[HN Gopher] Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI ...
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Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Create App
Content
Author : leotravis10
Score : 132 points
Date : 2024-01-08 21:18 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| leotravis10 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/8Nq7u
| minimaxir wrote:
| The tweet that made the layoff news go viral:
| https://twitter.com/Rahll/status/1744234385891594380
| malfist wrote:
| Wow, so the layoff notice to contractors was "Thank you for
| working at Duolingo, here's an exit survey"?
|
| That's cold.
| moffkalast wrote:
| "It looks like you missed you Duolingo lesson again, you know
| what happens now..."
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| Probably the official notice came from their contracting
| agency.
| viburnum wrote:
| I cancelled my subscription last year because the quality had
| gone down, and the UI changes kept getting worse.
| skinkestek wrote:
| For everyone who wonder what the quality is like:
|
| it is impossible -even for native speakers - to pronounce
| certain words and in particular numbers I think in a way that
| makes duolingo accept them. This seems to be true for more than
| one language (think I have heard / read about it from both a
| Norwegian testing Norwegian and a Ukrainian testing Ukrainian
| language.
| ttmb wrote:
| At the same time, it also seems to accept unintelligible
| grunting as a correct pronunciation for many questions, and
| not just German.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Duolingo is actually a great usecase for AI. It doesn't teach you
| a language in any meaningful sense, but is a fun side activity to
| practice. AI is great for apps like these.
| z_open wrote:
| The machine generated content was already bad. I don't know if
| this AI transition will make it better or worse but I swear
| Duolingo was among the worst of apps I tried. People say it's ok
| to use supplementary when you have a 10 or 15 minute break but I
| think sentence mining or watching YouTube videos with subtitles
| is a better use of those minutes. I avoid telling giving this
| advice to people in real life because it seems dismissive of the
| time they are spending.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I realize lots of people have learned languages by watching
| movies in the target language and reading subtitles in their
| native language, but I have found that to be highly difficult.
| I guess everyone is different, but given that the vast majority
| of people who read something while listening to something else
| will either comprehend something from one and nothing from the
| other, or worst case, get nothing from either, it seems likely
| that doing so to learn a language is not optimum.
|
| I could perhaps see this method as more effective in cases
| where the 2 languages are similar enough that there is some
| "lining up" between what you read and hear, but where the words
| are completely dissimilar and even sentence structure is
| completely different, I just don't see it as any better than a
| brute force method of learning.
| z_open wrote:
| In my opinion, watching movies is ineffective until you can
| read the subtitles in the target language. This is at the
| B1/B2 level. Before that you're just focusing on the native
| language.
|
| Once you hit the B levels, things get easier. But it's uphill
| until then and tutors or courses are your best bet to get
| there.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Such a large part of making lifelong connections in this world
| are from hiring people who you need to make something work. I
| made some wonderful connections in my previous jobs that I never
| would have otherwise if they could do everything themselves with
| AI or if I could do everything myself without them.
|
| The fact is, automation can make life better but beyond a certain
| point, if hardly anyone needs anyone else, then all those
| wonderful connections of working together vanish. We can stil
| make those connections theoretically, but the lack of needing
| someone else removes the actuality and genuineness of the
| process.
|
| I wish that everyone who created AI and who welcomes it would
| think about this longer-time societal impact before becoming
| blinded with its immediate appeal.
|
| Sorry to say but I think making AI in general is one of the
| biggest mistakes we ever made.
| madsbuch wrote:
| This is not really related to AI though?
|
| A company that was before 400 people, can now be 200 people.
| But people will rarely make meaningful bonds outside of those 5
| people closest to them (Dunbar's number).
| redcobra762 wrote:
| Dunbar's Number is most commonly set at around 150, not 5.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Dunbar is also talking about his layers of emotional
| closeness, where 5 is the innermost layer.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| It's also not unique to AI. One person with a tractor can
| outharvest the amount of corn it used to take a whole village
| to harvest. This feels just like a dressed up luddite
| complaint.
