. Not at all.
No, languages are indeed different. Providing elementary grammar or vocabulary is next to useless in real conversation with natives. I highly doubt anyone is SOLELY learning English or Spanish through Duolingo.
It's important to look at resources that languages provide- English and Spanish also have immense amounts of media to listen to and read, and obviously a lot of people to talk with. I would say that helps far more than learning simple grammar.
I'm not sure what point you think you are responding to.
My point is that a particular approach tends to work similarly well across many languages within a language family. Duolingo's method is effective at providing elementary grammar and vocabulary within Indo-European languages. I agree that it does not get you a sufficient vocabulary to read, or the verbal reflexes for speech. But it is an effective approach for an absolute beginner.
Everything that I've heard about it says that it is basically useless for various Asian languages. Even for absolute beginners. For example my wife used Duolingo with languages like Polish and Spanish. She was quite happy with the results, even though she outgrew what the app can do. However despite these good experiences it took her less than a week to decide that it was useless for Japanese, and move on to a random flashcard program instead.
As an interesting aside, we have objective evidence of these linguistic differences from machine learning. Google Translate originally worked by a form of statistical pattern matching across large numbers of original and translated documents. This worked brilliantly for Indo-European languages, but did badly for various Asian languages. To my understanding for much the same fundamental reasons that Duolingo does.
The first half of this is dead on. The second half is wrong.
Duolingo's top languages are in the Indo-European family. (Their most learned language is English, next is Spanish.) Their techniques are perfectly adequate for gaining elementary vocabulary a basic grounding in the grammar of those languages. The most common languages in that language family are positional. You really do need to learn to say "black shirt" in English versus "camisa negra" in Spanish. Saying it in the other order is wrong.
Their tools don't work well for other language families. However they do work for lots of languages that people want to learn.