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.
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.