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.
One of the languages I am learning is an endangered native language, and it was super helpful to see knowledgeable people in the comments.
I’m pretty frustrated they removed dark mode as well, made it very hard to do a lesson before bed.
Don’t worry, you can upgrade to Duolingo Max for even more money and have the AI explain it. (Seriously.)
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.
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.
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)
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.
What language(s)? Lots of good free resources.
LanguageTransfer.org looks good but I haven’t tried it myself.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apparently they’ve already been incorporating it and it’s very inaccurate. I’ve decided to stop using them and have switched to LingoDeer and MemRise. Really pleased with how much better they are.
Why not Anki? Ankidroid works well and there are many great community decks for all kinds of languages (and other topics too BTW).
I’m not great with ONLY flashcards so I personally feed my brain a variety. Anki is great from what I’ve heard
I started out with memrise, as it was very accessible and I wanted to start learning Japanese. It was fun but it’s also very limiting. A mixture of Smouldering Durtles, Human Japanese and Ankidroid really accelerated things. And then the ginormous post-covid upswing in my industry came, with less colleagues than before and my brain got fried. Still trying to recover from that with therapy and whatnot. Yeah, I lost a lot of progress that way.
Any who, that was specific to learning Japanese. Wishing you success with your endeavors! Learning other languages is a huge Eye-opener for understanding other cultures better.
