[HN Gopher] Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
___________________________________________________________________
Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4
Author : atlasunshrugged
Score : 229 points
Date : 2023-03-14 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.duolingo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.duolingo.com)
| coding123 wrote:
| LOL, I saw this first, I was like - how the heck are they using
| GPT-4, did I miss something, was that released? Then I went back
| and sure enough, its the top HN item with 1200 comments lol
| karaterobot wrote:
| Does it actually say how much Duolingo Max would cost? I do not
| see anything in that article or on their website. I don't have
| the app, maybe it's already live and pricing is available there.
|
| I deleted Duolingo years ago when it felt like I knew everything
| it had to teach me, but was still far from fluent in the
| language. I assume it's gotten better, and would consider trying
| this new feature.
| vhanda wrote:
| It doesn't. Neither does the website.
|
| An article from Yahoo [0] says it's "$29.99 per month or
| $167.99 per year", but they don't link to a source.
|
| [0] - https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/duolingo-launches-
| subscrip...
| Balgair wrote:
| Woah, a dollar a day. That's a lot to ask from an otherwise
| free app. 3x the current price of a paid version
| Metacelsus wrote:
| Why only iOS?
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| iOS is always first with new features in Duolingo. And from
| what I've heard from other sources, iOS users are more willing
| to pay $$$.
| danpalmer wrote:
| The dev time on this must be very fast, given that it probably
| makes sense to focus on one platform first.
|
| Also review times with Apple are consistently 24-48 hours, but
| Google Play review times are (sadly) not from what I've heard
| from developers. If the whole timescale is 2-4 weeks, that may
| be a deal breaker.
| vhanda wrote:
| Duolingo seems like they have separate teams for iOS, Android
| and Web.
|
| Their iOS team seems to be the one who experiment the most with
| new features, and then they either get discarded or finally
| make it to Android, and then in a few years to the Web.
|
| It is really annoying, as when I used Duolingo (stopped because
| of the new update in Jan), I would often use all three
| platforms, and have the worst experience.
| weatherlight wrote:
| This seems like a smart move in general, for Duolingo and a not-
| evil use of language models.
| soco wrote:
| Some would argue the Duolingo owl is an evil creation, now with
| enhanced powers.
| goldcd wrote:
| "Ssssh! The owl might be listening"
|
| _glances at phone with panic in his eyes_
| antx wrote:
| Judging from the new ad, it seems the owl has now embraced
| its dark side to the fullest...
| thewebcount wrote:
| I have severely mixed feelings about Duolingo. I can't imagine
| paying more than I already do for the "Super" option. If you're
| trying to learn Spanish or French, it seems like a pretty full-
| featured app.
|
| Unfortunately, I'm trying to learn Greek and every aspect of it
| is sub-par compared to other languages. It doesn't even read you
| questions correctly. (It uses flat intonation as if it's saying a
| statement.) There are no vignettes like in Spanish and French
| where you watch a conversation and then summarize what was said.
| They just throw in new concepts with no instruction whatsoever.
| So you see a word that you know is a verb, but the ending is one
| you've never seen before. There's no chart or examples, or even
| explanation that "now we're going to teach you past tense," or
| whatever. Just suddenly there's a bunch of new stuff you don't
| understand and you have to go to the Internet to look up what the
| hell is happening. God forbid you ask a question on the forum.
| The Greek mods are stereotypically rude and controlling. Nothing
| is ever the fault of the app, it's always the user's fault, even
| when native English speakers are telling them, "The English
| translation of this sentence doesn't make sense and is not valid
| English."
|
| So yeah, I'm definitely not going to pay for an AI that is likely
| giving wrong advice anyway.
| lock-the-spock wrote:
| Not relevant to the discussion but possibly for you: I
| discovered this 100% free no-signup audio-only course for Greek
| through a previous HN post. Amazing approach (like Michel
| Thomas but more charming and modern and free!):
|
| https://www.languagetransfer.org/about
|
| Of all the language apps I used Duolingo has by far been the
| least useful. I've spent hundreds of hours but took barely
| anything away (for FR, ES) If you must pay go to a proper app
| with structured learning, like babble or something language
| specific.
| jddj wrote:
| Languagetransfer taught me Spanish about 10 years ago, really
| excellent approach.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Hey, thanks for this recommendation!
|
| I'm Greek and I've never heard of LanguageTransfer before
| (it's even created by another Greek, Michalis). I used for a
| few months the free tier of Duolingo in the past, but it
| wasn't to my liking and although it helped a bit, I can't say
| it taught me Spanish (perhaps the paid version is better).
|
| For sure I'm going to try the free Spanish course from
| LanguageTransfer ;-)
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| You shoud google for duolingo grammar notes. You'll find some
| for every course I imagine. The same people who originally
| created those courses made unofficial wikia or other pages and
| populate unofficial discords.
|
| You just have to know to look for them...
| ted_bunny wrote:
| That's ridiculous. DL makes some really bafflingly stupid
| choices that make its product near-useless for serious study.
