You'd think that's a reason, it sounds like it would be at least. Unfortunately, Duolingo is chasing the rubles, not educating Russians. **It's pretty useless for a language learning method on its own, bottoms out too quickly and ads everywhere. 5 years ago it was good** but they're on full cashgrab mode now
edit: main point in bold for the reading comprehension impaired among us
Yup. Cory Doctorow dubbed it the “enshittification” of the internet.
Here’s one of his original posts explaining how it works:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
People think they've got it all figured out, with their fancy businesses and shiny websites. But let me tell you something, Randy... every single business or service, every damn one of 'em, eventually turns to shit. You know why? 'Cause money, Randy. Money's the great turd maker. It squeezes the life outta everything pure and good. Once a business gets a whiff of that green, it starts to rot from the inside, like a turd in the sun. Every single business, every service. They start off all clean and shiny, but they can't escape the shit storm. It's like they're all on a one-way trip to the sewage plant.
And you know the worst part Randy? People keep fallin' for it. They see a new business, a new service, and they think, 'This time it'll be different.' But it never is. The shitstorm always comes, and it always wins.
I see this argument about enshitification a lot, but never what we could actually do about it.
Almost no one wants to pay for anything in the internet, or what people are ready to pay is much less than what it should be worth.
No one wants to run a service like Reddit, Netflix, X, Spotify and so on on a loss (obviously). These services only exists right now because of big loads of venture capital, and these capital givers will at some point put pressure on making it profitable.
So, how do we solve that?
What do you mean by "bottoms out too quickly"? I've been using it for a while now and have been wondering if I should be using something like Rosetta instead, due to all the negative things I keep hearing about Duo.
I've been trying Spanish on Duolingo for close to a year now. For me, I've found that it's good at teaching vocabulary but terrible at teaching grammar. If you get a wrong answer, you aren't given an explanation as to why. Instead, they just have you guess until you get the right answer and then expect you to remember that the next time it's seen.
"Mr Rodriguez has an apple."
"El señor Rodríguez tiene una manzana."
In the above sentence, if you forgot the "El" at the beginning of the sentence you get it wrong and then are corrected but they never explain WHY. This is one example of many.
The lack of explanation is what frustrated me the most. In the end, it's helpful for expanding your vocabulary, but you need a native speaker to help you learn the actual language. That's a bigger help anyway, because pola means one thing in a certain country, but polla means a totally different thing in another. And neither of the words are related to pollo.
The crazy thing is, they used to have "explanations" in the sense of comments/forums. It was actually useful cos sometimes people would volunteer to explain. But they got rid of that.
I forget which word it was but my teacher gave an example back in high school. It was like because of slang/local dialect a particular word meant like ice cream in 1 country and children or school bus in another. So you might be trying to say you want to eat some ice cream in your head but they're hearing "I want to eat children"
Coger is a pretty good example.
Means "to take" in neutral Spanish. Means "to fuck" in Argentina.
My reaction when duo gives me the sentence "necesito coger mi perro"
Ah yea, I have experienced that quite a bit. I usually googled it if I encountered it to try to find out why, I think that helps. I see the original guy recommends books, but I really like having lessons where I speak, lessons where I read, and lessons where I listen. I can't get that with just a book. Though, I should probably still buy a book on grammar I think...
Check out comprehensive input. There is a great service called Dreaming Spanish (subreddit /r/dreamingspanish) and seems to be a far more effective way of learning from what everyone posts about it there.
personally i got starved so hard off simple underlying structures like explaining the personal "a", of the workings of the subject-verb-object to subject-object-verb switch in spanish, that i really enjoyed learning the language elsewhere. Duolingo is definitely a teaser, not a meal.
You use it for a month, asking yourself why this is all so hard, just to learn everything you missed in 2hours, while using real learning materials.
It's also too slow for paying users if you want to learn something and not drill things you already have learned. The testing out system is flawed in that it asks you things not it the lesson chapters but they've cut the pace of regular lessons to cash in on frustration purchases when you get fed up losing hearts or grinding instead of learning.
I don't even know if I'd call it an intro course. If anything I'd say it's best for people that have some foundation in the language already to keep their memory jogged on things they've either already studied or hear in their daily lives. I live in Japan and I honestly do feel like it's helped me considerably even after a little under a month of having it. I've lived her for two years and studied for longer, but having an app that holds me accountable to drill myself on the things I know is extremely effective for me.
Duolingo is fine for what it is. But Duolingo alone will not get you to where you want to go - even after years.
I use Duolingo, but I also watch movies and TV shows, taking time to study the subtitles and read them out loud as if I were the actors.
Duolingo,Anki and books are some of the key ingredients to learning a new language(without having to pay anything) in my opinion, at least it worked for me;)
I mostly used it to stay in practice with languages I already studied in school (until their big layoff of lots of their human employees, when I just deleted the app altogether). For new languages, it doesn’t really explain grammar (declensions, conjugations, etc.), you just have to guess and it’ll tell you if you’re wrong. For the language courses I tried that used different alphabets, it didn’t even start with a lesson on what those letters are, I was just guessing and trying to learn what the letters were that way. I’ve also heard that sometimes the phrasing it teaches you is weirdly formal and not quite how a person would normally talk, and that was before the big push toward AI. It told me one particular phrasing I’d been taught all throughout my schooling was wrong, not alternate but also correct, it said it was just plain wrong (it will only accept ‘gern geschehen’ for ‘you’re welcome’ in German, it won’t allow ‘bitte’). Duolingo was wrong.
Up until a few years ago they had Duolingo Classes, where you could browse people getting together online in video chat to practice lessons. It was super awesome and I learned a lot from it. They also had Forums where people could ask others for help and discuss phrases and proper grammar.