| outside1234 wrote:
| There is an analogue to this in manufacturing as well. We lost
| something when we moved all of our manufacturing to whatever
| the race to bottom place was of the moment instead of
| understanding how to make our things from top to bottom.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Yeah. And that brought a whole slew of other problems (such
| as supply chain security and systemic fragility induced by
| centralization) that we just accept as worth it.
| bavarianbob wrote:
| Curious to know if you believe it is truly lost because I
| would argue that what could be considered lost (artisan,
| soulful goods) still exists. Perhaps I also misunderstand
| "what" you believe is to be lost.
| soarerz wrote:
| would you have opposed industrial revolution?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| That's good to think about. If AI tools are genuinely helpful
| at work than it should change the people we meet there. Instead
| of bonding on lower level details we'll bond on what we choose
| to create or our larger contributions to larger creations. So I
| think that we'll still have these relationships.
|
| There might also be companies where a few people work together
| doing different things, that used to each be a department. They
| won't have their jobs in common, but they'll bond over working
| in a strange new type of business and the mental agility
| required to be responsible for so much output.
|
| I hope, anyway!
| manmal wrote:
| If meaningful connections at work go away, then clubs (books,
| chess, sports etc) and social hobbies will pick up the slack.
| Work doesn't have a monopoly on meaningful relationships.
| madsbuch wrote:
| I am learning Polish, and find that ChatGPT provides a much
| better tutor than any human. Ie. I would rather use ChatGPT than
| a human tutor, indifferent to the price.
|
| I am also developing my own app to learn languages, and I can get
| to Duolingo levels in roughly a weekend worth of side project.
|
| I project that a certain category of apps will die off really
| fast.
| dralley wrote:
| How do you know for certain that you're not being taught by a
| confidently incorrect tutor?
| renewiltord wrote:
| You never actually know that, and most people are. That's why
| there's so much "nous" use in French classes and so little
| "on" and so on. But the learn rate is so fast, that you get
| sufficient coverage to fix it up in actual conversation. My
| wife and I did a combo of another AI product
| (https://www.speak.com/) and ChatGPT to learn sufficient
| Spanish to get by in Chilean Patagonia and it did a pretty
| decent job (we just learned pronunciation through mimicry).
|
| We're not experts as a result, obviously, but it helped us
| get around and stuff which is fun. It was pretty much a crash
| course started as we were landing in Santiago (which is where
| we entered the country).
| madsbuch wrote:
| > But the learn rate is so fast, that you get sufficient
| coverage to fix it up in actual conversation.
|
| This should really be emphasised. Correctness might not be
| entirely on every time. But learning pace and engagement is
| so much higher, that it more than makes up for it.
|
| Especially engagement is a point where ChatGPT wins over
| all human teachers.
| madsbuch wrote:
| I know that as well as with any human tutor. The main
| difference is that I am motivated to check the answer, eg. by
| asking the woman who is my main reason to learn Polish.
|
| Also, the value of a tutor that in and encouraging way
| corrects my verb conjugation of byc (to be) for the 500th
| time has a lot more value than the risk of it being wrong on
| a corner case.
|
| A human tutor would semi-arrogantly have told be off and
| asked me to look at the dictionary (Yes, I have studied
| English, German, Spanish, and French in school, I have had
| more language teacher than anything else)
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Curious, when you went back to that woman and checked an
| answer with her, did she ever say "No that's definitely the
| wrong way to say it" or anything like that?
|
| I'm not arguing in any way I'm legitimately curious, as
| someone who has dabbled in language learning, as well as
| trying to use ChatGPT as a tutor, how its track record has
| been. Hallucinations was definitely one of my concerns when
| asking it about language stuff.
| rpmisms wrote:
| I think hallucinations would be less worrisome, since
| words and their meanings are collectively probably the
| strongest suit for ChatGPT.
| madsbuch wrote:
| She corrected usage. Eg. when to use mama and matka where
| it is super hard to intellectually learn how formal one
| should be.
|
| But again, in english, when is it appropriate to use mom
| and mother? It really depends on the context, culture,
| and relations.
|
| Also hallucinations are probably a good thing for
| language learning. especially when you have an interface,
| chat, where you can interrogate - and an AI that does not
| get offended when you question it.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| How do you know a human tutor is not confidently incorrect?