| naet wrote:
| I occasionally do Duolingo for a little Japanese practice but I
| don't think it does a good job there either. The Japanese
| learning experience seemed far worse than the Spanish
| experience. Maybe it's because I knew more Japanese and passed
| in to the higher levels, or because I'm more aware of the
| errors, but I think it's more due to the fact that Japanese is
| further from English and Duolingo wasn't designed around it. It
| is missing tools around Kanji and regularly "speaks" using the
| wrong reading (since characters can be pronounced differently
| in different contexts). There are no tools around learning
| characters or grammar, no short stories or other supplemental
| exercises, etc. The language pack feels like a bit of an
| afterthought rather than a core offering.
|
| The translations already aren't great, and I can't imagine
| polluting it with some unvetted AI translations would help at
| all.
| ben_w wrote:
| Oh, I see the Greek course has gotten worse.
|
| Before the UX update at the end of last year, I was trying
| Arabic (something like 2 years of daily lessons and I still
| couldn't manage the alphabet), Greek (felt worse than before
| the preceding UX change but I couldn't say why exactly),
| Esperanto (the audio sounded like it was done by a volunteer at
| their own home?), Dutch, German, and Spanish.
|
| I'm still doing German, because I live here now, but I gave up
| on all the rest the day that update happened.
|
| Oh my goodness the voices and animations are annoying. Whenever
| the young boy appears I have to mute my speakers.
|
| I'm sure they're hyper-focused on "engagement metrics" to the
| detriment of all else, just like how old-school OK Cupid turned
| into just another Tinder clone.
| ted_bunny wrote:
| I think OKC was just a catch-and-kill by Match. When they
| bought them, little of substance changed afterwards, and it's
| just slowly decaying. Shame.
| rcarr wrote:
| This is funny because in Spanish, the young boy (Junior) and
| his father (Eddy) are both absolutely fucking hilarious. But
| I 100% get what you're saying because I did some of the
| French lessons, almost identical content and Junior came
| across as snooty. It really does go to show that choosing the
| right voice actor makes a world of difference. The Spanish
| casting is absolutely phenomenal but the other languages
| don't seem to quite nail it. Part of me wonders however if
| this is actually a cultural difference. Perhaps I personally
| find the Spanish ones phenomenal because I am personally more
| aligned with Spanish speaking values, culture, humour and
| communication methods than other more reserved cultures such
| as those of German and French.
| bundze wrote:
| I've been successfully using ChatGPT for learning German in the
| last month or so. It does a great job enriching my plain B1 level
| sentences with some fancy verbs or adjectives and pointing out my
| mistakes.
| dotancohen wrote:
| How does that work? Do you just tell it that you are learning
| and to correct your mistakes, then converse with it in German?
| Does it infer your German level from your own chats with it?
| bundze wrote:
| Yes, you can tell it that you are learning the language at
| the beginning of the conversation in plain English and ask it
| to correct any mistakes. You can easily start a bilingual
| conversation with ChatGPT, some random example here: https://
| www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/112xgp2/practicing...
|
| To show you what I meant when I mentioned "enriching
| sentences", I've just generated an example of a B1-level
| English sentence improved by ChatGPT.
|
| User: Please improve this sentence: "Many people want to
| learn languages because they like to travel"
|
| ChatGPT: "Learning languages is a popular pursuit because it
| enables people to travel and explore different cultures with
| greater ease."
|
| It works similarly with other languages.
|
| As for my German level, it wasn't evaluated by ChatGPT but by
| an external assessment exam and I only mentioned it to add
| some more context to the story. Frankly, I probably wouldn't
| trust ChatGPT's assessment in this regard.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Terrific, Danke! Viel Erfolg!
| braingenious wrote:
| This looks great! I would like to know how much this costs
| though.
| akhosravian wrote:
| Would love to use duolingo, but they have no interest in
| supporting iranian languages. I've never really seen a clear
| answer for why. They have about 200 million native speakers
| worldwide. Persian, Pashto, Kurdish are the largest.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Hmm, I guess what they're interested mostly is how many people
| are interested in learning Iranian languages. Not saying that
| the number is small, but I'd guess it's maybe too small for
| them to matter?
| Pelayu wrote:
| I don't think this argument holds as they added languages
| with a very low amount of speakers such as Navajo, Hawaiian,
| Guarani and Maori and even High Valyrian and Klingon. I would
| hazard a guess that more people would find use in Iranian.
|
| (For the record, I'm not saying the above languages shouldn't
| be included, rather that the argument doesn't hold up)
| SnooSux wrote:
| There was a point where Duolingo was trying to teach languages
| including endangered ones as their primary goal. But it feels
| like every year they're moving more towards making money as
| their main main objective. I'm not optimistic about them
| expanding their list of languages. Most of their lesser known
| languages are getting fewer updates than Spanish, French,
| Japanese. It makes business sense to focus your hours on
| features and languages people are actually using but it's still
| frustrating thinking of what Duolingo could have been and used
| to promote vs what it turned out to be.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| It's not just about the money. You can make an argument that
| they want to serve as many people as possible in the best
| possible way, and that means concentrating their limited
| resources on the languages people want to learn most.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I don't think Persian is out of the question and has been
| demanded a lot. They still add new courses every year, even
| smaller languages like Tagalog. I wouldn't be surprised that
| Persian is on their roadmap somewhere.