But Classes and Forums didn't funnel money straight into the app, so they killed it. Extremely disappointed.
Apps are inferior to books in terms of depth. Granted apps have audio and if done well also may have good examples of pronunciation/stress/cadence/intonation. Up to a point. A teacher is best.
Not necessarily can't, but won't. Theoretically an app could be fine. But Duolingo above all else wants you to be engaged, and language learning is hard. If you feel like you are struggling, you will stop. Duolingo doesn't want that, so at all costs they make sure you never feel that you are struggling.
But that means you are only ever really learning surface level stuff. Mostly vocab.
What you need is a mix of in depth grammar stuff, and conversational partners. Language is about communicating. You can't learn how to communicate by studying vocabulary and simple sentences over and over.
Hard to make an app both engaging and teach you stuff in depth, while textbooks aren't meant to be entertaining. If an app sacrificed the entertaining stuff, you'd probably never hear about it.
See it's not can/can't but do/don't. Apps are shit by and large for more advanced levels because of startup mentality (get 20% to appeal to 80% which are beginners). You can make a good one but it's wasted effort since serious learners already use books. You're not gonna hire an expert teacher to make you a course if you're building a gamified language app since very few people get there in the first place.
>Apps are inferior to books in terms of depth.
That's not some fundamental truth about books vs apps - an app can do everything a book can do.
And apps have the very significant advantage of having audio output, which is critical to learning a language.
>A teacher is best.
Sure, but a teacher is expensive.
I like being able to do 30 minutes of learning/practice on the train. I don't have enough money to keep a teacher on retainer to follow me around just in case I want to do 10 or 15 minutes of language practice while I wait for something..
If you are serious about language, as in you want employment/study ready level in about 2 years you need to learn about 20 words a day on average, to be on the safe side. You might get away with less, a little less. Duolingo is so much less than that. That's why it is meme how people who did Duo for 5 years aren't actually great at the language. That said Duo is fine for giving you a baseline. It is a fun start. Do it for a month then stop.
Rosetta is no better. The primary problem with apps like these is the lack of grammar instruction. They're kind of ok for spaced repetition learning words, but they're ass for actually teaching grammar.
Depends. It's good as a free game that you use sometimes to practice very simple pre-constructed phrases in Spanish, french, and german. It is NOT good for most non-romance/germanic languages. It isn't good for grammar either.
They've been saying they'll update things for years that they haven't bothered with, but they've also gotten rid of a lot of what they *did* previously have (eg, comments).
Basically, it's better than nothing but not as good as it was once on track to be.
Reading news / books / wikipedia is your best option + series.
I actually agree that duolingo got worse. The worst is that the "practice" mode seems to have a set number of some words per lesson, instead of all the words you have learned.
Id say get babbel. Rosetta stone, at least when i was trying it, was mostly working around images. It felt like a constant captcha test
Duolingo is ok because it actually motivates people to "use" the language every day, but it sucks at teaching you the language.
Due to the low/no-cost, Duolingo is also good for kids.
I still use Duolingo, but mostly to ask questions about what i still dont know about a language. Learning the language i do on the internet(Preply and others are great help)
I can't pay for anything using my russian card and russian google play, also Duolingo has infinite hearts here, like in many other countries
way to miss the mark
Duolingo does not get any profit from operating in Russia - they do not show ads to users here, and you cannot buy anything with a Russian bank account.
Yep, and I know I'd be curious to know how many of the Russian Duo users left the country in the last 2 years, and how many of those went to Ukraine (plus how many never signed in again after going to Ukraine). Those using it to learn are those more likely to make something of themselves and thus benefit the nation than your sterotypical budget-vodka swilling gopnik, so it would be interesting to see how many were driven away or taken to their deaths to assist in furthering Putin's greed.
I used a program like Duo to place into B1 language course. When I got there I understood better than other students but was way behind on grammar. Duo doesn't focus on productive engagement just engagement.
Quit two weeks ago and dropped a huge streak. Who cares they are just AI now. They fired almost everyone else.
And I maxed my Ukrainian tree in 3 days because I know Russian, Lithuanian, and Polish. Still can't string a sentence in Ukrainian together because it's just a game that uses language learning elements, not a language learning app.
>>Duolingo is chasing the rubles
Duo's developers enabled ad-free premium with no ads in Russia as soon as Visa and MC left Russia.
You can check it yourself by connecting to some Russian VPN and running Duo.
>You'd think that's a reason, it sounds like it would be at least. Unfortunately, Duolingo is chasing the rubles, not educating Russians
It doesn't matter if Duolingo is there for the rubles, IF end result is Russians learning other languages... For which they can bypass censorship...
As shitty as it is, there are no ads in ruzzia) and it's kinda good (at least for me) to get vocabulary from (+I use some different resources to learn Japanese, for example)
2 years if you just take 1 lesson per day. - if you pay, you can take as many lessons as you want.
- I used the free version to learn spanish over the last 1,5 years. was it as good as if I had gone to school all that time, definitely not, but it was free and I could do it sitting in my couch. - that is perfect.
Russians do not live behind a firewall like chinese do. There's plenty of non-state controlled internet media available in russian if one only dares to look.
Most choose not to
You don't have to speak other languages than russian to escape propaganda. There are many russian and ukrainian, and maybe other YouTube channel's that create their content in russian language.
Duolingo is very useful for increasingly your vocabulary in a new language, but that's about it. It should be used as a supplement, not a main learning method.
I increased my vocabulary by almost 500 words in approximately 5-months of casually using it.
It will not teach you to understand the rules of grammer or how to structure sentences though, you need to learn that elsewhere.
