Duolingo is very much on the Enshittification path, seems like they fired a number of translators and have the rest just proofreading AI.
For the interested, here’s the place where you can request your personal data and delete your account
I’ve seen quality drops of Duolingo, ever since their … IPO, sadly.
Anyway, here’s some ways you can milk the rest of the Duolingo before completely abandoning it.
- Use the web version, and type in all the answers if it’s possible. Selecting words are good for introducing new words (and reminder in case you forgot), but by typing it on your own, it’s faster to commit into memory.
- Use classroom mode to get unlimited hearts, create your own classroom and invite yourself in. I assume that Duolnigo will probably eventually stop this loophole
- Use search engine to search for the sentences you’re unsure of. No, don’t use machine translation, but search on the internet, and see if the sentence ever being used by the sites (news, academic, or personal homepage) using the target language.
I sadly still don’t know what other comparable free alternatives to Duolingo. Anki is great, but it’s largely flashcard for words, not sentences (unless you want to create your own deck). The others require subscription fee.
Other methods? Search for pdf of language grammar files, there are a lot out there. Some are godawful to read, especially those ‘Comprehensive Grammar Guide’ books. Some are amazing, e.g. Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese.
To add to the list of resources:
Todaku Books offer leveled difficulty, so even if you are starting out with Japanese there is something for you to read. The books are Creative Commons licensed, so don’t pay for them if you don’t want to.
Another option is rocket language. It seems to be a lot focused on developing conversational skills. It’s is paid but not subscription which I’m a fan of. You just buy the language you want. The first few lessons of a language are free if you want to try it. I’m test running it right now to start my switch away from Duolingo
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The popular language-learning app Duolingo cut 10 percent of its contracted translators last month amid a push to integrate generative AI into its services, multiple outlets have reported.
It’s another alarming turn in an increasingly AI-laden labor market in which company leaders continue to implement automated technology wherever they can — often, as in this case, at the cost of human jobs.
According to Bloomberg, the firings were doled out just a few weeks after Duolingo bragged in a November letter to shareholders that the company was harnessing AI to produce “new content dramatically faster.”
Duolingo also reportedly uses AI to generate some of the voices heard in various in-app language scripts and to prompt AI-generated feedback to users.
To make matters even more depressing: in a late December Reddit thread, a site user claiming to be one of the fired Duolingo translators alleged that their former team’s remaining contractors are now tasked with simply checking AI-generated text for errors.
Trusting translation AI — meanwhile pushing remaining contractors to fact-check presumably high numbers of those “dramatically faster” content outputs — may well come at the cost of such nuance, potentially flattening the learning process and rendering language robotic.
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Duolingo, the app to work on something every day for years and be no more skilled in that ability than if you did nothing. Now fewer people will have useless jobs which is a problem since in many ways it’s difficult to survive working a useful job.
I use Duolingo for German but I’d happily switch to something else if they’re going to pull this shit. I’ll often times take things from Duolingo and run them through the Translate app on iOS to see if there are differences. It’s not ideal, but I also have no allegiance to companies.
Clozemaster!
Coming from Duolingo I found it a bit overwhelming. I tried one collection, but as I already know Spanish a bit, it was too easy. Any tips?
Scroll down to the bottom and do the random collection.
What could be possibly go wrong?
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Welcome to Costco, I love you.
I noticed that they stopped giving free streak freezes two weeks ago. I have a 1200 day streak and my premium sub renews this month but I might just switch to another platform.
Edit: Canceled my subscription and left feedback about streak freezes. Three days later I get a free streak freeze. Not sure if it was a glitch or what. I’m gonna wait to confirm before renewing my sub.
I just got free streak freezes 11 days ago.
So perhaps it’s regional.
Free streak freeze? As in an option to stop an arbitrary counter that does nothing from being reset?
Humans are so massively susceptible to gamification. It’s nice for providing motivation, but it ends up being like an addiction the way companies leverage it.