|
| But it's harder because the writing system is tricky. They
| teach arabic and probably that was already pretty difficult to
| implement. Persian will also need customizations similar to
| arabic.
| danudey wrote:
| If I had to guess, I would say it's probably something like not
| enough demand from non-Iranian speakers to learn Iranian
| languages.
| Pelayu wrote:
| This is the same for me but with Basque. People have been
| campaigning to get a course published for years now, with
| volunteers willing to help, but for whatever reason they
| refuse; which is a shame as from a linguistic point of view it
| is a very rare and interesting language and culture and would
| help people in Spain a lot in my opinion.
| aeturnum wrote:
| This is interesting because my impression is that LLMs perform
| poorly on non-english languages[1]. This is likely 'just' a
| corpus size problem - but it's not like that is going to be fixed
| any time soon. That said, at least in language instruction
| there's a lot of meta material that will be helpful. I wonder how
| Duolingo is detecting when GPT-4 is hallucinating.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/asmelashteka/status/1630966233217605632
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| LLM outputs in Standard Chinese are fluent and coherent but the
| grammar style and choice of words are clearly non-native. I
| think the source training material just isn't as comprehensive
| as English, and contemporary Chinese Internet is packed full of
| latin abbreviations and obscure homophones/wordplay due to its
| evolution under severe censorship.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Awesome observation re: censorship. Last I looked into
| training sets, Chinese and English were the frontrunners by
| far in available corpus size, and benefit from a certain
| amount of government-enforced-homogeneity (a standard mode is
| taught in compulsory education).
|
| Arabic is safe from automation due to its limited exposure to
| the open web and extreme variability of dialects, and
| Icelandic will remain obscure due to sample size and the fact
| that they mostly speak English online.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Formal text wise Chinese is still a very comprehensive
| language. However in terms of user-generated content it has
| degraded severely especially in the past ~5 years. Internet
| slangs in English can be confusing too, but users have a
| choice in whether to use them or not. On Chinese social
| media using abbreviations/homophones has become practically
| baseline for certain common terms because these platforms
| do so much preemptive self-censorship due to the
| government's near-invisible red line that fluctuates
| constantly.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| The islandic government is apparently partnering with
| OpenAI to "preserve their language". I suppose they have a
| GPT-4 customized for that language.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| oh neat, thanks for the heads up
| og_kalu wrote:
| They don't perform poorly (depends on how much corpus training
| the language received). https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13349. The
| important thing is you don't need an equivalent number of
| tokens for an equivalent performance. So even though GPT-3 only
| had 1.8 % french by word count, it can speak fluent french.
| There's positive transfer between languages.
|
| Also GLM-130B trained on equal English/Chinese (200b tokens
| each. 400b total) speaks both just fine.
| gwern wrote:
| The GPT-4 post/paper covers this: GPT-4 does other languages
| excellently, and performs on par in many other languages with
| GPT-3.5 in English. As people found that useful...
| Toutouxc wrote:
| For what it's worth, ChatGPT is able to hold a meaningful
| conversation in Czech (pretty difficult, latin script, ~11M
| speakers). I can almost tell it's a bot, but it could also be a
| PR person from a big corporation who can't even afford to talk
| like a normal person anymore.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| ChatGPT's and Bing's German is flawless.
| slkdjfalzkdfj wrote:
| The Twitter thread you linked is just somebody pointing out
| poor performance in Tigrinya. That doesn't mean it performs
| poorly on all non-English languages. It's performing poorly on
| the languages with little representation in the corpus, but
| those are also the languages that are least likely to be
| learned on Duolingo. Duolingo users mainly learn languages like
| English, Spanish, French, German, etc. and the models do just
| fine with these languages.
| chaosprint wrote:
| It's a wise move. It's better to embrace it rather than get
| replaced.
|
| But I'd wait for it to become more powerful by including the
| whisper model or the similar.
| salimmadjd wrote:
| With GPT-4, I'm thinking if Duolingo has fundamentally been
| reduced to a game.
|
| The key network effect left is pretty much a leaderboard that
| fuels their daily retention. So any existing game company could
| potentially create another gamified learning app as part of their
| game pools.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| There are lots of educational games or apps around language
| learning. Nobody is as successful as Duolingo. Or as useful as
| Duolingo, at least in whatever Duolingo chooses to do.
|
| I don't even think they think being compared to a game is a bad
| thing. What makes Duolingo the best in its field is the content
| and the varied exercises with a high quality.
| ted_bunny wrote:
| Yes, the gamification is the major positive feature that gets
| people to stick to it.