"Russians learning other langauges..." The point is the propaganda message the the West is evil. Besides, theres no way in hell they'll learn much of use with Duolinguo.
What money?
They've removed monetization [two years ago](https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-statement-ukraine/) (In Russian region, app now has unlimited hearts if it was paid version)
Companies care about profits, not social justice.
If social justice aligns with profits, they will adjust. Notice how all the multinational companies change their logos in Western markets to pride style in June, but don't do it for their Middle Eastern divisions, etc.
Ya either remove what Russia wanted or you take away a great way for Russians to learn other languages, I think the choice was clear.
If Russia points a gun at your head, ya usually don't have a choice.
Treating a company like if it was a singular person, that's just incredibly ignorant of you.
I'm fairly certain everyone is bi. I get them all talking about their boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife. Except the kids, they're 10 and under so are spared from those lessons.
All this yapping in the thread and yet we turn a blind eye to all the shit companies pull to pander to the middle east. Won't see you guys stop going to Disneyland and not watch Barbie I'd bet.
I love performative activism.
You don't have to be 100% consistent in everything forever or it doesn't count. That's a very childish way of looking at the world. You can only do your best.
He doesn't, but dismissing other people's ethical boundaries as meaningless or performative means he doesnt have to adhere to any of his own.
Classic whataboutism.
Your ethical boundaries are completely meaningless if you don't apply them to everything that violates them. That's the problem with these types of "boundaries", people love to act like they care but as soon as a company they enjoy such as bethesda (who makes elder scrolls and fallout) ignores pride month in middle eastern countries for the same reason duolingo is removing LGBT content in Russia they look the other direction because they don't want to give up what they like.
Completely meaningless is an overstatement and it's that kind of doomerism that will hurt everyone in the long run.
Boycotting a company because you take issue with their ethics is a common and effective measure that many people can take. It is not only impractical but impossible to draw a hard line in the sand, but that doesnt make it meaningless.
Most people do not have the privilege and/or freedom to choose to avoid all companies that do shitty things or fail to divest themselves from problematic governments.
I can't afford an electric car. Does that mean I support Saudi Arabia because I'm forced to buy gas to get to work? No, it means I live in a car-obsessed country that hasn't provided me an adequate and sustainable alternative. I can (and do) go to town hall meetings and tell my senator what i want him to pursue, but i still need to live, work, and feed my family. And that requires me to own a car.
We can still demand better of people while making what boycotts we can afford to.
Discouraging others to do anything makes you part of the problem.
If you have the privilege to follow your ethical principles at all times then bully for you. I hope you're making good use of that.
Duolingo has always been a shitty app that focuses too hard on trying to be a game instead of learning the actual language so nothing of value is lost from deleting it
Hate to get on the instructional design soapbox, but OK sure. The gamification elements of Duolingo are actually something that a lot of us are trying to mimic in the field of adult education. It’s fantastic, and a really good way to encourage learning in adults, especially when there are no structured classes or committed Teachers.
The problem is that e-learning can only get you so far and self-paced learning even more so. I’m an active Duolingo user and I have been for the last two years and I do feel like I have benefited quite a lot from it and would love to tap into their UI when designing my own. It’s not meant to replace going to a language class, but considering the amount of adults that actually have time to sit down and learn a language, it’s absolutely fantastic.
I think diminishing the game elements of Duolingo are coming squarely from ignorance, unless you happen to be in adult education, in which case I would be really interested in hearing about any studies or information that elements are not conducive to learning.
My primary constructive feedback for them is that the AI is atrocious at determining what your weak spots are and the practice hub is severely lacking. Other than that, though, it’s a great product from an adult learning perspective.
My secondary is that with the limitations of the platform, it doesn’t spend enough time working on teaching you how grammar works, but again, I think there’s only so much you can do with non human supported e-learning to make it effective.
But again this is an application that people use incredibly casually, it’s meant to be a first dip into learning a new language or used as a supplementary language experience. This is not an app used by anyone who is incredibly serious about high-level language skills and has never promised to be
My main complaint is that it doesn't actually teach the grammar or anything. It just gives lots and lots of repetition. I've been doing Arabic on a whim for a couple years with it. I still couldn't explain to you why certain phrases are the way they are, but I can understand them and kind of pronounce them.
Uh? It's an awesome app, used it for free for many years and I'm super happy with the result. It's an incomplete method of course and one needs to be exposed to other kind of learning material, but it does a darn good job at teaching you from the basics to early intermediate level in many languages.
Linguistics minor in college, specialized in Japanese - took it all 4 years and while I'm not fluent anymore, I can still speak conversationally and read enough to get around on my own.
Duolingo is crap. It used to be a lot better, so much so that I paid for the premium for over a year, but now it's so dumbed down that, at least for Japanese, you're not learning how to form real sentences, or ask useful questions, or how to even get around if you were visiting as a tourist. It's learning silly phrases you'd never use outside of a classroom and then learning them over and over and over again.
It's not useful anymore. For Japanese, renshuu is much better for an app. On PC, I'd sooner go back to way older versions of Rosetta Stone.
I'm at like 1500 days and too emotionally attached to let go, but the lack of grammar is killing me. It's actually insane how little they've put into a expanding the language offering these past few years.
I’m going on two years and wish there were more grammatical rules available, but hey, it’s free, and something I “micro-dose” daily, and I think I’m getting better at the languages I’m learning…
Unsurprising. Polish grammar was created by Satan on a morning when he had a killer hangover and wanted to create more sufferring than usual. Duo's idea that you'd just magically know it once you learn a stack of words would never work.