I want my language learning app to have things like that, to help motivate me to keep coming back every day.
What other platform is available?
I’ve found Babble to be okay
Do you mean Babbel? Hadn’t heard of it, will keep it in mind
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Sadly it didn’t work for me. I liked the concept but gave up after two weeks because I didn’t enjoy the experience at all and didn’t seem to make any progress (Swiss learning Spanish). YMMV of course.
Yup, that’s the one
The duolingo format was never popular with polyglots. The game format makes it easy to feel like you did something which is a great thing, but the is the only pro people who have learned multiple languages find with it.
There is a lot of debate about what the best way to start is, but all agree that you need to interact with the real language in real world type settings (watching a movie in the language with subtitles is real world, though you need to make an effort to listen not just read!) They also agree that time is important, you need to study at least an hour every day to make progress.
You definetely do not need to study an hour every day to make progress.Otherwise everyone learning a second or third language in school would be entirely fucked. For me personally the gamification has helped a lot with learning the basic concepts and words of a language.
If you want to get to the level of a native speaker of course no app can do that and i guess somewhere around B1/B2 you need to use the language in a real setting like you said.
While technically you don’t need to study an hour every day, if you don’t put that much time into it you will eventually look back and see you have spend a year+ and don’t know anything and then give up. An hour a day means it is likely you have made progress between reviews of your life and thus the effort is worth continuing. At 10 minutes per day you will be dead before you know the language, so giving up is the right answer.
Enough people fail to learn a language in school as to consider the whole idea of school bunk. (but some do learn, and some schools are better than others - but the better ones all feature time as a factor)
But that is relative. Of course if you spend ten minutes a day you will have a smaller progress. But still you make steady progress. It took me two month now with Spanish to get from nada to being able to say how many siblings i have, where my parents are from, where i live and what job i have. It is not much, but last week i didn’t know how to express my workplace and by next week i’ll be able to express something more.
This is the same like for everything you learn or train. You want to be a concert violinist? Yeah better practice multiple hours a day. But just practicising ten minutes a day will still get you to be a decent player after a few years. Want to look like Schwarzenegger in his best times? You got to hit the gym regularly and on a proper plan and diet. You just want to be fit and build some muscles? Ten minutes of planks, pushups and situps and you’ll notice your shape changing after a few weeks.
As you said, with the small steady work you’ll hit a wall eventually, be it languages, physical training or instruments. And then you need to put more effort for really filling the gaps.
Anecdotally, a friend who’s pretty handy at languages uses more Memrise than Duolingo now. Similar sort of setup, but with a different style of delivery - more visual cues and a better repetition approach.
They also use AI.
in my experience, Memrise teaches you useful phrases much faster, while Duolingo drills you about horses eating blue apples and turtles wearing yellow hats.
To be fair, as a Duolingo hater myself, I do see the logic in teaching wacky phrases. It at least gives me the impression that it makes it easier to improvise sentences based on the grammar you’ve learnt by drilling “the bear should eat some cheese when it rains” or whatever.
Learn how to say “two tabs of acid” in 10 languages
I just tried it out and I like it a lot better than duolingo.
Duolingo is super gamified and you can’t keep practicing after you made a few mistakes. I just practiced for an hour with memrise and it was nice. There’s also video exercises in the app, and you can also practice chatting (with an AI probably?). I hope it holds up.
I would love to compare babbel too, but Arabic is not available there.
Just fyi you can keep practicing as much as you want in Duolingo, just tap the heart in the top right and click practice to earn more hearts.
Huh, I didn’t know that. I just tried it out and it worked.
I think I’ll stick with memrise for now.
Thanks though!
Awesome, I think I may go back to a language myself. Thanks for checking it out and letting us know!
Back in the day, I found Rosetta Stone to be a decent approach, it’s the only reason I still know how to say “the kid is under the plane” in Arabic, without barely knowing any Arabic (it was in the first free demo lessons). The context turned a bit dark after 9/11, though…
CDs are often available at libraries too!