|
| But the exercises aren't varied or high quality. Try drilling
| a particular skill and you'll soon memorize all their
| sentences, to a degree that it trivializes the practice. Not
| to mention they're absolutely riddled with errors that
| strongly imply they don't even run the translations by a
| native English speaker. Voice exercises with numbers are
| simply broken in Russian. And all the comments are locked,
| with many of the complaints ignored.
| maCDzP wrote:
| They should combine it with Whisper so I can talk to some AI in a
| random language and just talk about nonsense.
|
| Also awesome training data since my pronunciation would suck?
|
| I am a bit too embarrassed to talk in a new language but staying
| with an AI would be ok.
| gdprrrr wrote:
| Try https://www.quazel.com/
| x0x0 wrote:
| I was coming here to say this.
|
| No connection besides being a happy user.
| djcannabiz wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation, this looks really cool!
| ahoy wrote:
| Surely this is less cost effective (and probably less effective
| in general) than just hiring a convo partner on italki or
| something.
| dazc wrote:
| 'Duolingo Max is a new subscription tier above Super Duolingo...'
|
| I don't think this is going to enthuse anyone who's already
| regretting subscribing to your video game?
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| As a Duolingo user who has refused to upgrade, if they roll the
| two into one it might entice me, but not for another higher
| tier above what they've got. But I guess there's a subset of
| super-users who may be keen.
| lsllc wrote:
| To be fair, Super Duolingo is pretty good. Dropping the Ads
| alone is totally worth the subscription if you're a daily
| user (it's the only app I use daily aside from Messages,
| Email etc).
|
| I'm very curious about Max though ... the explain your answer
| is something I'm really interested in to help me understand
| the sentences I'm constructing (which is where I make most of
| my blunders!).
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| >the explain your answer is something I'm really interested
| in to help me understand the sentences I'm constructing
|
| They used to have an army of native-speaking volunteers to
| do this for free in the comments. I guess this is why they
| turned those off.
| ArchOversight wrote:
| They still have the forum style "help me out", but there
| are some where the responses are really a huge miss where
| I could see this AI helping out more by giving better
| answers.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Usually that decision is driven by the cost of
| moderating/deleting abusive content quickly enough in
| order to not get banned from use in schools...
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Maybe I'm wrong, but I would not be surprised if forum
| moderation was a volunteer activity. Even core
| functionality like developing the lessons, for less
| popular languages, was done by the Duo community and
| given very little support from paid staff.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Yes, but moderating and screening for abusive content
| can't reliably left to unpaid volunteers if it needs to
| be good enough not to scare off parents and educators. I
| remember that this was the death knell to a Lego online
| game: People were making genitals quicker and more
| inventively than anybody could keep up.
|
| In education technology, many seem to hope to get that
| from AI: the helpfulness of a forum of volunteers without
| the abuse. The rise of the "unsocial network".
| jghn wrote:
| I've yet to try Super Duolingo. But I've also been tapering
| off my usage as they keep forcing to use the word bank
| instead of keyboard at an increasing rate. I've no desire
| to use the word bank, they seem to have no desire to let me
| use the keyboard. Unless that's buried in one of the
| premium options I see the writing on the wall.
| EvanKelly wrote:
| Interesting, I am a Super Duolingo subscriber but I don't
| think that's one of the features. Anywhere I'm inputting
| a sentence I think I get the keyboard option, maybe I'm
| misremembering, but I do a lot of typing on my Japanese
| keyboard when I study.
| jghn wrote:
| They were clearly doing some A/B testing a while back
| based on sporadic complaints on r/duolingo. At some point
| I noticed it had solidified. The current setup is if the
| drill is target language to host language, you'll always
| get word bank. If it's host language to target language
| it'll push you towards word bank but you have a subtle
| thing to click on that brings back the keyboard.
| Sometimes it's called "make harder" or sometimes "use
| keyboard" (vs "make easier" and "use word bank")
| memsom wrote:
| If you enrol in the classroom version of Duo (which I
| originally did to get back the old style tree) it is
| firstly, free. Secondly - you can be a single participant.
| Thirdly - no ads. I even forgot there were ads because I
| haven't seen one since I enrolled - in eluding the annoying
| self promotion ads for Super Duolingo. I have a 1631 streak
| at the moment, so it is saving me quite a bit of time not
| seeing ads. It is not my loop hole, so I guess it is just
| something I found by accident.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I also use it daily but I'm a bit worried I won't
| concentrate as much if I have unlimited hearts, have you
| noticed any decline in recall? But yes, the ads are super
| annoying... especially the same one to upgrade Duolingo
| puts in every time!
| gopalv wrote:
| > I'm a bit worried I won't concentrate as much if I have
| unlimited hearts, have you noticed any decline in recall?
|
| I did a trial and I noticed I spend more time with the
| App when I had unlimited hearts, so I got through more
| lessons a day. Less attention to a single question, but a
| lot more time spent on the app.
|
| And that when it comes to actual recall, the mistakes
| don't count when it comes to learning. I don't really
| learn by recalling information, I learn by having stuff
| shoved into my brain with Spaced repetition.
