- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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If you looking to replace dualingo, check with your local library, they may offer free access to different language learning apps. I was able to get Rosetta Stone for free using my library. And they also have access to Muzzy and Transparent language.
Duolingo uninstalled
It’s okay. We can all play that game. I’ve replaced my use of Duolingo with AI.
Pro tip: have as your “system prompt” in your LLM of choice “at the end of every query, include me a short Swedish relates to my prompt”. No need for Duolingo.
At least AI can give you actual grammar lessons
Duolingo is a tragedy. They really quickly realized that you don’t make money teaching things - you make it on retention and gamification.
Mango languages is great if your library has a subscription. I believe the US’s foreign service materials are also really good, if you want effective but boring.
I was so upset last year when they got rid of the comment section. There were often helpful explanations for WHY you conjugate the word that way, or how native speakers might use a different word.
Yeah, the comment section was amazing…and then they came out with “max”, where you get “explain my answer” for a premium, powered by a [notoriously fallible] LLM. This is the definition of enshitification.
Literally canceled because of that change. Fuck them.
This “AI first” thing was the last straw for me, but ever since I noticed that the comment section was gone there’s been a bad taste in my mouth. I wonder how many of us there are.
I’m pretty frustrated they removed dark mode as well, made it very hard to do a lesson before bed.
Duolingo? Mine still has dark mode. Maybe just for subscriptions?
One of the languages I am learning is an endangered native language, and it was super helpful to see knowledgeable people in the comments.
That’s honestly enraging!? Such data can be greatly valuable for learners, and the native speakers’ community, and linguistics.
It was an amazing resource. For them just to nuke it completely was very frustrating.
Yeah but fuck learning, there’s money to be made, amirite?
i encountered some people that spoke some MAYAN. would like to learn it, because thier pictographs are interesting.
That’s cool as heck.
Never used it but that sounds like such a neat concept.
Does anyone know of any free language learning apps that have a comment section? (And a user base that utilizes the comment section, of course.)
Don’t worry, you can upgrade to Duolingo Max for even more money and have the AI explain it. (Seriously.)
Yeah, I saw that. I have the family plan (some people in the house go through a lot of hearts (mistakes)) and still have to see ads for Max.
I don’t know how good this feature was on Duolingo, but there’s a site/app called HiNative that does a really good job at this sort of thing.
that looks cool. Thank you for pointing it out!
The gameification part was good, it made it easier to keep up the habbit, though I recently got locked out for no apparent reason so apparently they just outright want to fail? Any good free alternatives? (I wasn’t using the paid version)
What language(s)? Lots of good free resources.
Here’s a website with those FSI courses I referenced earlier, as well as Peace Corps training materials. This is going to be the boring route. Drill drill drill, but you get good at it.
As a general strategy - on the Omniglot forums a billion years ago there was a method called Listen-Read which I think does wonders for me. You pick a longer book, preferably one you have enjoyed and read already in English. You get a copy of that book in English and your target language, as well as audiobook (let’s go with say, French), then you listen to the audio book in French while reading the book in English, then switch to listening to an English audiobook while reading the French book, then the audiobook in French while reading the French.
Librivox and Project Gutenberg are godsends. I did Candide this way, and part of Les Miserables. This is obviously less immediate fun/dopamine satisfying than Duolingo is, but will teach you to read better than Duolingo will. It’s not great at expressive language - while I can read Proust, my « je voudrais un Diet Coke » was not well received in Paris.
If you have a language in mind I can probably point you in some other directions.
Any good free alternatives?
You won’t like the idea but…
spoiler
pirating a textbook from Libgen/Anna’s Archive
Duolingo was shit for learning, for me at least.
So i left rather quickly, then came back hoping i could pick up some more Italian and noticed they summomed another paid tier. I wonder how many tiers they can summon up until they stop existing.
Tell me more about Mango library subscriptions? How would one determine?
Your local library may have a Mango subscription plan for card holders. You might be able to find it on their website but a librarian would definitely know.
It’s not gamification that’s the issue. That aspect really held my attention and gave me consistency.
It’s the push to a pay-to-win model that made me quit. They made the challenges harder and harder to complete without using boosts, and to use the boosts you had to use gems. And gems were really hard to get unless you bought them with real money. It doesn’t matter if you have a super subscription (or whatever it’s called), you still had to pay to get the gems.
And the prices for the gems were just as predatory and the disgusting mobile gaming industry. Never should there be an option to spend over $20 for in-game consumables, nevermind over $100. It’s sick.
There are at least some Duolingo courses that use AI voices exclusively and they are shit.
On the one hand, having an AI to talk to sounds like something that could be good. Getting a real person to talk to every user would be impossible. I just don’t think the technology is going to meet expectations any time soon.
They do this in the French course. Half the time it still can’t understand what I’m saying. Maybe that’s on me, but still. C’est la vie.
If you decide to cancel your subscription and delete your account, they give a warning when deleting that says you need to cancel your subscription SEPARATELY. Just a heads up for anyone thinking of leaving like I did.
“Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees”
Except for the contract employees. Fuck those people.
In 2012, we bet on mobile. […] That decision helped us win the 2013 iPhone App of the Year and unlocked the organic word-of-mouth growth that followed. Betting on mobile made all the difference. We’re making a similar call now, and this time the platform shift is AI.
I think this is some sort of fallacy, not sure which tho. Maybe a hasty generalization? “We bet on mobile twelve years ago and won, so if we bet on AI now we’ll also win.”
"past performance is not indicative of future results¨
Except for the contract employees. Fuck those people.
I mean technically the contractors are not employees
Yeah, like, I think this is a bad move for Duolingo as a company, since their code quality will rapidly go downhill with the current state of AI generated code.