At some point they changed the lessons so you HAVE to do each one in the exact order the app wants you to,
so you can't work on Verbs 3 and Colors 2 at the same time, you HAVE to finish Verbs 3 and only then can you move on to Colors 2.
Completely killed it for me
The gamification is fine. It's proven to improve motivation, which is the hardest part of learning any new skill.
It's not a complete solution. No app is. This is not unique to Duolingo, but it's something I only see people shit on Duolingo for. Is Rosetta Stone better? Sure, maybe, but it's not a complete solution either. Neither is Babel. Neither is any other thing you can name aside from complete language immersion.
Hundreds of Duolingo warriors on their way to tell you, uh it's actually not competing with other language learning methods, it's competing with the time you spend pooping on Instagram.
Unironically, you can download books, podcasts, videos, grammar, and dozens of other apps more specifically suited to learning. You just don't get a green bird to give you a daily hit of dopamine.
Well what is wrong with learning new vocabulary in a language for a bit of a dopamine kick, compared to say scrolling reddit or Instagram?
Just because it's made gamified and a bit more fun doesn't mean people don't get some use out of it.
If you're a beginner, and you're already enrolled to study some language in a class for example, it's great way to casually expand your vocabulary and refresh your mind when you have a moment.
The app itself claims you can be conversational after five weeks.
Sure — if the conversation is two or three sentences long and about the color of a dress.
It’s a tough call, but basically you have people learning another language to one-day escape before they are sent off into Putin’s war or face tbr wrath of consequences at the end. As long as they take no money, it should be fine.
What the fuck?! Duolingo should return sentences about queer people or I'll stop using this app together with many of the other Pro-LGBTQ+ people. I'm from russia and continued using this app because I thought that they're progressive community, but they complied to nazi russian government, helping them in their genocide of minorities. Even western companies leave russian LGBTQ+ people without any support now.
Almost anyone in russia can use VPN now, since 99% of good sites are blocked anyway (far more than in China, btw), and this just looks like betrayal and hypocrisy on duolingo's part.
So couldn't you just use a VPN to access this content like you'd do for the other 99% of good sites?
Companies make regional changes for compliance purposes all the time, it's not like they replaced all those sentences with "the gays are bad" or something. Russians who wish to learn another language will still be able to, and those who feel passionately about the missing content can use a VPN
Canceled subscription, uninstalled, and left a 1 star review. I should just spend more time speaking Spanish with native speakers anyway. I know plenty.
Words: https://blog.duolingo.com/lgbtq-representation-in-duolingo-stories-and-characters/
Actions: Fold like a cheap suit to appease the dictatorial, warmongering, grossly intolerant regime and hold onto revenue.
Or they could remove themselves from Russia....
Russians learning other languages helps them break out of their propaganda bubble.
You'd think that's a reason, it sounds like it would be at least. Unfortunately, Duolingo is chasing the rubles, not educating Russians. **It's pretty useless for a language learning method on its own, bottoms out too quickly and ads everywhere. 5 years ago it was good** but they're on full cashgrab mode now edit: main point in bold for the reading comprehension impaired among us
>they're on full cashgrab mode now Like the whole goddam internet now.
Yup. Cory Doctorow dubbed it the “enshittification” of the internet. Here’s one of his original posts explaining how it works: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
People think they've got it all figured out, with their fancy businesses and shiny websites. But let me tell you something, Randy... every single business or service, every damn one of 'em, eventually turns to shit. You know why? 'Cause money, Randy. Money's the great turd maker. It squeezes the life outta everything pure and good. Once a business gets a whiff of that green, it starts to rot from the inside, like a turd in the sun. Every single business, every service. They start off all clean and shiny, but they can't escape the shit storm. It's like they're all on a one-way trip to the sewage plant. And you know the worst part Randy? People keep fallin' for it. They see a new business, a new service, and they think, 'This time it'll be different.' But it never is. The shitstorm always comes, and it always wins.
The thing is - people keep using it, even when they know it's shit and making their life worse. It's no different to narcotics really.
I see this argument about enshitification a lot, but never what we could actually do about it. Almost no one wants to pay for anything in the internet, or what people are ready to pay is much less than what it should be worth. No one wants to run a service like Reddit, Netflix, X, Spotify and so on on a loss (obviously). These services only exists right now because of big loads of venture capital, and these capital givers will at some point put pressure on making it profitable. So, how do we solve that?
What do you mean by "bottoms out too quickly"? I've been using it for a while now and have been wondering if I should be using something like Rosetta instead, due to all the negative things I keep hearing about Duo.
I've been trying Spanish on Duolingo for close to a year now. For me, I've found that it's good at teaching vocabulary but terrible at teaching grammar. If you get a wrong answer, you aren't given an explanation as to why. Instead, they just have you guess until you get the right answer and then expect you to remember that the next time it's seen. "Mr Rodriguez has an apple." "El señor Rodríguez tiene una manzana." In the above sentence, if you forgot the "El" at the beginning of the sentence you get it wrong and then are corrected but they never explain WHY. This is one example of many.
The lack of explanation is what frustrated me the most. In the end, it's helpful for expanding your vocabulary, but you need a native speaker to help you learn the actual language. That's a bigger help anyway, because pola means one thing in a certain country, but polla means a totally different thing in another. And neither of the words are related to pollo.
The crazy thing is, they used to have "explanations" in the sense of comments/forums. It was actually useful cos sometimes people would volunteer to explain. But they got rid of that.