I wasn’t quite sure what to think about this, so I’ve asked my local LLM. Seems it is fine.
Holy shit it’s on the money
It generally doesn’t have a high opinion of translators (note that the emojis here are inserted as path markers to help with prompt debugging - but everyting else is from the LLM):
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…soon to come to your favorite corporation’s C suite’s Windows 11 desktop’s Copilot assistant for empowering the synergies of staying relevant in a high stakes market environment.
Sayonara, Duolingo.
As a writer on the internet with no power to stop these companies from scraping my work, you now want to teach me using someone else’s stolen words and teach someone English using mine. Go fuck yourself.
The circle of life continues, and literacy goes down. AI cannot proofread, it merely says “these letters usually go with these”. AI screws up, people get taught shit language, they use it, it gets used as training data, rinse and repeat.
Well language is a fluid thing. If more and more people get taught shit language, the language will change to match. We have far worse problems on this planet :)
I do think these AI companies grabbing what they can without giving anything back is a problem though. In my view content creators are a bit hypocritical too though. When Google scraped the internet verbatim (viewable in google cache) they didn’t mind because it gave them discoverability. Now they suddenly do care because they don’t benefit directly. Really, the stance should have been made earlier. But I do agree it should be stopped. Or content creators compensated.
The Extinction level meteor can’t come soon enough.
Time to pack it in and give some other microorganism a shot at the evolutionary big-leagues. Maybe they’ll do better.
Assuming we take the Halo lore as a matter of fact and are not projecting human faults to the Covenant: I guess not really.
As soon as monarchs or religious leaders emerge it’s game over.
And I’d guess there will always be someone more rich than the other one and be in charge of something more resulting in something like a capitalist system.Sadly true.
Absolutely the large language models are over glorified word predictors that get it wrong. I’d go so far as to say, they get it wrong nearly all the time.
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Duolingo isn’t a good resource for learning a language, it’s focus is user retention
Innovative Language and Lingodeer are better
Duolingo isn’t a good resource for learning a language, it’s focus is user retention
These two statements contradict each other. To learn a language you must practice it every day, week after week, month after month. It’s an appropriate application of addictive game mechanics, because our motivation doesn’t last long: 1-3 months for most people.
Duolingo might not be the best place to learn some languages (e.g. German), but it can be a very helpful tool for everyday practice. And stuff like streaks, leagues, and other things are rather helpful.
An advent calendar has user retention but it’s hardly a tool for learning languages
Mate, just learn how to admit when you’re wrong. That’s a useful skill in life.
Does that not disprove your claim that user retention and learning contradict?
My experience is that duolingo is a good component of language learning but is bad as a whole package. I have that, a flash card app, daily word games, and a YouTube channel for a children’s TV network in my language. None of them individually would teach me the language, but collectively they reinforce each other and fill in many gaps. Alas, neither innovative language nor lingodeer have the language I want at the moment.
What are the flash card and word game apps?
I use DuoCards for flash cards. The word games are FOCLACH (basically wordle in Irish), litreach (guess words from people saying them in 3 Irish dialects) and seafóid (basically Waffle in Irish). The games are all browser based apps so not in app stores, but DuoCards is.
ETA while DuoCards has built in flash cards, I usually make my own based on the words I learn from all the other sources, and get the translation and grammar details from teanglann.ie, tearma.ie, or nualeargais.ie
Neat thank you
What makes these two better?
More lesson focused than game
lingodeer explains the grammar and innovative does a classroom approach with video lessons
But, retention means repetition, so you learn more, right? Not trying to defend Duolingo but I’ve been enjoying it for the last 3 years or so. Almost got 1000 day streak and my Spanish is getting better.
It is fair to say it helps people stick with it but it ends up avoiding harder facets and puts more focus on memorizing rather than learning
Well, proper language learning is more about memorization than understanding. People learn language as a child through repetition, and the understanding comes later.
it’s not really memorization, children don’t learn languages by sitting there desperately burning every word into their memory, they hear it repeated over and over and the brain just passively soaks it up and eventually starts making sense of it.