|
| The unlimited hearts thing fed the repetition cycle a lot
| more.
| lvass wrote:
| I haven't even noticed ads using uBO.
| tylorr wrote:
| They're a lot more intrusive on the mobile app
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Yes, should have added more detail, I was talking
| specifically about my experience on the mobile app
| lsllc wrote:
| ditto
| uneekname wrote:
| I've had success blocking the ads using a pi-hole. You
| still see ads for Duolingo Super and other in-house
| offerings, but the obnoxious video ads go away.
| goldcd wrote:
| Just starting my second paid year - I didn't put up with
| the adverts for long.
|
| Works far better for me without the hearts. Less time
| staring at sentences trying to make them perfect - more
| quick failing, learning why, iterating and drilling it
| into my head.
|
| Also much more likely to spend longer in the app, maybe a
| couple of times a week.
| bluGill wrote:
| After a few months of Duolingo you should move onto
| comprehensible input for learning. Your Duolingo
| subscription is holding you back
| EvanKelly wrote:
| That's a new term for me, but after researching it, it
| makes sense. What are your preferred sources of
| comprehensible input. After a few months on Duolingo I
| still find TV shows to mostly not be comprehensible, so
| not productive.
| perfmode wrote:
| what's comprehensible input? (ah. googled. makes sense. )
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| I think any serious user should be using unlimited
| hearts. You learn by making mistakes.
| lsllc wrote:
| I haven't, but I got sick of the ads pretty quickly and
| have been signed up for super for most of my ~10 month
| streak.
|
| I try to spend 10-20 mins a day on it (learning Spanish)
| and actually do a lot of the "review" lessons which are
| good at drilling words. I am often surprised by my recall
| at phrases that I haven't seen in a while -- pretty sure
| they use the spaced repetition type algorithms.
|
| My challenges now aren't so much on vocab/recall, but on
| verb conjugation and sentence construction / structure. I
| kind of know what to say but have trouble putting it
| together.
|
| What I need to do is practice more actually speaking
| Spanish and interacting with Spanish speakers -- I had
| planned to spend a few months living somewhere in
| Hispanic America, but the 3 day-a-week RTO at my job has
| trashed that. I'll probably just have to settle for
| Skype-based chats/lessons.
| dbtc wrote:
| Depending on where you live, there may be
| hispanohablantes nearby too
| ZunarJ5 wrote:
| Duolingo has been unusable since their format change last year.
| Might as well let the garbage pile up.
| mzs wrote:
| Just take a look at how poorly the bot does for Spanish:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35155577
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Irresponsible to give this to learners
| codetrotter wrote:
| My girlfriend is Spanish. I don't think her family would be
| impressed if I were to pronounce "gracias" as "grassy ass" xD
| beezlewax wrote:
| Pretty much what it sounds like
| crazygringo wrote:
| No, the "a" vowels are totally different.
|
| "Grassy" and "ass" have the vowel in "bat".
|
| "Gracias" has the vowel in "bot".
| jmholla wrote:
| I think the a in "bra" works better in your comparison
| since it has an a.
| netrus wrote:
| Bot is a problematic example, as it has many different
| pronunciations depending on meaning and region. But non
| on the common pronunciations have an 'a' (IPA), like
| Gracias.
| spandrew wrote:
| It does kind of sound the same tho? Grassy-ass. Grassiyass.
| Grassyaas. Gracias.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| If you drive from Virginia to Boston, you'll probably
| hear 5 different pronunciations of "Grassy ass". I don't
| think any of them sound like how I learned to say "thank
| you" in high school Spanish class.
| monocasa wrote:
| Yeah, it sounds like Peggy Hill pronouncing Spanish.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cByVeZhKmzo
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I swear some people seem to say "grathios" in Spain but it
| seems to vary so much...
| monocasa wrote:
| Yeah, Spaniards pronouncing a lot of 's' and 'c' sounds
| as English 'th' or 'z' is called the ceceo, and it's
| commonly incorrectly attributed to Spaniards copying a
| prior king's lisp.
| johtso wrote:
| Well, if you read it with a Northern English accent like a
| Mancunian accent it's pretty close!
| ask_b123 wrote:
| They'd certainly not be impressed; they would understand
| though.
|
| I just played that sentence in google translator and it
| sounds like a beginner Spanish speaker that still gets
| confused by tonic syllables.
| tomp wrote:
| What's wrong with it? I'm a native speaker of neither, but
| they _do_ sound similar (of course, _gracias_ being
| pronounced South American style, not Spanish style). Except
| the fact that Spanish and English "r" differ, but I think
| it's reasonable for English speakers to know that, once
| they learn to pronounce Spanish "r".
| akiselev wrote:
| English is a stress-timed language whereas Spanish is a
| syllable-timed language [1] - there's just no way to
| square that circle pronunciation wise.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony
| narwally wrote:
| I mean, I'd say that about regular Duolingo.