|
| I know it sounds like a glib answer, but in reality the
| answer to both questions is you don't know for certain in
| either case. Honestly I would say both are incorrect for at
| least some portion of their responses, but you seem to be
| insinuating that humans are closer to 0% while the LLM's
| percent is higher. In my estimation the LLM is probably less
| often incorrect but that's just my opinion. I am sure a more
| rigorous study could be conducted though.
| madsbuch wrote:
| This is also my own experience. In particular, ChatGPT has
| deeper knowledge on complex grammatical structures (like
| the 7 cases polish have) than I can expect from a regular
| tutor - my friend was not able to explain complex consonant
| clusters, while ChatGPT happily babbles out resources and
| explains just what I need for a particular case.
| smlavine wrote:
| How do you verify that what it's teaching you is actually true?
| Do you spend other effort reading native Polish and speaking
| Polish with others?
| madsbuch wrote:
| The same response as to the sibling comment that asks the
| same.
|
| I think this question is mostly asked by people who have no
| idea how it works.
|
| ChatGPT can actually on demand give me a list of 20 idioms
| related to finding directions, something a human tutor would
| have to find in some material.
|
| And yes, of cause I learn language to communicate with people
| which also corrects my misunderstandings.
| alectroem wrote:
| If you are learning Polish, how do you know that ChatGPT is the
| better tutor of Polish?
|
| I guess you could ask the same question of a human tutor,
| however this seems to me the sort of thing a chatbot could very
| confidently give BS or incorrect information, and you would
| have no way of knowing unless a human who already knows Polish
| pointed it out.
| madsbuch wrote:
| No human person has the stamina to spend 3 hours fixing basic
| conjugation tables and still encourage me.
|
| As a European I have received _extensive_ language tutoring
| and know how people teach. I also know enough Polish people
| that I can certify that they are just regular people without
| super-human tutoring skills.
| codetrotter wrote:
| If Duolingo wanted to invent a new word it is probable IMO that
| they would be able to introduce and popularize it, in spite of no
| one else having ever thought of that word.
|
| For example, if Duolingo wanted to invent "schmibbidibbi" as a
| word, they could give it a definition and start using it in their
| material. Pretty soon people would start using the word IRL.
|
| I wonder if there will ever be any words invented by AI that
| Duolingo accidentally teaches the world, which did initially not
| exist outside of the Duolingo app.
| jkaptur wrote:
| What an amazing choice of new word - it's "Generation Alpha's
| first foray into internet culture"
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet
| codetrotter wrote:
| schmibbidibbi is clearly a distinct word, different from
| skibidi. But also near enough that conceivably an AI could
| invent the word schmibbidibbi if it knew skibidi. Depending
| on how it tokenizes words.
| ikesau wrote:
| that's an interesting idea, but I dunno if "language learners"
| comprise a sufficiently influential cultural group to influence
| language in this way.
|
| If I learned a new word through duolingo, used it while
| speaking to native speakers of the language, and no one knew
| what it meant, I probably would be embarrassed and confused and
| not use the word again.
|
| But maybe it'll happen! And along that line, I wonder if
| advanced language models will be able to identify "missing
| words" that we're lacking to discuss concepts that we haven't
| yet conceptualized.
| codetrotter wrote:
| The trick is to teach French learners that this word means
| something in French and at the same time to teach English
| learners that it means something in English.
|
| So you travel to France and practice your newly-learned
| French. You run across a French person who has been learning
| English. You use the word thinking that it's French, and the
| person you speak to has already heard it as an English word
| and thinks that you don't know the word in French but they
| know what you mean thinking it's an English word.
| morkalork wrote:
| Reflections on trusting trust vibes.
| helloericsf wrote:
| Which AI services does Duolingo use for the translations? It
| seems like they're satisfied with the outcome. Curious about the
| cost of the AI service as well.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| OpenAI's GPT4 https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/
| thorum wrote:
| My experience is that GPT-4 is quite good at most languages,
| including hard ones like Chinese - especially when paired
| with a "verification" step, where you copy something it wrote
| and start a new session and ask, "Is this sentence well-
| written <language>?"