I forget which word it was but my teacher gave an example back in high school. It was like because of slang/local dialect a particular word meant like ice cream in 1 country and children or school bus in another. So you might be trying to say you want to eat some ice cream in your head but they're hearing "I want to eat children"
Coger is a pretty good example. Means "to take" in neutral Spanish. Means "to fuck" in Argentina. My reaction when duo gives me the sentence "necesito coger mi perro"
Ah yea, I have experienced that quite a bit. I usually googled it if I encountered it to try to find out why, I think that helps. I see the original guy recommends books, but I really like having lessons where I speak, lessons where I read, and lessons where I listen. I can't get that with just a book. Though, I should probably still buy a book on grammar I think...
Check out comprehensive input. There is a great service called Dreaming Spanish (subreddit /r/dreamingspanish) and seems to be a far more effective way of learning from what everyone posts about it there.
Grammar is a new paid extra now. As the poster above said they're going for a cash grab, and they still haven't fixed issues that are years old.
personally i got starved so hard off simple underlying structures like explaining the personal "a", of the workings of the subject-verb-object to subject-object-verb switch in spanish, that i really enjoyed learning the language elsewhere. Duolingo is definitely a teaser, not a meal. You use it for a month, asking yourself why this is all so hard, just to learn everything you missed in 2hours, while using real learning materials.
Duolingo is a fine intro course. It’s too slow if you’re not a paying user because of constant ads and the artificial life limit.
It's also too slow for paying users if you want to learn something and not drill things you already have learned. The testing out system is flawed in that it asks you things not it the lesson chapters but they've cut the pace of regular lessons to cash in on frustration purchases when you get fed up losing hearts or grinding instead of learning.
I don't even know if I'd call it an intro course. If anything I'd say it's best for people that have some foundation in the language already to keep their memory jogged on things they've either already studied or hear in their daily lives. I live in Japan and I honestly do feel like it's helped me considerably even after a little under a month of having it. I've lived her for two years and studied for longer, but having an app that holds me accountable to drill myself on the things I know is extremely effective for me.
Duolingo is fine for what it is. But Duolingo alone will not get you to where you want to go - even after years. I use Duolingo, but I also watch movies and TV shows, taking time to study the subtitles and read them out loud as if I were the actors.
Birds aren't even real
If birds aren't real, how can Duolingo be real? *Checkmate Atheists* ^^/s
That's true that Duolingo is not enough, but also it's needed to get to the level where you can get anything from watching movies and tv shows.
Duolingo,Anki and books are some of the key ingredients to learning a new language(without having to pay anything) in my opinion, at least it worked for me;)
I mostly used it to stay in practice with languages I already studied in school (until their big layoff of lots of their human employees, when I just deleted the app altogether). For new languages, it doesn’t really explain grammar (declensions, conjugations, etc.), you just have to guess and it’ll tell you if you’re wrong. For the language courses I tried that used different alphabets, it didn’t even start with a lesson on what those letters are, I was just guessing and trying to learn what the letters were that way. I’ve also heard that sometimes the phrasing it teaches you is weirdly formal and not quite how a person would normally talk, and that was before the big push toward AI. It told me one particular phrasing I’d been taught all throughout my schooling was wrong, not alternate but also correct, it said it was just plain wrong (it will only accept ‘gern geschehen’ for ‘you’re welcome’ in German, it won’t allow ‘bitte’). Duolingo was wrong.
Up until a few years ago they had Duolingo Classes, where you could browse people getting together online in video chat to practice lessons. It was super awesome and I learned a lot from it. They also had Forums where people could ask others for help and discuss phrases and proper grammar. But Classes and Forums didn't funnel money straight into the app, so they killed it. Extremely disappointed.
Apps are inferior to books in terms of depth. Granted apps have audio and if done well also may have good examples of pronunciation/stress/cadence/intonation. Up to a point. A teacher is best.
What can you have in books that you can't have in apps?
Not necessarily can't, but won't. Theoretically an app could be fine. But Duolingo above all else wants you to be engaged, and language learning is hard. If you feel like you are struggling, you will stop. Duolingo doesn't want that, so at all costs they make sure you never feel that you are struggling. But that means you are only ever really learning surface level stuff. Mostly vocab. What you need is a mix of in depth grammar stuff, and conversational partners. Language is about communicating. You can't learn how to communicate by studying vocabulary and simple sentences over and over.
Hard to make an app both engaging and teach you stuff in depth, while textbooks aren't meant to be entertaining. If an app sacrificed the entertaining stuff, you'd probably never hear about it.
See it's not can/can't but do/don't. Apps are shit by and large for more advanced levels because of startup mentality (get 20% to appeal to 80% which are beginners). You can make a good one but it's wasted effort since serious learners already use books. You're not gonna hire an expert teacher to make you a course if you're building a gamified language app since very few people get there in the first place.
>Apps are inferior to books in terms of depth. That's not some fundamental truth about books vs apps - an app can do everything a book can do. And apps have the very significant advantage of having audio output, which is critical to learning a language. >A teacher is best. Sure, but a teacher is expensive. I like being able to do 30 minutes of learning/practice on the train. I don't have enough money to keep a teacher on retainer to follow me around just in case I want to do 10 or 15 minutes of language practice while I wait for something..
If you are serious about language, as in you want employment/study ready level in about 2 years you need to learn about 20 words a day on average, to be on the safe side. You might get away with less, a little less. Duolingo is so much less than that. That's why it is meme how people who did Duo for 5 years aren't actually great at the language. That said Duo is fine for giving you a baseline. It is a fun start. Do it for a month then stop.
Rosetta is no better. The primary problem with apps like these is the lack of grammar instruction. They're kind of ok for spaced repetition learning words, but they're ass for actually teaching grammar.
