Using Duolingo can provide a good example of practicing something. It’s very practice based. It’s not perfect. It barely explains anything and mostly just makes you practice and figure out some patterns and concepts yourself. Each practice problem is designed to be short and easy. One of their goals is you do a bunch of small, easy steps and then after a while you actually made some progress without it ever being hard. I don’t think it’s ideal but it’s pretty decent. It can be a good resource by itself to start with and if you get more advanced it can be good paired with some other resources.
A lot of other language learning apps are too hard, at least at the beginning. They give you less repetition and introduce more words and concepts faster. There’s something good about how easy Duo tries to be and the emphasis on high volume practice.
If you do Duolingo for a month it could give you some perspective on philosophy practice. It has you do way way more practice problems than I’ve ever seen anyone do for philosophy (or grammar). And it keeps the problems way shorter, faster and easier than I see people do for philosophy. And doing lots like that actually does work – do it for a while and you will know more than when you started.
Language (and math and some other topics) is good for auto-generated practice problems with answer keys. It’s hard to do so much practice in philosophy without answer keys. Still, one could try and get closer. Doing a larger number of easier problems would have some benefits even without answer keys – you just have to avoid repeating the same errors many, many times and never catching on (which is something that shouldn’t be too common when sticking to easy enough problems, and which other forum members or a tutor might spot just from skimming some answers without checking them all).
@Eternity @LMD I’d recommend you both do 15min/day of duolingo for a month to get more experience doing a larger number of easier practice problems. Any language you want is fine (though the courses are worse quality for some languages, especially more obscure ones. I don’t know all the details. The non-English courses they’ve put the most work into are Spanish and French). The languages I’ve done a bit of are Spanish and Japanese. Any language where you don’t have to learn a new alphabet is easier, so if you don’t care much, I’d recommend against dealing with a new alphabet. Also big alphabets are a problem. In the short term, learning a small new alphabet makes things harder, but you’ll get used to it eventually. But learning 2000+ Kanji is both a short and long term difficulty. Japanese also has significantly different sentence structure compared to English or Spanish (which are similar to each other), which is interesting but also harder.
A whole lesson in Duo can be like 20 practice problems and take 3 minutes. You could easily do 100 problems per day and over 3000 problems in a month.
PS You can force quit and reopen the app to skip ads.