|
| It has a surprisingly deep understanding of nuance and
| context. You can copy some Chinese text that Google Translate
| completely fails to translate, paste it into GPT-4 and ask
| "Please explain this text including any nuanced meaning that
| a foreigner would miss" and get a detailed, coherent
| explanation.
| dappermanneke wrote:
| it's been going down in quality as an actual teaching aid for a
| while, beyond maybe sentence structure memorisation, so it's sad
| to see this accelerate further
| ttmb wrote:
| Wasn't one of their initial monetization ideas that crowdsourced
| translations - from amateurs, not even paid contractors - would
| outperform AI translation? The translation thing never came close
| to panning out, from what I can tell.
|
| Back in the day you used to be able to see a mini discussion
| thread about any exercise. The comments in these threads - from
| unpaid users - were frequently much more helpful than the
| official teaching notes. But they got rid of those a while back,
| too. At the time people suggested it was because they wanted to
| push people into some sort of paid tutoring offering that they'd
| announced. But I don't see any hint of that around. Now I'd guess
| it's because the questions are no longer hand crafted by people,
| and are now autogenerated by AI, leading to an inability to have
| discussions about specific questions.
| Nadya wrote:
| This seems to be a scaling issue for all of these online
| language/SRS learning systems. Every single one of them scales
| and then starts dialing back/deleting/hiding all of the user-
| generated content that helped the platform get to where it is
| today.
|
| Almost a decade ago "smart.fm" was a thing and the best thing
| about it was all of the user-generated content (blogs) offering
| discussions and explanations for so many various languages.
| From grammatical concepts being explained to people asking
| questions and having users provide answers in public Q&A style
| format. Then smart.fm got rid of all of that and became
| "iknow.jp" and deleted everyone's blogs and hard work built to
| create the smart.fm community (many of whom then moved to
| Memrise).
|
| Memrise was originally about using user-submitted mnemonics and
| it had a vast library of them being created. Nowadays, as far
| as I can tell, none of the mnemonics are around anymore and
| they're no longer the focus. The focus is on monetization and
| gamification of their Pro user stats (of which I have lifetime
| membership until the year 9999 due to my help/work during their
| Beta testing years).
|
| Because mnemonics were the focus - words across all of their
| courses had to be combined so that the mnemonics between
| courses would carry over. Myself and a number of (unpaid)
| volunteers spent months combining all of the words for every
| popularly used language (I helped with the Japanese dictionary)
| across all existing courses at that time.
|
| Hosting (and moderating) user-generated content is an issue at
| scale. At the start when you have mostly good faith actors and
| few trolls it works quite well. But after a certain scale
| moderation becomes a massive issue.
|
| At least I got a cool staff-only T-shirts out of it. Ben is an
| awesome dude and when I donated to the Memrise bus tour
| godfundme I asked if I could have one of their staff shirts
| that I knew they had - and they actually sent me one instead of
| one of the bus tour shirts!
|
| The better funded of these sites seem to last a bit
| longer/scale a bit larger but it seems the death of user-
| generated content is inevitable after a certain point.
| dataangel wrote:
| The founder's academic work is literally on using games to get
| people to generate training data for AIs. I watched his lecture
| on this in ~2007.
| bavarianbob wrote:
| Have a link?
| yreg wrote:
| Oh, they've removed those mini threads? That's a shame, those
| used to be super helpful.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah, you used to be able to dive into really
| interesting/useful discussions (pretty much a forum) about
| nuances of certain phrases/words, usually involving people
| who have grown up speaking the respective language. It was
| really helpful to get that extra detail and context on weird
| little quirks that may not have been obvious by the content
| built into Duolingo itself.
| charcircuit wrote:
| There isn't really a need for human translators in language
| learning. Machine translation is good enough at translating into
| one's one native language and the translation quality doesn't
| really matter as you already know your native language.
| vintermann wrote:
| I don't want it to translate to my native language.
|
| We happened to have a teacher who was an old Esperantist with
| some quirky ideas, so I learned English with the so-called
| direct method. That means that after the first class, the
| teacher and everyone spoke only English in class. The textbook
| relied heavily on pictures.
