Duolingo really is speedrunning dystopia rn.
I uninstalled it today. I wrote to their support telling them why I wasn’t going to continue using it, and got a AI written response back. Welp.
For refugees, I can’t recommend Lingq enough. I tried every app in the past to learn Spanish and it was the only one that really moved the needle.
I’ll check this out. I feel I’ve had some progress, but it really does plateau.
Quietly? Seems like it’s been loudly, and on fire. And smelly.
I’m still hoping for a FOSS language learning platform to replace these type of services. DuoLingo seems rather limited, to what crowds of volunteers could create by working together.
Early Duolingo was curated and corrected by the community. Clearly people were volunteering to do it, so I don’t know why they removed all the community tools and are now using AI to fill the gap.
Lingonaut seems promising, but it isn’t open source, or at least not yet. The creator seems open to being convinced though?
the problem is them or some other vc backed thief will use all those resource to give it for free with much better packaging then go back to their parasitic way once that foss project is dead.
Probably not quite what you’re looking for, but there’s Anki, a software for flashcards. It has some shared decks available for download, and you can make and potentially share your own. It can also be used to study things besides languages.
Replace these vulture CEOs with AI and the only use it for recommendations. Profit margins will rise when you aren’t wasting them on golden parachutes and some fuckwit’s next yacht. This will only continue as long as one socially inept and willfully ignorant is pulling lever at the top, making decision based on their experience being complete detached from 99% of the rest of humanity.
I used it for a week, I was harassed by application and I uninstalled it. I don’t want to be in a relationship right now.
800+ day streak, all gone. I did actually want to keep learning so it pushed me to start taking lessons. Ai is so bad it got me talking to people. 😔
Congrats on taking a difficult step towards improving your learning. I moved away from Duolingo a while ago, and in hindsight, it was a significant boost to my language skills; it was only after I had left that I realised that Duolingo is better at hooking people with gamification than it is at actually teaching language skills (even before the AI trash became prominent). I hope that you experience similar productivity.
Thank you for the encouragement. ❤️
I found duolingo usefull to start when your proficiency in a language is next to nothing, a good place to start. But it doesn’t get you that far in my experience. I moved on to reading books in translation apps, so I have the original and the translation side by side. And I must say, Les Trois Mousquetaires is teaching me a lot of French, but it’s also actually a really fun read, it has some hilarious dialogues. So at first I wanted to learn French, now I just want to read the novel. You don’t need gamification when the actual content you’re reading is good in itself. I’ve now combined it with the audiobook. Each reading session I start by listening to the parts I read last time. If you pick famous books, the audiobook can usually be found on yt or elsewhere.
Everyones sayin duolingos shit cause of ai but i tried hungarian(native) on it once and it was already horrible. Failed a test three times on it lol. Also the whole thing is designed to make you feel like youre learning samething but youre not.
People mention their Duolingo streak the same way people mention how much karma they had on reddit.
well I guess the CEO thinking that “it is because of people who are afraid of technological advancements” explains why Duolingo sucks so much.
Nobody ever learned a language with Duolingo. At best you learn a handful of words. Stop wasting your time pretending to learn.
They did that “prank” where they killed Duo. But they really did kill him
I’ve used Transparent to reasonable success - not long enough to become fluent, but enough to get me through a holiday. My access was through a library, but I don’t think it’s too expensive for paid access (compared alongside the price of travel).
Everything enshittifies unfortunately
