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
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.
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.
Check out Mango. I was able to get a free subscription through my library.
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
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.