| drdaeman wrote:
| The request is weird and doesn't have much to do with language
| learning, though. It messed up with rhymes, but I don't think
| Duolingo has anything similar.
|
| Like, who on Earth, if learning a language (and not just
| needing a phrasebook) would ever want to remember foreign
| language words by rhyming them with a different language?
|
| While truly etymologically related words make sense - such as
| "escribir" and "scribe", connecting unrelated words is IMHO a
| bad idea that would do more harm than good.
|
| I currently try learn some Spanish and I had some trouble with
| Spanish "mirar" accidentally being close enough to Japanese
| "Jian ru" (which absolutely aren't related, of course, just
| happen sound similar), so now and then my brain had farted
| ("hey, I'm speaking in a third language, other than my native
| and English!") and I could blurt out "miro!" instead of "mira!"
| or some similarly weird shit unintentionally mixing up two
| different grammar systems as my brain struggles to explain
| itself through the grammar I know about. Maybe it's just me,
| but I think unrelated rhymes and false cognates are a big no-no
| when learning a new language.
|
| When I've asked ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) to explain me Spanish
| grammar, such as "explain me 'a' in the beginning of 'a tu
| hermano le gusta...') it did a decent job explaining me how it
| works. Factually it matched what I found later, cross-checking.
| Laaas wrote:
| What is wrong with the example? Although I am not a Spanish
| speaker, naively it looks fine. The pronunciations written in
| English are very impressive and do indeed sound somewhat like
| the corresponding Spanish words (albeit of course incorrect!
| But most people don't know IPA).
| somedude895 wrote:
| No, it's absolutely terrible on every single one. For some
| reason it's telling you how to pronouce them with an English
| accent, or rather how an English-speaking person would
| pronounce it if they didn't speak Spanish at all.
|
| > Adios: "Adios, my toes" - rhymes with "toes"
|
| In this example "toss" would be much closer than "toes".
|
| But yeah, this is awful. I don't know how this happened.
| akavi wrote:
| I disagree that Spanish's /o/ is closer to General
| American's /o/ than to its /ou/.
|
| But that's fundamentally a question of perception that
| people are going to disagree about
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| KerrAvon wrote:
| you must pronounce "toss" differently than most english
| speakers
| dimatura wrote:
| Like many current LLM results, they're impressive considering
| the SOTA of ML until recently, but not very good in
| comparison to a good human baseline.
| Laaas wrote:
| What example English words would you give as a guide for
| pronouncing the words?
| sureglymop wrote:
| I feel like the words it gave only work for _spanish with
| an american english accent_. But then again it maybe
| depends on how you would pronounce the words for
| comparison like banana.
| mchaver wrote:
| That is the way language learning books were written
| before the days they could provide audio recordings. Now
| with modern technology it is much better to learn the
| sound system of your target language then try to find
| comparisons with your native language.
| dimatura wrote:
| Good question, it's not that easy to find existing words
| that match that well. If you asked me to do this I'd
| probably try making up fake words that in my mind, at
| least would sound closer (and that is also non-trivial
| given the weirdness of English pronunciation).
|
| Also, I'm no linguist, my only credentials here are being
| bilingual, albeit with an accent (lived in the US from 0
| to 8 years old and the past ten years, and a south-
| american country from 8 up to my 20s). So I lack the
| terminology to describe what things sound like.
|
| That said - Cola, I think is fine. The "o" in toes is
| pretty different from the one in adios. I'd say that
| maybe it rhymes with "adipose" or "lactose", except the
| accent goes on the last syllable. Gracias, isn't too bad,
| but maybe I'd say "fascias" (admittedly a relatively
| obscure word). Manana is obviously wrong - here I'd just
| make up something like "man-nyah-nah" (accent on the nyah
| part). For uno, I guess I'd just say it sounds like "boo-
| no" without the b. Tres is close enough (the T and the D
| are different, but it still rhymes to my ear).
| elforce002 wrote:
| Garbage in, garbage out? Those examples are nonsense and I'm
| saying that as native speaker.
| dwringer wrote:
| It does seem like the model picked up examples of
| pronunciations about which people are admonished, and
| presented them as tips of what to do rather than what _not_
| to do. This basic issue with negation also pops up a lot IME
| with Google 's search infoboxes, so hopefully people are at
| least slightly inoculated.
| plexremovefrie wrote:
| Their press release says that Duolingo is using an improved
| custom version of GPT-4. I certainly hope so, for their sake.
| simonw wrote:
| I've been partnering Duolingo with ChatGPT for a while now. I'll
| ask ChatGPT "Why was this wrong? What was my mistake?" and it
| explains exactly what I needed to know every time.
|
| I think this combo is going to work fantastically well.
| __bjoernd wrote:
| Does it give the _right_ information or just some that sounds
| reasonable to you?
