This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Duolingo is a tragedy. They really quickly realized that you don’t make money teaching things - you make it on retention and gamification.
Mango languages is great if your library has a subscription. I believe the US’s foreign service materials are also really good, if you want effective but boring.
I was so upset last year when they got rid of the comment section. There were often helpful explanations for WHY you conjugate the word that way, or how native speakers might use a different word.
Yeah, the comment section was amazing...and then they came out with "max", where you get "explain my answer" for a premium, powered by a [notoriously fallible] LLM. This is the definition of enshitification.
One of the languages I am learning is an endangered native language, and it was super helpful to see knowledgeable people in the comments.
That's honestly enraging!? Such data can be greatly valuable for learners, and the native speakers' community, and linguistics.
It was an amazing resource. For them just to nuke it completely was very frustrating.
i encountered some people that spoke some MAYAN. would like to learn it, because thier pictographs are interesting.
Literally canceled because of that change. Fuck them.
This "AI first" thing was the last straw for me, but ever since I noticed that the comment section was gone there's been a bad taste in my mouth. I wonder how many of us there are.
Don’t worry, you can upgrade to Duolingo Max for even more money and have the AI explain it. (Seriously.)
Yeah, I saw that. I have the family plan (some people in the house go through a lot of hearts (mistakes)) and still have to see ads for Max.
It's not gamification that's the issue. That aspect really held my attention and gave me consistency.
It's the push to a pay-to-win model that made me quit. They made the challenges harder and harder to complete without using boosts, and to use the boosts you had to use gems. And gems were really hard to get unless you bought them with real money. It doesn't matter if you have a super subscription (or whatever it's called), you still had to pay to get the gems.
And the prices for the gems were just as predatory and the disgusting mobile gaming industry. Never should there be an option to spend over $20 for in-game consumables, nevermind over $100. It's sick.
Tell me more about Mango library subscriptions? How would one determine?
Your local library may have a Mango subscription plan for card holders. You might be able to find it on their website but a librarian would definitely know.
The gameification part was good, it made it easier to keep up the habbit, though I recently got locked out for no apparent reason so apparently they just outright want to fail? Any good free alternatives? (I wasn't using the paid version)
Here’s a website with those FSI courses I referenced earlier, as well as Peace Corps training materials. This is going to be the boring route. Drill drill drill, but you get good at it.
As a general strategy - on the Omniglot forums a billion years ago there was a method called Listen-Read which I think does wonders for me. You pick a longer book, preferably one you have enjoyed and read already in English. You get a copy of that book in English and your target language, as well as audiobook (let’s go with say, French), then you listen to the audio book in French while reading the book in English, then switch to listening to an English audiobook while reading the French book, then the audiobook in French while reading the French.
Librivox and Project Gutenberg are godsends. I did Candide this way, and part of Les Miserables. This is obviously less immediate fun/dopamine satisfying than Duolingo is, but will teach you to read better than Duolingo will. It’s not great at expressive language - while I can read Proust, my « je voudrais un Diet Coke » was not well received in Paris.
If you have a language in mind I can probably point you in some other directions.
Duolingo was shit for learning, for me at least.
So i left rather quickly, then came back hoping i could pick up some more Italian and noticed they summomed another paid tier. I wonder how many tiers they can summon up until they stop existing.
Duolingo has enshittified so much over the last few years.
Even if I had the ability to become a millionaire tech founder, I don't think I'd want to because every "I want to make learning new languages free and easy for everyone" becomes a "I have to drive 3% more ad revenue this quarter by charting my users' every bowel movement".
I suspect the reality of being a rich tech bro is watching your adult self slowly consume your own childhood dreams, aspirations, and soul.
Enshittification is not driven by the founders (mostly, fuck Zuckerberg). It's driven by greedy investors who want their billion dollar unicorn payout and who who will risk a hundred company failures to get it.
A lot of tech companies that manage to resist outside investors are doing just fine.
It's ultimately driven by the lack of constraints in their market segment. Tech companies will screw over investors as well if they can get away with it.
But I was more talking about how the founder of Duolingo professed specific, world-bettering goals when he started the company that -- if held sincerely -- would make him ashamed of himself because most of what the company does isn't in the service of them.
The tech world is rife with founders that ultimately met that exact same fate.
I canceled Super and uninstalled when they started telling me to get Max. My friends canceled and uninstalled today because of this news.
We might be a small minority but I do giggle at the thought that Duolingo is gonna have to build AI customers soon because nobody will want to use it.
I've been using the free version almost exclusively for over a decade. It continually gets shittier all of the time.