|
| Lots of people don't like the direct method, and I can
| understand why it's unpleasant, but it worked really well for
| me. I had German lessons in school for a long time, but never
| gained anything like the fluency I got in English - the German
| teachers varied from some very archaic grammar-translation
| stuff ("durchfurgegenohneum", "ausbeimitnachseitvonzu" etc.) to
| the ones who seemed to have no plan at all.
|
| LLMs should be able to teach me with the direct method, though
| fine-tuning would help.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > the German teachers varied from some very archaic grammar-
| translation stuff ("durchfurgegenohneum",
| "ausbeimitnachseitvonzu" etc.) to the ones who seemed to have
| no plan at all.
|
| Native German speaker here: such grammatical structures are
| really how I think about my mother tongue, thus I do believe
| these are good exercises: always have the grammar tree in the
| back of your mind when you speak German "and then speak this
| grammar tree". :-)
|
| In opposite to English, in German grammar is quite important.
| vr46 wrote:
| Duolingo should be on borrowed time, as a method to learn a
| language it's inefficient to the point of being ineffective - it
| seems to serve as an acceptable reason for fiddling with one's
| phone, like a Guilt-Eze pill.
|
| I spent 18 months on it and the learning was soundly thrashed by
| three weeks in a classroom, and for all the pupils, not just me,
| primed for success by 18 months with Duolingo.
|
| Unless anyone has had a different experience, Duolingo is an
| exercise in self-deception. No doubt there will be people in
| difficult situations that have managed just fine with Duolingo,
| or in spite of it, but it doesn't feel like a growing market.
| huytersd wrote:
| You learn the vocabulary, you learn pronunciations and you
| learn how to listen and comprehend. I don't see what's so bad
| about it. It's never going to be able to compete with a native
| speaker just speaking to you in that language but nothing will.
| Panini_Jones wrote:
| It's deceptively ineffective. Sure, it can teach you things,
| but it has not been a good use of time for me personally (I'm
| not OP btw).
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Never is a very long time, I suspect you'll be able to chat
| with an AI assistant, in a language of your choosing, within
| 5 years.
| gretch wrote:
| I've used duolingo several times on and off throughout my
| life for different languages (Spanish, German, French).
| Sometimes paid, sometimes free.
|
| In the beginning I thought it was excellent and that's why I
| kept coming back.
|
| I tried it again the last 12 months and the app wasted so
| much of my time making me skip through promotions and do-
| nothing animations. Opening chests, collecting gems, all the
| gamified stuff.
|
| I didn't need it. I was already self motivated to learn
| without a bunch of time sinking doodads that you have to
| click through.
|
| I guess duolingo is good if you are struggling with
| motivation.
|
| Recently I used a paid app called Pimsleur that I liked.
| There's also a lot of good free resources on YT
| bdamm wrote:
| Your point is a good one, although I have to point out that
| Duolingo does at least let you skip through the gamified
| stuff very quickly. When I'm doing lessons I reflexively
| double tap the "Ok" button to skip over the little whoo-hoo
| animation.
|
| It would be awful if I was forced to wait for the animation
| to complete, which fortunately, they do not. The same
| applies to basically all the animations except for the
| opening screen.
| bavarianbob wrote:
| The problem lies in the perceived benefit that the user
| believes. The app, through its marketing and content, leads
| you to believe that you can and in fact, will, learn the
| language of your choosing.
|
| Anecdotally, this has not been the case for me.
|
| Similar to the parent, I have accelerated my learning tenfold
| by ditching D**** in favor of reading, watching, and
| listening to content in my target language as well as
| speaking to a tutor I found online.
|
| I've wasted a tremendous amount of time going through and
| ultimately completing a tree only to find myself crossing the
| finish line not being comfortable saying anything in that
| language. Is that a criticism of me? Perhaps. But, the big D
| once fooled me into thinking the answer to that question was
| that it is. Which is to say, I don't believe it's a criticism
| of me.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I feel like you're saying "primed for success" ironically but
| I'm not seeing the irony.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| If they were actually primed for success then 18 months of
| Duolingo should've given them a significant head start on the
| other students.