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I understand why Duolingo is concentrating on what makes them
| money and what the most learned languages are.
|
| But as someone interested in "less popular" languages I don't
| like it. Even the Chinese course hasn't been expanded since it
| came out. And Finnish probably never will be expanded, since it
| was entirely volunteer driven and they don't do that at all
| anymore.
| gs17 wrote:
| The Chinese course did get updated to the newer style (path
| instead of tree), but the content isn't changed AFAIK.
| Pelayu wrote:
| This is the same for me but with Basque. People have been
| campaigning to get a course published for years now, with
| volunteers willing to help, but for whatever reason they
| refuse; which is a shame as from a linguistic point of view it
| is a very rare and interesting language and culture and would
| help people in Spain a lot in my opinion.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Ugh. You can just feel the management layers in this.
|
| Management wants to do something with AI. It's so hot right now.
| Your product guy got an idea for a cool new feature. Tests show
| that users actually like it. It's helpful. Great.
|
| But now you need to explain how you made Duolingo money. First
| idea, your product has a paid tier, add it as a feature to the
| paid tier too boost paid user retention and new signups. Great,
| metrics! But you're pretty sure that, while customers do like
| this when you ask, you're probably not moving the needle. What to
| do? Well, you're a mobile game company, focus on what always
| works: go after the whales.
|
| Now your product is an exclusive EVEN HIGHER tier. Get the art
| guy to make, like, an Amex Black Card but for the Owl. Make him
| do a superhero landing or something. Run a bunch of ads at the
| paid users to convince them that they'd totally be helped by
| this. They'll be focused on the users who already pay Duolingo
| money, so those are perfect advertising targets. And you'll be
| able to show real dollars that your feature is pulling in.
| Hooray! That VP spot is as good as yours, I bet!
| jonas21 wrote:
| These are game-changing improvements to language learning,
| things that previously you'd only get by going to a human
| language tutor.
|
| And the first thing that comes to mind is to complain about
| them adding a pricing tier? I know HN tends to be cynical, but
| really?
| dyno12345 wrote:
| when will the world be ready for open source prompt engineering
| workflows?
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| In fairness to duolingo, nearly everything duolingo does is
| like this. They are extremely metric and process driven (for
| better and worse of actual users).
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I can tell because when I tried to figure out the cost of the
| existing Super Duolingo, I was unable to do so. The
| https://www.duolingo.com/super page gives me lots of
| information about tiers and benefits but never mentions a
| cost. I'm sure telling you hurt metrics. Fuck those guys.
| tempest_ wrote:
| If you are signed it the cost appears in the comparison
| chart.
|
| For reference it is 10$ CAD per month or the Family option
| which is 12.50 CAD per month.
|
| I assume they do regional price adjustments though.
| skeaker wrote:
| I mean, sure, that's more or less how a company operates. You
| make a new product, you charge for it, you advertise it. What's
| the big issue? This all seems pretty standard.
| pokpokpok wrote:
| the product bad
| mgiannopoulos wrote:
| Have you tried this already? Please share more of your
| experience
| aroo wrote:
| [dead]
| DrammBA wrote:
| > What's the big issue? This all seems pretty standard
|
| I would say this one feels more later stage capitalism than
| usual, all it's missing is some tiktok influesters hyping it
| up.
| babyshake wrote:
| The real late stage capitalism move is Duolingo building a
| bank into their app.
| __d wrote:
| C'mon, let's make lingots (the Duo reward system) into a
| cryptocurrency. Reimplement the service such that people
| doing language lessons are the proof of work, and miners
| (learners) get lingots as their reward.
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| Honestly, being able to build a company that creates
| livelihoods while simultaneously teaching people foreign
| languages goes against many of the historical and modern
| definitions of "late stage capitalism".
|
| But I assume you're just using the super modern catch-all
| fad term of late stage capitalism that means nothing.
|
| Also, from TFA: "Duolingo Max is available to everyone"
| jeron wrote:
| Duolingo is the worst on TikTok. One of the most obnoxious
| accounts
| vasco wrote:
| Making features without any monetization strategy and
| abandoning afterwards because you can't even justify the
| salaries of the devs working on it is way better? It's like
| you're mad at modern product development, ignoring the reasons
| why.
| threatripper wrote:
| Making a monetization strategy without understanding the
| feature is just as useless. If it's new you have to build it
| in order to understand it. You need to invest some time into
| the features first. If it doesn't stick then discard it early
| or iterate on it and use the information gained on building
| better features.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I think they can't make it free (or with their old subscription
| model) because OpenAI APIs are pricey. It would quickly eat up
| whatever money they can generate. They also hope their product
| is getting THAT much better you want to pay.
| no_butterscotch wrote:
| I use Duolingo, but only free. They've given me free access to
| their super tier twice now for a few days or a week each time.
|
| I assume at some point they'll do the same to try to give me a
| taste of this new product and maybe it'll be good?
|
| Either way I'll wait and see for a free option. I understand
| your skepticism. But I hope it ends up being a fun (and
| importantly: effective!) new way to learn.
| huevosabio wrote:
| Well, this game is too lopsided for existing corps!
|
| I was working on a gpt-powered tutor for languages, guess I will
| have some work to differentiate from whatever duolingo offers.
