Neat. Here's how you can delete your account: https://www.duolingo.com/help/delete-my-account-and-data
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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Perfect. Thank you.
Just in time for spring cleaning. Thanks.
I’m wondering which of these 2 options is true for the chief techbro who came up with this:
- They are genuinely clueless, and have never used ChatGPT for more than 5 minutes
- They know the limitations of LLMs well, but they want to ride the AI hype to inflate their company value (and maybe cut some costs by downsizing)
They believe in infinite growth. They think LLMs are going to get reliable fast. LLMs have probably played a direct role in convincing them of that
Yep they're paying lip service to the employees but this message is 100% to potential investors looking to bet on the AI wave.
Humans-last
For the first time ever, teaching as well as the best human tutors is within our reach.
No it fucking isn't. The video calls are awful and don't do anything to help you learn why what you said is wrong. Lilly just acts confused and ignores what you said. And in their normal explanations it just assumes why you didn't know something, gives an answer for what it guessed, and doesn't do anything else. The old explanations were much better than the new garbage they offer.
That's pretty on point for the kind of stereotypical girl lily is supposed to be.
I was gonna say language learning is actually one of the few AI might be useful for, but they're not talking about making their users learn with a little AI translator having a random conversation with them; they're replacing their workforce with AI.
Fuck. I was considering using Duo once I finish school to give myself some more options to flee the US as we dive deeper into nazism. Any good alternatives?
Language Transfer, lingodeer
They already have AI driven conversations if you pay.
Which is about the extent AI could benefit a service like Duolingo. Gutting their workforce isn't going to make it any better.
Anki is great for flashcards with lots of community generated decks for free download:
I know I'm going to sound like a stock Marxist from the 1930s, but: AI is a means of production and therefore should be collectivized.
Language Transfer on SoundCloud or Busuu if you want more of an app / exercises experience.
What language are you trying to learn?
I haven't used the app for a while, but I still have it installed. The delete account button doesn't work, and neither does the feedback button. Cool.
Glad I finished my first Dutch unit just to get the basics and am deleting the app today. It feels like a real condemnation of the state of modern AI that I don't trust a large language model with languages.
I was using Khan Academy when they went to AI. Suddenly my answers were being marked as incorrect, even though they matched the "correct" answer presented. Or they were marked incorrect becuase I used pi, when it said I could answer in terms of pi.
I'm expecting the same to happen here.
Honestly I was thinking of removing duo before this. It's just glorified flash cards making you memorize words associations instead of getting into how thimgs work. I still haven't gotten the rules of how verb conjugation works in Italian. Just gonna read the books I got.
That's a bad description of it, though. There exist flash card apps, such as Anki and Memrise, and Duolingo has many other features. Grammar, reading, speaking, those are all built-in.
Of course some people prefer to learn grammar using the old-fashioned "grammar translation" method, and you are free to do so if you want to, but on average the speed of that method is slow.
Certainly it's a good idea to have at least two study materials, which could include Duolingo, or not, according to personal preference.
I'm working on Spanish now with it and I have to admit it's significantly improved from the last time I used it a few years back. Fewer nonsense sentences to translate like "My bear loves your house", which was frustrating and felt so useless. There's way more listening and speaking modules, they are generally decent at speech to text, and the language pronunciation sounds more realistic with multiple very different voices.
However, I never know why I got a question wrong, and can't do anything to rectify that other than report that the AI made a mistake, which helps with their model training, but does absolutely squat for my learning. Even the more gamified exercises are just fancy tests, where you are expected to 'learn' by getting things wrong, seeing the correct answer and regurgitating it. The community forums and explanations are gone, and each module has maybe one or two example sentences that typically don't even cover the full range of content in the module.
My husband and I have a family plan, and he is a much more dedicated user than me, but I would never pay for duolingo on my own.
I left after seeing a lot of useful community suggestions completely ignored for a long time. A few months later they finally closed the community making clear they won't hear anyone. I won't bother trying to get anything from them.
I have found that Language Transfer is a far superior way to learn languages (including Spanish), and it's free (although I make a monthly donation)!
It is available as YouTube videos, SoundCloud MP3s, or on a very simple but effective app.
https://www.languagetransfer.org/
I think you mean this, your link is broken. I love them too and recommend them all the time (it's mostly a one guy effort actually, it's super impressive).
Thanks, I fixed it.
And yes, I agree that he is amazing. One guy teaching courses in Spanish, Italian, Greek, Arabic, French, German, Turkish, and Swahili!