|
| Judging by the tone, I'm assuming that didn't actually occur.
| eterm wrote:
| It took me a few times to understand their sentence
| correctly.
|
| What I think OP meant to say:
|
| All pupils found success. My success could be explained by
| being primed for success with 18 months of duolingo, but all
| pupils had similar success.
|
| As written, it reads like "all pupils [...] primed for
| success by duolingo" which is perhaps why you tried to look
| for irony to match it with their conclusion.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Hah ok. I'm amused.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Studying Duolingo for 18 months should have primed them for
| success, but after just three weeks of an in-person class, it
| was evident that it had not. It's implied (or assumed) that
| the class was for 2nd year students or less, so Duolingo must
| be less effective than traditional instruction.
| attentive wrote:
| Duolingo saving a year of in-person classes sounds like a
| success to me.
| ttmb wrote:
| I'm sure it's not the best language learning tool around, but
| it has taught me enough of three different languages to visit a
| foreign country, ask for directions, order things, etc, with a
| number of conversations never falling back into English. And
| all for the price of free.
| forinti wrote:
| It all depends on one's expectations. I have no expectation
| of speaking a new language correctly or with a decent accent
| (I'm probably too old). I've being using Duolingo for some
| time and I complement it with Youtube videos and random
| texts. My French spelling has improved and I can read Russian
| news. I'd call it a success. Of course it won't replace a
| proper course and teacher, but it's not worthless.
| pkulak wrote:
| I'm about 18 months in as well and feel like I don't know crap.
| I just can't memorize thousands of new words. I honestly have
| no idea how anyone is bilingual.
| kranke155 wrote:
| They use other methods, like Rosetta. Duolingo is trash.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Why is roesetta better?
| treprinum wrote:
| It's not, it's just a different style, "full immersion"
| where you have no clue what is going on and they think at
| some point you'll understand. I don't think it works well
| but whatever. Best is to pay for a trip to some remote
| area speaking only the target language and force yourself
| to understand it quickly, swim or sink.
| bavarianbob wrote:
| Do you think an environment like this in say, VR, has
| merit?
| treprinum wrote:
| No idea, if you can survive with VR goggles for hours,
| and you have reasonable VR partners not trying to teach
| you all kinds of slang and swearwords, then maybe.
| colordrops wrote:
| Go live, date, and work in a country that speaks the language
| you are studying. You will find that you don't need to start
| from ground zero and you will gain speaking and listening
| skills quickly.
| ghaff wrote:
| And that's pretty much the thing. Pretty much everyone I
| know says immersion is the thing. You can probably learn to
| read academically. And I'll probably do some more language
| courses before a more immersive situation. But for the vast
| majority of people "I've spent a month with this online
| course" fluency isn't realistic.
| treprinum wrote:
| Just subscribe to ChatGPT and tell it to teach you whatever
| language you want to master including meaning of each
| sentence in your own language. There are plugins for voice
| input/output as well so you can learn while doing a workout
| etc.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| No one source of language learning material will bring you to
| fluency. There's a great community of language learners over
| at the Language Learners Forum [1] (note: it's been down the
| past few days but seems to be back up, although slow).
|
| One resource that seems to be universally loved over there is
| Assimil [2]. I've been working through one of their courses
| and it's been great. I augment it with youtubers that make
| comprehensible input videos at my ability level, as well as
| with iTalki lessons.
|
| I tried Duolingo once many years ago, but there's no way that
| memorizing words is going to get you all the way there. You
| need reading, writing, listening, and speaking practice in
| real world situations.
|
| [1] https://forum.language-learners.org/ [2]
| https://www.assimil.com
| simlevesque wrote:
| Assimil is great.
|
| My personal favorite ressource is Lingolia [1]
|
| [1] https://lingolia.com
| willmadden wrote:
| Immersion is the best way. Go to the place where the language
| is spoken and throw yourself to the wolves.
| colordrops wrote:
| As someone else has said in response, my vocabulary,
| pronunciation, and understanding of grammar rules are solid. I
| believe I've already learned 3000 words of Spanish at this
| point. I will need immersion to gain the speaking and listening
| skills, but I was never deceived about that. I figured this
| would be a small daily investment for a few years that I would
| eventually need to actualize.