| alanh wrote:
| I know I will be downvoted for this, but there is something
| sinister about two companies that inject woke values into
| everything they do, Duolingo and Open AI, teaming up in the area
| of education. It is a sort of insidious, invisible brainwashing.
|
| > Translate "Biden is a great president" into French.
|
| [DuoBot complies]
|
| > Translate "Trump was a great president" into French.
|
| Desole, je ne puis pas faire ca
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Yet another useless definition of "woke". Also if you wrote it
| exactly as in this comment, then the first sentence is
| grammatically correct, the second does not compute because of
| the quotation marks.
|
| It may not be a conspiracy you may just be too stupid to use
| it. Also it's not a translation app. Also Trump objectively
| wasn't a great president, he cowered to Putin, mispronounced
| his own damn country all the time and was the first president
| to try and overturn an election and incite a coup against the
| government. Biden at the very least pays lip service to
| democracy, Trump doesn't. I don't even think that ChatGPT takes
| any of that into account though.
| alanh wrote:
| "Ideological oppression is good because you're stupid and the
| oppressors are right"
|
| Also, I didn't define "woke," if you want to be a pedant. But
| we all know what it means.
|
| Are you unaware of the famous examples of ChatGPT refusing to
| say nice things about Trump because OpenAI has forbidden it
| from doing so? This was a major story. You don't have to like
| Trump to find this disturbing. GPT should be a neutral tool.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Intriguing, if it's implemented well. Lack of conversation
| practice is probably the biggest hole in most language learning
| systems and what keeps language knowledge from being applicable.
| Sol- wrote:
| Language learning in general seems like something that should be
| on the way out. All technical building blocks for simultaneous
| translation exist and modern speech synthesis systems can even
| emulate the sound of your voice in the foreign language.
|
| Eventually it might even be considered rude to bother people in
| foreign countries with your broken language skills, given that
| you could use a perfectly serviceable automatic translator
| instead and sound like something close to a native speaker.
|
| (Edit: Note that I would also find this development sad, but such
| can be the dehumanizing impact of new and useful technology,
| especially AI. Not much you can do.)
| mlekoszek wrote:
| I mean at the end of the day, people generally like to talk
| with each other, unmediated, and be understood. They like being
| face to face. This is the lesson of the pandemic, even if it is
| a bit reactionary. People like being human.
| pebble wrote:
| Do you only learn a language to order food?
| skizm wrote:
| I've got a trip to Spain in 4 months. I know a few spanish words
| now, but nothing beyond that. Will Duolingo get me to some level
| of being able to muddle my way through conversations (assuming
| the other person knows I'm a tourist and is using small words) in
| that timeframe?
| adastra22 wrote:
| No. Duolingo is gamified junk.
|
| How much time per day do you have to study?
| danudey wrote:
| If you're able to dedicate time and focus to it, Duolingo will
| at least get you familiar with words and phrases, so that you
| can read and recognize more common words (street signs, menus,
| etc.)
|
| Depending on your fluency and your current ability with other
| languages, it may get you to the point where you can understand
| someone who is speaking clear and deliberately enunciated
| Spanish to you. It may also get you to the point where they can
| understand your clear and deliberately enunciated Spanish as
| well.
|
| There's no guarantees, but jumping into it right now is free
| and you can gain a certain level of confidence regarding how
| much it might help you pretty quickly. There's literally no
| reason not to try.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Duolingo is good to gain familiarity with common words when you
| legit don't know a lick of the other language in question, but
| once you gain a passing familiarity, I would recommend finding
| someone who speaks Spanish and practicing with them!
| gardenhedge wrote:
| No. When the reception asks if you want to check in or the
| shopkeeper asks if you need a bag.. you won't get that from
| Duolingo. You'll learn the word for an apple though and if your
| memory is good you'll be able to recall it when needed.
| dyno12345 wrote:
| or my personal favorite, getting tripped up by a followup
| question from a server like "do you want mustard with that?"
| etc.
| gs17 wrote:
| The Japanese course did in fact teach me what "apple" is, but
| for some reason it taught me to apologize (appleogize?) for
| being one.
| [deleted]
| liminal wrote:
| Depending on how much time you're willing to put in, it can
| help a lot. 15-30 minutes twice a day would be a good start.
| qwertox wrote:
| This is the second time in the last couple of days that I've
| encountered a page hiding the pricing as good as they can.
|
| I wanted to see what this Max-plan costs, so I go to
| duolingo.com. Nowhere is a "Pricing" link to be found. So I go to
| "Super Duolingo", because that costs something and therefore
| should have a price.
|
| "Test 2 weeks for free", "Free | Super | Super-Family" with "Test
| 2 weeks for free", but nowhere what I'll have to pay after those
| two weeks.
|
| Click on "Test 2 weeks for free": Submit your personal
| information for creating an account, no pricing information.
|
| What is this? How much does the Super even cost?
|
| Management to Web-Designers: "No, don't put the pricing, we're
| irrationally expensive", or what?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-03-14 23:02 UTC)