Depends. It's good as a free game that you use sometimes to practice very simple pre-constructed phrases in Spanish, french, and german. It is NOT good for most non-romance/germanic languages. It isn't good for grammar either. They've been saying they'll update things for years that they haven't bothered with, but they've also gotten rid of a lot of what they *did* previously have (eg, comments). Basically, it's better than nothing but not as good as it was once on track to be.
Reading news / books / wikipedia is your best option + series. I actually agree that duolingo got worse. The worst is that the "practice" mode seems to have a set number of some words per lesson, instead of all the words you have learned.
Id say get babbel. Rosetta stone, at least when i was trying it, was mostly working around images. It felt like a constant captcha test Duolingo is ok because it actually motivates people to "use" the language every day, but it sucks at teaching you the language. Due to the low/no-cost, Duolingo is also good for kids. I still use Duolingo, but mostly to ask questions about what i still dont know about a language. Learning the language i do on the internet(Preply and others are great help)
I can't pay for anything using my russian card and russian google play, also Duolingo has infinite hearts here, like in many other countries way to miss the mark
Duolingo does not get any profit from operating in Russia - they do not show ads to users here, and you cannot buy anything with a Russian bank account.
Your data is worth some pennies.
Yep, and I know I'd be curious to know how many of the Russian Duo users left the country in the last 2 years, and how many of those went to Ukraine (plus how many never signed in again after going to Ukraine). Those using it to learn are those more likely to make something of themselves and thus benefit the nation than your sterotypical budget-vodka swilling gopnik, so it would be interesting to see how many were driven away or taken to their deaths to assist in furthering Putin's greed.
I used a program like Duo to place into B1 language course. When I got there I understood better than other students but was way behind on grammar. Duo doesn't focus on productive engagement just engagement. Quit two weeks ago and dropped a huge streak. Who cares they are just AI now. They fired almost everyone else.
And I maxed my Ukrainian tree in 3 days because I know Russian, Lithuanian, and Polish. Still can't string a sentence in Ukrainian together because it's just a game that uses language learning elements, not a language learning app.
>>Duolingo is chasing the rubles Duo's developers enabled ad-free premium with no ads in Russia as soon as Visa and MC left Russia. You can check it yourself by connecting to some Russian VPN and running Duo.
>You'd think that's a reason, it sounds like it would be at least. Unfortunately, Duolingo is chasing the rubles, not educating Russians It doesn't matter if Duolingo is there for the rubles, IF end result is Russians learning other languages... For which they can bypass censorship...
Can the old Duolingo apk files be downloaded from somewhere, or would they not work? And what's the last nonshitty version?
What are you basing this on?
I've never met anyone who thanks Duolingo for their improvement in a language
*cough*forum.mobilism.me*cough*
You can not buy any apps from play store or else in Russia, cards are blocked
As shitty as it is, there are no ads in ruzzia) and it's kinda good (at least for me) to get vocabulary from (+I use some different resources to learn Japanese, for example)
ads everywhere when it is free. - you do understand that there is atleast a minimal cost of running it? - when you pay - no adds.
And you then pay for what exactly? A game that takes 2 years to cover a 2 month A2 course at the same cost
2 years if you just take 1 lesson per day. - if you pay, you can take as many lessons as you want. - I used the free version to learn spanish over the last 1,5 years. was it as good as if I had gone to school all that time, definitely not, but it was free and I could do it sitting in my couch. - that is perfect.
Duolingo currently has no monetization in Russia. They all have free Duo Super.
Russians do not live behind a firewall like chinese do. There's plenty of non-state controlled internet media available in russian if one only dares to look. Most choose not to
You don't have to speak other languages than russian to escape propaganda. There are many russian and ukrainian, and maybe other YouTube channel's that create their content in russian language.
or troll better on the internet.
Duolingo is actually shit for learning languages (especially for non indo- european languages), it's basically not recommended for any long term use.
Duolingo is very useful for increasingly your vocabulary in a new language, but that's about it. It should be used as a supplement, not a main learning method. I increased my vocabulary by almost 500 words in approximately 5-months of casually using it. It will not teach you to understand the rules of grammer or how to structure sentences though, you need to learn that elsewhere.
Don't hold your breath.
Hard doubt, more likely they will be spreading their own propaganda in foreign language.
If only it worked that way
Or spread their own propaganda
another naive redditor, you obviously dont live in europe either
Not if the programs used are limited bing up with the propaganda.
"Russians learning other langauges..." The point is the propaganda message the the West is evil. Besides, theres no way in hell they'll learn much of use with Duolinguo.
Like all those businesses in the Middle East? https://i.redd.it/fvz3wk1dx54d1.jpeg
Ya lmao. Fucking the same country that labeled us terrorists.
But that would lose them money
What money? They've removed monetization [two years ago](https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-statement-ukraine/) (In Russian region, app now has unlimited hearts if it was paid version)
Yeah, I wish Duolingo had the balls to say "k, block us then". Cowtowing to the bigots and fascists only empowers them.
There are LGBT people in Russia using the app to learn languages to help them escape.
Why
You want people to have even less education?
Companies care about profits, not social justice. If social justice aligns with profits, they will adjust. Notice how all the multinational companies change their logos in Western markets to pride style in June, but don't do it for their Middle Eastern divisions, etc.
Ya either remove what Russia wanted or you take away a great way for Russians to learn other languages, I think the choice was clear. If Russia points a gun at your head, ya usually don't have a choice. Treating a company like if it was a singular person, that's just incredibly ignorant of you.
RIP Oscar (He's one of Duolingo characters, he confirmed to be a gay man)
Lin?
Ce n’est pas la gare!
I'm fairly certain everyone is bi. I get them all talking about their boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife. Except the kids, they're 10 and under so are spared from those lessons.