| hammock wrote:
| It seems like AI, deployed against a few hundred learners,
| ought to be able to discern what the most efficient path to
| learning a new language is. Then you can just create a new app
| that does exactly that
| thorum wrote:
| At least in the grassroots language learner community, there
| seems to be a growing sense that the most efficient way to
| achieve real fluency in a second language is: regular long-
| term effort to read or listen to text or media in the
| language that is just a little above your level of
| understanding. Notably different from how duolingo works.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis
| diggan wrote:
| > what the most efficient path to learning a new language is.
|
| This is assuming that there is a "most efficient path to
| learning a new language" that applies to everyone.
| bhdlr wrote:
| That's the nice thing about ai though, it could be tailored
| to your experience and learn so you do. For example if you
| are progressing on pace with similar learners it could
| apply a different learning program or vary course materials
| until it sees improvement
| malwarebytess wrote:
| It's pretty clear immersion is the best path.
|
| Using AIs conversational skills seems like the best way to
| employ AI in language learning.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| I suggest that the power of these new language models is that
| instead of finding "the path of success" the models can
| adapt, and learn to accommodate individuals with every
| respective path to success. Chat, GPT never has the same
| conversation with two different individuals, roughly
| speaking. If Duolingo can pivot to deliver automated,
| personalized learning experiences, then more power to them.
| That would be fantastic in my opinion.
| yreg wrote:
| I know of some people who have learned languages through
| Duolingo. I also know some people who took classroom courses
| and accompanied those with Duolingo - and they believe Duolingo
| was helpful in that sense. I know people who learned foreign
| language by a combination of Duolingo + staying in a foreign
| country at the same time.
|
| I myself have used Duolingo to learn some rudimentary basics of
| a foreign language and I haven't forgotten those.
|
| I doubt Duolingo is the most efficient, but that doesn't mean
| it's useless.
| simlevesque wrote:
| I've learned a new language in the last 2 years.
|
| You can't do it with just Duolingo. But I truly believe that
| there is no method except for full immersion which can make
| you learn a language alone. It's always: in person classes,
| reading, watching medias, changing your phone's language,
| going out to restaurants, language learning apps, making new
| friends.
|
| Duolingo is effective, just not alone.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Duolingo has the same incentives problem as dating apps - once
| someone is sufficiently fluent in the language they want to
| learn, they stop using the app. So instead of efficiently
| teaching the language, Duolingo makes the process as slow as
| possible while tricking the user into feeling that they're
| quickly learning.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Eh, I don't think that's accurate since there's no "monogamy"
| equivalent to language. It takes a long time to learn a
| language deeply, and if that were made easier, many people
| would just want to learn more of them. The nature of (the
| vast majority of) relationships is that when you find one
| you're done looking for more, that is not the nature of any
| type of knowledge.
| danielenick89 wrote:
| And as a plot twist using actual dating apps to learn a new
| language while abroad can be very effective
| simonw wrote:
| "Unless anyone has had a different experience"
|
| I've tried classroom instruction, and teacher-driven courses,
| multiple times in my life. They never really stuck for me.
|
| Duolingo has worked for me where other techniques haven't. I'm
| now at a stage where I can read a newspaper article in Spanish
| and understand ~90% of the content.
|
| (5 year streak, but that's 5 years of 5-15 minutes a day which
| turns out to be exactly the commitment that works for me.)
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Like many things, circumstances will differ.
|
| One thing that I deem a falacy though, is comparing it with
| e.g. an expensive paid for classroom or personal lessons. It
| may well fail in such direct comparison, and no surprise!
|
| People then use _that_ comparison to claim "it's worthless",
| and I disagree with that.
|
| If the claim is "30min of structured learning with duolingo
| will get you no closer to learning a language than 30 min of
| mindlessly scrolling facebook cat videos", I don't believe
| that's true. And THAT is the correct comparison :)
|
| One thing to note though, is how you use it - note I used the
| term "structured learning" in previous sentence, not "doing
| match madness for points" :)
|
| Personally, I spent first few months learning on duolingo, and
| it was wonderful; had some small chats with people who speak
| that language at work, occasionally wrote a sentence or two in
| that language in emails, etc. Then I spent next few months
| _preserving the streak_. I did the challenges and matches and
| got thousands of points and first places... but learned
| nothing. In fact, my knowledge deteriorated.
