Duolingo has been shit for ages, I cancelled my subscription long ago. Apparently they use AI instead of actual employees now lol.
Actually was a good app once upon a time but it’s been fully enshittified. Also I still can’t get over the fact that they offer a Klingon course but no Thai, Punjabi, Urdu, Persian, or Cantonese (for English speakers).
I started chinese this past year and I used HelloChinese with free Duolingo (+free Ankidroid) and it was useful cuz Duolingo offered more variety of sentences to fixate/practice any topic/grammar rule (which Duolingo never fucking explain lmao). Then I finished the HelloChinese course but the Duolingo one added a whole 45 chapters section recently, so now I’m doing HelloChinese Stories, free Anki and free Duolingo.
(I also still have DuChinese which system I really like but for some reason the stories I picked up were boring/weird compared to HelloChinese ones, but HelloChinese Stories system suck ass tbh)
Oh and once a week I enter Xiaohongshu to read comments and get slapped by how fucking far I am from real use, and very happy when I do understand things.
I hit the end of hellochinese and ended up moving on to superchinese it has modules through level 6 . I still like hello chinese’s “immersive lessons” a bit more though
It does take over a year and a half of intensive study to pass the tests they give to diplomats.
I know it’s gonna take me a decade at least
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They removed the discussion forums around when I did Duolingo, which already made it much worse.
ended my ~2000 day streak couple of months ago. Fuck this company
Duolingo has been one of the most aggressively pro AI companies since the arrival of LLMs. They cleared house of as many employees as possible years ago and their ceo is a mega piece of shit. A great example of a product that had value that was utterly ruined by profit motives; while there were a few years where it was a solid app for language learning with a gamefied approach duo now actively pursues engagement and pushing opportunities for creating purchases over education.
There are hundreds of stories of people who use it for years, even with paid subscriptions and daily practice, and find it teaches them very little. Granted this is on the learner to some degree but it’s also because the app pushes the learner to keep progressing/momentum up rather than do “boring” drills, it locks actual feedback behind not just paid subscriptions but the most expensive tier, etc.
Fuck duolingo. Don’t waste your money, don’t back that gross company, but most importantly don’t waste your time and energy to just increment a counter. Just use anki. Plenty of free decks and honestly making your own deck is a good exercise in and of itself. Remember the one good thing from duolingo: they are really seriously good at abusing the notifications system and bothering the shit out of you to get you to sign in to the app daily. Recreate that with some reminder app and build the habit to do language practice daily for 30-60ish minutes with an actual good resource (like anki and a recommended text for whatever language you’re learning like assimil, hsk, genki, etc but they all have pros and cons) and in 1 year you’ll be miles ahead of anyone using duolingo for the same timeframe
Don’t have much else to add so I’ll just say I agree. I can speak two languages (three if you count sign language) and am learning two others and I’d never recommend Duolingo to anyone.
so is the bird a collectible waifu now
Always has been
My plus subscription (for my parents and in laws) expires by Christmas and I can’t wait for the emails from Duolingo
I have the free version and most adds are “prevent dementia with this crossword/sudoku/tetris game”
My friend downloaded Duolingo just to get the collab stuff for his genshin impact account and I was like… “you already play through one of the less-‘‘generous’’ gacha games, and you want to grind the AI-infested lifeless spanish course in Duolingo?? I mean, that’s your free time so whatever—” because I had a 1.5 year streak and made the decision to stop because of the AI, forum and course changes sucking
Hahaha. I got this yesterday.
In July I was in China and there was a coffee shop called Luckin Coffee doing a promotion with duolingo
luckin is the best and duolingo doesn’t deserve the collab