But also, if you are a contract employee, you should be prepared to be let go at any moment. That’s sort of the whole point of being a contract employee - you are only employed for the contract. It isn’t unethical in anyway for a company to not rehire employees who knew up front that they might not be rehired.
Technically my shit is edible, technically.
So they’ve killed themselves before adding Armenian.
Makes sense.
As an Armenian with family murdered by the Turks. What was the point of this?
Trying to help Duolingo add Armenian is something I’ve read about in 2018 or something like that, and it’s still there. They are very firmly not interested.
Well that’s some BS. Why the fuck don’t they have Armenian? Are they Turkish run?
I dunno, but there were plenty of volunteers. Eastern Armenian is far from a dead language after all. Especially when comparing to Icelandic or Welsh. Those are awesome languages too, though, alongside Coptic and Assyrian.
Well, I prepaid for a year about 2 months ago. I’m gonna use it, but not renew. Fuck em
Could probably ask them for a refund based on their significant change in how services are provided.
It’s kind of a gray area for me, because I did split a family plan with a friend. I’ll swallow my shame for the next 10 months, but that’s the end of the line.
uninstalls Duolingo
leaves 1-star app review
They have been shilling max so hard, the practice tab now is hidden to make room for the Video Call tab (Max only) and a tab to subscribe to Max or upgrade your plan.
Probably won’t renew this year. I have a 1500+ day streak, but a good chunk of that is just doing a single quick practice lesson every day, the gamification got me and I haven’t learned much new stuff in probably a year.
I learned enough Italian to use it when I went on a two week trip in 2023, but the problem with Duo’s lessons is nothing is conversational. I would be able to say/ask something, understand the response, but then not really have the ability to keep the conversation going.
The differences in languages after so many years is also a bit disheartening, I had a friend show me all the tools available in their French course that I didn’t have, it made their Italian lessons look like vocab flash cards in comparison.
I am not a big LLM user, but I did try to use it as a conversation partner, which worked alright. I haven’t looked in a while, but my biggest issue was it would speak too fast and none of the available tools had a way to slow it down outside of telling it to add ellipses after each word.
i cancelled my subscription and told them why
Duolingo has enshittified so much over the last few years.
Even if I had the ability to become a millionaire tech founder, I don’t think I’d want to because every “I want to make learning new languages free and easy for everyone” becomes a “I have to drive 3% more ad revenue this quarter by charting my users’ every bowel movement”.
I suspect the reality of being a rich tech bro is watching your adult self slowly consume your own childhood dreams, aspirations, and soul.
Enshittification is not driven by the founders (mostly, fuck Zuckerberg). It’s driven by greedy investors who want their billion dollar unicorn payout and who who will risk a hundred company failures to get it.
A lot of tech companies that manage to resist outside investors are doing just fine.
It’s ultimately driven by the lack of constraints in their market segment. Tech companies will screw over investors as well if they can get away with it.
But I was more talking about how the founder of Duolingo professed specific, world-bettering goals when he started the company that – if held sincerely – would make him ashamed of himself because most of what the company does isn’t in the service of them.
The tech world is rife with founders that ultimately met that exact same fate.
Holding on to your goals is hard when you owe loan sharks half a billion dollars and they want their payday
Extreme wealth incubates and breeds narcissism.
Well it makes sense if you think about it.
You invest a million dollar in 100 companies, 95 fail, 4 makes 10 million each. If the last one hits at least 60 million you are even, anything above is pure profit. Basically just throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks.
That doesn’t “make sense” at all, it’s insane. If we end the billionaire class and distribute wealth more evenly productivity and efficiency would go waaaay up because the people managing money will actually care about it instead of setting it on fire.
I canceled Super and uninstalled when they started telling me to get Max. My friends canceled and uninstalled today because of this news.
We might be a small minority but I do giggle at the thought that Duolingo is gonna have to build AI customers soon because nobody will want to use it.
I’ve been using the free version almost exclusively for over a decade. It continually gets shittier all of the time.
The latest thing is you can’t even practice the language to earn more hearts to continue your lesson, you have to now watch ads. I think it’s rather emblematic of their approach overall… it’s not about learning it’s about more eyeballs for ads, unless you fork over a recurring payment for increasingly mediocre lessons.
Yeah. I’m on a two year streak. Pretty close to letting it go and moving to something else. The free version is getting completely garbage.
Let’s also replace the customers by AI, that way the whole system will really be “AI first” and self-sufficient.
it’s a matter of time (or more likely has already happen) where an AI company ends up having only AI users, it makes money be selling adds to show to the users, which are all AI bots, and then selling those bots as user data.
then said company celebrates that it has no humans involved making a shit ton of profit.
So Twitter?
Afraid to find out what an AI Karen would be like.
I have found Duolingo much, much less useful for language learning than Language Transfer. The latter actually helps you learn to think in another language rather than memorize things (which is still useful, but not nearly as much).
Short if total immersion, I have found nothing better than LT.
Holy crap that website needs some serious work, on mobile at least
Thanks! I’ll have to check this out
Dreaming Spanish, if you are trying to learn Spanish. I seriously think it is the future of language learning, bar none.
The problem I have with finding an alternative is that most just offer some five to ten largest languages. Want to learn Spanish, French, Russian, or Chinese? There are hundreds of both free and paid services available. Want to learn Hungarian, Irish, or Finnish? It’s Duolingo and a scant handful of sites specific to that language.
Thanks, I will check it out:)
From the first look: is this just audio or also written practices?
Just audio. But it is presented in a way that helps you to learn, rather than just remember. If you give it a try, I promise that you will be shocked at how you can retain the knowledge.
It isn’t enough on its own, however. You need to reinforce the lessons by speaking to people, reading, and/or TV and movies.