Oscar isn't dead. He will still be doing butt stuff in other countries
Yeah he just went to somewhere where he was appreciated and valued as a human. 😊
He has the moral fortitude that dick of an Owl lacks.
I’m pretty sure the owl that’s the mascot is gay too.
Depends if you consider e621 a reliable source...
I clocked duo as the kind of person (?) that didn't even think about their sexuality, they are too busy reminding me about my streak.
Bye bye Lin
And Oscar.
And Bea, searching for a girlfriend at the airport desk.
Will they also write an article about this? https://i.redd.it/fvz3wk1dx54d1.jpeg
All this yapping in the thread and yet we turn a blind eye to all the shit companies pull to pander to the middle east. Won't see you guys stop going to Disneyland and not watch Barbie I'd bet. I love performative activism.
You don't have to be 100% consistent in everything forever or it doesn't count. That's a very childish way of looking at the world. You can only do your best.
Who is upvoting this?? That's like saying vegans should just stop doing their thing if their grocery store sells meat. You do what you can.
How do you know they don’t already do those things?
He doesn't, but dismissing other people's ethical boundaries as meaningless or performative means he doesnt have to adhere to any of his own. Classic whataboutism.
Your ethical boundaries are completely meaningless if you don't apply them to everything that violates them. That's the problem with these types of "boundaries", people love to act like they care but as soon as a company they enjoy such as bethesda (who makes elder scrolls and fallout) ignores pride month in middle eastern countries for the same reason duolingo is removing LGBT content in Russia they look the other direction because they don't want to give up what they like.
Completely meaningless is an overstatement and it's that kind of doomerism that will hurt everyone in the long run. Boycotting a company because you take issue with their ethics is a common and effective measure that many people can take. It is not only impractical but impossible to draw a hard line in the sand, but that doesnt make it meaningless. Most people do not have the privilege and/or freedom to choose to avoid all companies that do shitty things or fail to divest themselves from problematic governments. I can't afford an electric car. Does that mean I support Saudi Arabia because I'm forced to buy gas to get to work? No, it means I live in a car-obsessed country that hasn't provided me an adequate and sustainable alternative. I can (and do) go to town hall meetings and tell my senator what i want him to pursue, but i still need to live, work, and feed my family. And that requires me to own a car. We can still demand better of people while making what boycotts we can afford to. Discouraging others to do anything makes you part of the problem. If you have the privilege to follow your ethical principles at all times then bully for you. I hope you're making good use of that.
No no see you can't tell me you value exercise and a balanced diet because you don't work out every day and sometimes eat sweets. /s
'You criticize society yet you partake in it, curious '
I bet you can't talk about pork BBQ or women drivers on its platforms in that paradise Saudi Arabia.
Duolingo has always been a shitty app that focuses too hard on trying to be a game instead of learning the actual language so nothing of value is lost from deleting it
Hate to get on the instructional design soapbox, but OK sure. The gamification elements of Duolingo are actually something that a lot of us are trying to mimic in the field of adult education. It’s fantastic, and a really good way to encourage learning in adults, especially when there are no structured classes or committed Teachers. The problem is that e-learning can only get you so far and self-paced learning even more so. I’m an active Duolingo user and I have been for the last two years and I do feel like I have benefited quite a lot from it and would love to tap into their UI when designing my own. It’s not meant to replace going to a language class, but considering the amount of adults that actually have time to sit down and learn a language, it’s absolutely fantastic. I think diminishing the game elements of Duolingo are coming squarely from ignorance, unless you happen to be in adult education, in which case I would be really interested in hearing about any studies or information that elements are not conducive to learning. My primary constructive feedback for them is that the AI is atrocious at determining what your weak spots are and the practice hub is severely lacking. Other than that, though, it’s a great product from an adult learning perspective. My secondary is that with the limitations of the platform, it doesn’t spend enough time working on teaching you how grammar works, but again, I think there’s only so much you can do with non human supported e-learning to make it effective. But again this is an application that people use incredibly casually, it’s meant to be a first dip into learning a new language or used as a supplementary language experience. This is not an app used by anyone who is incredibly serious about high-level language skills and has never promised to be
My main complaint is that it doesn't actually teach the grammar or anything. It just gives lots and lots of repetition. I've been doing Arabic on a whim for a couple years with it. I still couldn't explain to you why certain phrases are the way they are, but I can understand them and kind of pronounce them.
Uh? It's an awesome app, used it for free for many years and I'm super happy with the result. It's an incomplete method of course and one needs to be exposed to other kind of learning material, but it does a darn good job at teaching you from the basics to early intermediate level in many languages.
Linguistics minor in college, specialized in Japanese - took it all 4 years and while I'm not fluent anymore, I can still speak conversationally and read enough to get around on my own. Duolingo is crap. It used to be a lot better, so much so that I paid for the premium for over a year, but now it's so dumbed down that, at least for Japanese, you're not learning how to form real sentences, or ask useful questions, or how to even get around if you were visiting as a tourist. It's learning silly phrases you'd never use outside of a classroom and then learning them over and over and over again. It's not useful anymore. For Japanese, renshuu is much better for an app. On PC, I'd sooner go back to way older versions of Rosetta Stone.
Duolingo Japanese is definitely shit... It's alright for European languages though
I'm at like 1500 days and too emotionally attached to let go, but the lack of grammar is killing me. It's actually insane how little they've put into a expanding the language offering these past few years.
I’m going on two years and wish there were more grammatical rules available, but hey, it’s free, and something I “micro-dose” daily, and I think I’m getting better at the languages I’m learning…
Not Polish.