The latest thing is you can't even practice the language to earn more hearts to continue your lesson, you have to now watch ads. I think it's rather emblematic of their approach overall... it's not about learning it's about more eyeballs for ads, unless you fork over a recurring payment for increasingly mediocre lessons.
If you decide to cancel your subscription and delete your account, they give a warning when deleting that says you need to cancel your subscription SEPARATELY. Just a heads up for anyone thinking of leaving like I did.
I have found Duolingo much, much less useful for language learning than Language Transfer. The latter actually helps you learn to think in another language rather than memorize things (which is still useful, but not nearly as much).
Short if total immersion, I have found nothing better than LT.
Holy crap that website needs some serious work, on mobile at least
The problem I have with finding an alternative is that most just offer some five to ten largest languages. Want to learn Spanish, French, Russian, or Chinese? There are hundreds of both free and paid services available. Want to learn Hungarian, Irish, or Finnish? It’s Duolingo and a scant handful of sites specific to that language.
“Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees”
Except for the contract employees. Fuck those people.
In 2012, we bet on mobile. [...] That decision helped us win the 2013 iPhone App of the Year and unlocked the organic word-of-mouth growth that followed. Betting on mobile made all the difference. We’re making a similar call now, and this time the platform shift is AI.
I think this is some sort of fallacy, not sure which tho. Maybe a hasty generalization? "We bet on mobile twelve years ago and won, so if we bet on AI now we'll also win."
*It also seems they're using AI to code... those poor programmers will have to double check every single line it shits out because you know, it's a fucking AI. Yet another company succumbs to a CEOs emotional FOMO.
"past performance is not indicative of future results¨
Except for the contract employees. Fuck those people.
I mean technically the contractors are not employees
Technically my shit is edible, technically.
Apparently they've already been incorporating it and it's very inaccurate. I've decided to stop using them and have switched to LingoDeer and MemRise. Really pleased with how much better they are.
Why not Anki? Ankidroid works well and there are many great community decks for all kinds of languages (and other topics too BTW).
It's okay. We can all play that game. I've replaced my use of Duolingo with AI.
Pro tip: have as your "system prompt" in your LLM of choice "at the end of every query, include me a short Swedish relates to my prompt". No need for Duolingo.
Duolingo uninstalled
So if they're using a ChatGPT wrapper to teach me languages, why do I need Duolingo? Copilot is free.
Copilot is free.
Free.
Free with ads.
Freemium with ads.
Free trial with tiered subscription service.
New subscription tiers with reduced ads. Premium package for boosts to service.
Please enter your credit card number and watch the ad to unlock device.
Please drink verification can to continue..
uninstalls Duolingo
leaves 1-star app review
Welp, time to quit
Oh no! How will I pretend to learn a language now? Woe is me.
I get the hate for Duolingo, but you can actually learn with it
Duolingo got me enough vocabulary in Spanish to put the simplest sentences together, and then follow more robust lessons. I still think it was a good starting point, but I won't use it anymore on principle.
i cancelled my subscription and told them why
They have been shilling max so hard, the practice tab now is hidden to make room for the Video Call tab (Max only) and a tab to subscribe to Max or upgrade your plan.
Probably won’t renew this year. I have a 1500+ day streak, but a good chunk of that is just doing a single quick practice lesson every day, the gamification got me and I haven’t learned much new stuff in probably a year.
I learned enough Italian to use it when I went on a two week trip in 2023, but the problem with Duo’s lessons is nothing is conversational. I would be able to say/ask something, understand the response, but then not really have the ability to keep the conversation going.
The differences in languages after so many years is also a bit disheartening, I had a friend show me all the tools available in their French course that I didn’t have, it made their Italian lessons look like vocab flash cards in comparison.
I am not a big LLM user, but I did try to use it as a conversation partner, which worked alright. I haven’t looked in a while, but my biggest issue was it would speak too fast and none of the available tools had a way to slow it down outside of telling it to add ellipses after each word.
If you looking to replace dualingo, check with your local library, they may offer free access to different language learning apps. I was able to get Rosetta Stone for free using my library. And they also have access to Muzzy and Transparent language.
There are at least some Duolingo courses that use AI voices exclusively and they are shit.
On the one hand, having an AI to talk to sounds like something that could be good. Getting a real person to talk to every user would be impossible. I just don’t think the technology is going to meet expectations any time soon.
The problem is if the user asks the AI a question about the language they're learning they'll often get confident bullshit as the response and they won't know it's wrong because they're still learning.
if the labor cost goes down, the service should become cheaper.
if it worked like that, i'd love to have AI replace humans.
AI isn't the problem. capitalism is.
