Yup, left Duolingo at the start of this year and broke my 1500+ day streak. Because the AI slop was terrible. From nonsensical language to math questions that were flat-out wrong, I just saw zero benefit to continuing to give them money.
Huh. Interesting. What kind of math were you learning where you noticed the errors?
Just requested a partial refund and a download of Al information they have of us. In an official customer service reply from Duolingo granted me a full refund and instructions towards downloading the data. Interesting g enough the customer service reply was named Oscar AI Support. Interesting
You can tell all of the new content is written by AI. It suuuuuuucks.
Welp…
Bye Bye Duolingo…
There goes my French practice…
No way shall I support your use of so-called AI to theoretically reduce your costs while enshittifying my experience and enshittifying the planet’s ecosystem.
FFS.
🤷♂️ 🤡 🖕 🖕
The bird really did die
I’m on Day 189 of Spanish. RIP duo.
I’m on day 2562. Been a paying user for more than a decade. Told them to get fucked in my cancellation.
My brother in owl, I’m on 3249.
Join francophone Lemmy communities
Duolingo sucks for language learning
Slow input method with the word bank which really doesn’t matter early on but becomes a chore that slows progress later on
Doesn’t really do much in the way of correcting errors unless you pay money for the highest level subscription and even then the error correction is weak. A platform like Duolingo has the potential to do really cool error correction; to literally point out the exact error you made and tie it to an explanation. Obviously that’s difficult especially as things become more challenging but duo has had a decade and millions in development funds, which they’ve spent making the courses actively worse to drive up subscription costs and iaps
The lessons are so focused on the whole “gameification” thing that unless you specifically go back to constantly practice vocabulary (and if applicable characters) you will never retain anything. If you merely pound through a Duolingo course from a-b on the prescribed “path” you will struggle immensely and forget tons of early vocabulary and grammar concepts that are introduced and then never brought back unless you seek them out. There are “weak skills” lessons but they are relatively uncommon so you can feel like you’re constantly progressing
The word banks similarly don’t necessarily test retention and just test your ability to do a quick game of matching
You’ll learn something but if you truly want to learn a language there are far more efficient ways. Duolingo is a practice tool at best
You’ll learn something but if you truly want to learn a language there are far more efficient ways. Duolingo is a practice tool at best
What are some better ways?
It’s really hard to beat flash cards. I like Anki a lot because it codifies them and makes the process of “have I mastered this” a bit more streamlined. Though I feel like a lot of people just download premade decks and while that’s fine you learn a lot making the deck. You can’t get around hours of studying vocab and grammar, especially if you’re after the critical period (which I would hope everyone posting here is)
The gameification that Duolingo brings is valuable and very motivating for a lot of people. The problem is that over the years like many capitalist ventures Duolingo made language learning secondary to earning income. So the primary goal of the app suffers at the expense of keeping you constantly engaged so that you’re far more likely to buy shit even if that means ultimately dont learn all that much
The best language learning system I’ve found is Language Transfer .
It’s free, but it easily beats Duolingo and anything else I have tried (short of total immersion).
I still donate $10/month even though I haven’t used it for a while, because I want it to succeed!
This is interesting, thanks
Check out Mango. I was able to get a free subscription through my library.
this is the way. My counties online library system offers tons of language sources free to me (the county pays for a license I assume)
They have less than 1000 employees. Previous cuts were of 10% of employees. Are they really being replaced with AI or is the curriculum just finished? I have a feeling AI isn’t expanding very much of the curriculum. Duolingo is probably just spouting “we have AI” nonsense like every technology company to sound like they are cutting edge.
Are they really being replaced with AI or is the curriculum just finished?
Nah, they add new AI slop constantly.
I doubt they’ve completely covered every important language. And from what I’ve seen, their speech recognition quality is terrible. So obviously there’s still room for improvement.
And language changes over time, though maybe not much on these timescales. But even if the curriculum officially covers 100% of a language at one point in time, the language is still going to drift from that snapshot.
Isn’t Duolingo nonprofit? What’s the problem in cutting jobs?
No. Duolingo is a for-profit company.
And even if they were a non-profit org, cutting jobs isn’t a good thing. It’s sometimes an unfortunate necessity.