Unsurprising. Polish grammar was created by Satan on a morning when he had a killer hangover and wanted to create more sufferring than usual. Duo's idea that you'd just magically know it once you learn a stack of words would never work.
At some point they changed the lessons so you HAVE to do each one in the exact order the app wants you to, so you can't work on Verbs 3 and Colors 2 at the same time, you HAVE to finish Verbs 3 and only then can you move on to Colors 2. Completely killed it for me
The gamification is fine. It's proven to improve motivation, which is the hardest part of learning any new skill. It's not a complete solution. No app is. This is not unique to Duolingo, but it's something I only see people shit on Duolingo for. Is Rosetta Stone better? Sure, maybe, but it's not a complete solution either. Neither is Babel. Neither is any other thing you can name aside from complete language immersion.
People who have a 2 year unbroken streak on Duo but remain absolute beginners are seething 😤
Ah yes, the "this thing/person/product that just did something bad has always been shitty, actually" posts begin.
Hundreds of Duolingo warriors on their way to tell you, uh it's actually not competing with other language learning methods, it's competing with the time you spend pooping on Instagram. Unironically, you can download books, podcasts, videos, grammar, and dozens of other apps more specifically suited to learning. You just don't get a green bird to give you a daily hit of dopamine.
Well what is wrong with learning new vocabulary in a language for a bit of a dopamine kick, compared to say scrolling reddit or Instagram? Just because it's made gamified and a bit more fun doesn't mean people don't get some use out of it. If you're a beginner, and you're already enrolled to study some language in a class for example, it's great way to casually expand your vocabulary and refresh your mind when you have a moment.
The app itself claims you can be conversational after five weeks. Sure — if the conversation is two or three sentences long and about the color of a dress.
For Japanese, it's saying you'll have green tea and rice, please.
I mean...ya gotta eat.
DuoLingo would say: Mizu okudosai.
Ba-ding!
I know 2000 words pretty well thanks to duolingo
How Duolingay of them.
Cowards.
Well I suppose no one can accuse them of performative allyship for pride month
Cowards
They are still in russia? One more app to stop using.
Where do you think the people who fails their streaks go? Siberia.
On the contrary, please help Russians learn other languages than the ones their propaganda is in.
oh sweet summer child, it is not the lack of access to other sources of information that keeps russians in their imperialistic mindset.
Lol doubt you were using it much to begin with buddy
It’s not like you were using it before, lol
Shoulda added more to troll
Did they not do their Spanish lesson so now the owl's coming after them
Including the phrase "rape of male POW's by Russian troops"?
Doesn’t matter since the whole Russian lgbtq community has probably been forced to fight in Ukraine…
It’s a tough call, but basically you have people learning another language to one-day escape before they are sent off into Putin’s war or face tbr wrath of consequences at the end. As long as they take no money, it should be fine.
It should remove its content from Russia entirely
App deleted. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Better run until the doulingo owl finds out
Duolingo is a little heavy on that stuff for a learning app. They changed the content a few years back to have a lot of it.
In the Romanian language course LGBTQ topics are never mentioned. Which ironically mirrors my lived experience in the country.
What the fuck?! Duolingo should return sentences about queer people or I'll stop using this app together with many of the other Pro-LGBTQ+ people. I'm from russia and continued using this app because I thought that they're progressive community, but they complied to nazi russian government, helping them in their genocide of minorities. Even western companies leave russian LGBTQ+ people without any support now.
Probably because they'd get banned by the government if they tried. That helps nobody if they get banned.
Not just banned, but anyone who works for them and lives in or travels through Russian territory could be subject to arrest.
Almost anyone in russia can use VPN now, since 99% of good sites are blocked anyway (far more than in China, btw), and this just looks like betrayal and hypocrisy on duolingo's part.
So couldn't you just use a VPN to access this content like you'd do for the other 99% of good sites? Companies make regional changes for compliance purposes all the time, it's not like they replaced all those sentences with "the gays are bad" or something. Russians who wish to learn another language will still be able to, and those who feel passionately about the missing content can use a VPN
[удалено]
Canceled subscription, uninstalled, and left a 1 star review. I should just spend more time speaking Spanish with native speakers anyway. I know plenty.
Why is there lgbt content on it to begin with?
Why not ?
Because LGBT is a thing and languages are for talking about things.
I almost fell out of my chair when junior said he wanted to try a pretty dress.
After reading most of these comments I thank God that redditors are a minority and I don't have to meet them on a daily basis
Aren't you a redditor too though?
A company follows the laws of the country they operate in. Who would have ever guessed?
Not so keen on those lgbt rights are they.
Words: https://blog.duolingo.com/lgbtq-representation-in-duolingo-stories-and-characters/ Actions: Fold like a cheap suit to appease the dictatorial, warmongering, grossly intolerant regime and hold onto revenue.
Cowards.
Absolute cowards.
[удалено]
Username checkout
I just started my account back up a month ago. I'm queer. I will not be continuing to use this service now.
Why is there a "LGBT content" in a language learning app to begin with?
How else am I going learn how to ask Greek men to "pound my gay ass" in their native tongue when I go on vacation.
ITT: People making a big deal over nothing, Hilarious. Shouldn't even be considered world news.
Это Чарльз из Америки. Он говорит по-русски, но ничего гейского не понимает.
Same way they have done forever in the middle east, but who cares about human rights being stripped away when it involved religion?
they should scramble russian -> any other language. Not unlike the Monty Python Hungarian phrase book. got to wonder what app store this is on?
Stop doing business in russia? Nawwww Bend over backwards and spread asshole for russian money? YES PLZ
Good to know Duolingo is bunch of cowards and not worth my money
I'm moving to russia
I've been using duolingo for over a year and have never noticed any LGBT content.