And i’m pretty sure this is why people who learn to speak languages in school are generally terrible at them, it’s shoved down their throat and the brain is given no time to process understanding the language before trying to speak it.
I’ve found that my ability to speak languages i learnt in school has become significantly better a couple years after the fact, presumably from my brain having had time to process the information.Just because people learn that way as a child, that doesn’t mean that it’s the best way to learn.
I’ve learned more with Duolingo than any other resource to be fair.
I need some more copium. Not Again :'(
This time last year, I could still see the forum posts to related lessons when I’d get something wrong. Now, when I’m told my answer is incorrect, I have nothing to go off.
I’m trying to learn the baby steps of Korean. Being able to quickly read what I did incorrectly (and why, because usually people eould explain the grammar) was great. I hate that it’s gone, and I’m considering making Busuu my main app
I think a lot about writing a story about some sort of Enshittification Avenger. So when a reasonably good service decides to enshittify, the avenger breaks into their board’s house and beats the living shit out of them.
Honestly, when it comes to duolingo, you’re probably best off sticking to Spanish or stuff like that.
I tried out a course in my native language, and it really wasn’t great beyond the basics. Loads of mistakes.
And if you’re going to be paying for that, you might as well buy (or pirate) a proper Spanish course.
Spanish or French and only if you speak English. Everything else might as well not exist.
That’s a bit over the top, in my opinion. I’ve tried plenty of courses, and Duolingo is pretty good to get a hang of the basics of a language.
I’d say, in my experience, the hardest part of learning a language is getting started, and I feel Duolingo is perfect just for that. To get deeper knowledge and become more comfortable, one should probably switch once they start feeling more comfortable with the alphabet (if there is a specific one), and with the basic vocabulary and grammar.
EDIT: Forgot to add but another advantage of Duolingo, is that it’s also great to get a taste and basic feel for different languages; and that can be especially useful for someone who is looking to learn a new language but can’t quite decide on one.
Been using a multifaceted approach to cramming Italian in my little brain:
- Anki flashcards (this is my main thing)
- conversational pod casts
- movies, shows and music
- lastly, Duolingo
Any suggestions on what I could be using instead of Duolingo?
The podcasts and other media consumption will probably be what most benefit you in the long term, and something like Anki and Duolingo I think are good complements for that.
Any alternatives to Duolingo that I think would be worth replacing it, would have to be something that is more focused on the specific language that you are learning, i.e. Nicos Weg for German (and I don’t personally know any for Italian, sorry). Most other general language learning websites/apps would probably be running into the same issues and limitations as Duo, and which one to use depends most on personal preference; however, there is one I’ve heard of called Italki (there may be more) which basically acts as a language exchange app, where you connect talk to people who natively speak the language you are learning, and they can give you input. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve heard good things.
Other than that, you have certified online/in person courses, but obviously those are not as convenient as Duo, and they cost money (probably significantly more than even a Duo subscription).
EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention, but one thing which I personally enjoy is looking up and trying to read children’s books; and I mean like “90% picture & 10% text” books which are made for parents to read to their very young kids. And as you get more comfortable, try finding and reading increasingly harder books/stories online.
I notice Duolingo is your only form of output. Is that a conscious decision? Otherwise I’d second the recommendation for something involving speaking to someone with the patience to, or who agrees to, have a conversation with you.
Yeah, it is at the moment for the most part. My girlfriend is fluent in Spanish, and I have talked to her about general concepts that overlap.
We decided after I started getting deeper into the language that we should maybe not do that as much so I don’t pick up bad or flat out wrong habits.
I myself am of an Italian descent, however the relatives I have that speak it either live in Italy still and are estranged or sadly have passed away. There is an Italian grocery store near me, and I have heard them speaking it so I was hoping to strike a couple friendships up over time there.
Well best of luck with it!