Just calling it out: The nonsense/goofy sentences were used because it was found by studies to be more effective for learning/recall.
That wasn't a flaw, just a poorly/not at all broadcasted feature.
If I could make a recommendation for Spanish specifically that helped me - I'll paste a comment I made a few months ago
I highly recommend checking out Dreaming Spanish - it’s a channel/site that teaches Spanish through a method called comprehensible input. Basically, all you do is watch, listen, and read in Spanish totally in Spanish, no translations whatsoever. That sounds intimidating, but the beginner stages they really talk at you like you’re a baby almost. They talk with their hands a lot and use drawings. That’s the most important part, because in the beginning you won’t be able to understand any Spanish or hardly any. But by making it so simple you can basically understand even though you don’t know the words. After a hundred or so hours of this, you can move on to slightly less easy content. And so on and so on until you can understand just regular media in spanish. At that point, your learning will really take off, because you can watch things that you’re actually interested in and that will capture your attention more.
They don’t do any explicit grammar or vocabulary practice. That’s on purpose, the arguments of comprehensible input is that language isn’t learned, it’s acquired. You didn’t learn English by rote memorization, you listened a lot. If you can hear a few words and make the connection to the meaning by watching, and then you hear that word dozens or hundreds of times more - you will have a better understanding of that word than a simple translation flashcard could ever give you. Because words don’t have just one meeting they’re complex and change in different situations. But the best part is through this method you won’t even realize that you’re learning these words. Same goes with grammar, with this method things just kind of sound right. You can use the correct grammar, but you might not necessarily be able to explain why. Just like native speakers.
I’ve personally listened, or watched over a thousand hours of things in Spanish in a bit over a year. And at this point most media is almost as easy to watch as English for me. I also read the full Harry Potter series in Spanish. (It was rough at first, but after I got used to the writing style a lot of the times I’d forget it was in Spanish in the more exciting sections) I need to practice speaking more, I can definitely do it and be understood but it lacks pretty significantly behind my understanding but that is really just a question of how much practice I can get. But once you’ve banked 1k, 1.5k hours the rate at which your speaking will improve is way faster than the process of learning so far.
Check out this this playlist of videos that really explains things in more depth. It has English subtitles you’ll have to turn on. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlpPf-YgbU7GrtxQ9yde-J2tfxJDvReNf
They have a ton of free content, and if you want more you can pay just $8 a month - but honestly if you do a few hours a day after a couple months you’ll be able to just watch some YouTube videos of native speakers and you won’t really need dreaming Spanish anymore. But the site does have a handy hour tracker that you don’t need to pay for at all that I still use to this day.
I’ve tried to learn French, german, and even Spanish before but until this try when I discovered this method, I didn’t really get anywhere. At this point I’m almost comfortable saying that I’m bilingual. And it really doesn’t take that much effort just make it a routine, and once you can get into more advanced and interesting videos just watch things that you’re interested in. When you really get good, you can just watch the TV shows and movies that you already like to watch, but put on the Spanish dub. It’s that easy. I’m not doing anything differently now than I was before I knew Spanish but I’m learning every day because I just do the things I normally did but in spanish!
You can start their Super Beginner (most basic level) here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlpPf-YgbU7GbOHc3siOGQ5KmVSngZucl
But I’d recommend doing it on https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ where it will automatically track your watch time, let you filter by person/accent/level/topic, etc.
The beginning is by far the hardest part. The least interesting videos, the least level of comprehension. It will feel like a chore. Luckily the beginning is where you have the most motivation to push through it.
Good luck with that, I'll watch the outcome with great interest.
If you call your employees or customers some wacky, quirky nickname you have already lost.
Them: this is not about replacing employees with AI
they then proceed to explain how they will give new work to AI first instead of hiring people
Thankfully this shit service has never seen a cent from me (and I know 2 languages), and I'll definitely keep it this way...
Anyone had any luck getting refunded?
Are there any viable non-AI alternatives to Duolingo?
Probably not. Translation and language is perfect for AI to work on. People here may hate it, but no business in that market can afford hundreds of employees when the competition uses AI.
Sure they'll produce all the content they need.
But then they'll need even more resources to shift through the hallucinations.
Can anyone suggest a comparable alternative to Duolingo?
He's not wrong though. I haven't read the whole post, but the fundamental change in teaching, i.e., having access to the world's knowledge in an individualized offering at a fraction of the cost for similar access before the LLM breakthrough is real.
Anyon have luck getting a refund for a year subscription?