|
| Then after 200 days, I lost my streak and... breathed a sigh of
| relief. I am now making sure I do the lessons and practice and
| _learn_ , and purposely avoid the competition part of it or
| activities which give many repetitive points but don't increase
| my knowledge. My familiarity with language is increasing again
| and I can make more and more sentences on my own.
| demondemidi wrote:
| DuoLingo is so annoying with the gamification. It just won't
| shut up. I found that if I limit my use, it stops reminding
| me what league I'm in, probably because it realized I don't
| care.
|
| I just hope I'm not learning wrong things from the new AI-
| powered checker. It's bad enough that I can't always find an
| explanation why I got something wrong. (I've actually used
| ChatGPT 3.0 to explain some of my mistakes, and then was able
| to verify its explanation because of the keywords it used,
| and then googling those.)
| wycy wrote:
| > Then after 200 days, I lost my streak and... breathed a
| sigh of relief.
|
| I have a 297 day streak right now and I just feel like slave
| to the owl. I'm going to get to 365 and then purposely break
| the streak to free myself.
| attentive wrote:
| If you get daily language exposure some other way then why
| not. But if the owl is the only thing ties you to your
| daily exposure then you'll have nothing.
| mc32 wrote:
| The irritating thing about them is they personify the owl. It
| doesn't even have a normal name, and instead is issued the
| brand name.
|
| Anyhow, when it tells me it's sad, or it misses me, it makes
| me actually avoid the app. It's so stupid and annoying as all
| hell.
| madjam002 wrote:
| Are there any better apps for learning a foreign language?
| pahool wrote:
| I prefer Mango Languages, which I get for free through my
| public library. The progression feels better to me, it's not
| as gamified (sorry for using that word), and there is some
| (though not a ton of) actual lesson content in there. For
| example, learning Spanish, it gives some context on the
| different usages of "Ser" vs. "Estar" for "to be", and it
| includes discussion on gendered nouns. DuoLingo may have
| gotten to some brief lesson content at some point, but for me
| it was too grating to continue with and I quit before I made
| much progress with it.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Language Transfer is free, non-commercial, and many swear by
| it:
|
| https://www.languagetransfer.org
| Affric wrote:
| I found Duolingo to be incredibly helpful.
|
| The language I was learning had no tuition available for adults
| in my country and I practiced with native speakers when I could
| find them and consumed media from the community of the target
| language.
|
| All while on public transport, when I would otherwise be on my
| phone. All for the price of nothing (though their model has
| grow much more user hostile).
|
| This is not to advocate for Duolingo as a company or even the
| app as a method but I found it effective and useful as a tool.
|
| Duolingo isn't going to learn a language for you. You have to
| internalise the grammar and vocabulary.
|
| Could I have done the same with a book? No. I could have done
| something different. Could I have done the same with a class?
| No, no classes existed for me.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Nothing is a substitute for immersion, and learning a
| language is so incredibly hard that it's fair to question the
| motivation of the learner and ask whether they intend to live
| in the place that speaks the language.
|
| If you intend to move, then whether you practice Chinese for
| 4 years in a classroom vs. with Duolingo, any differences are
| going to melt away very quickly and what will emerge as the
| forefront factor of success will be one's innate ability to
| push yourself in a foreign environment; i.e., don't be safe
| and only interact with people who speak your native language.
| Affric wrote:
| 100%
|
| We quickly learn how vulnerable we are without a local
| language or Lingua Franca.
|
| In my experience working class immigrants who have
| immigrated to places that have no large established
| language community in their new home are the best
| demonstration of this. They often start with nothing but
| end up with great skills whereas others will just stay and
| interact with their native language community and be barely
| conversational in the majority language.
| lgessler wrote:
| IMO this is a misunderstanding of the product.
|
| This might be a cynical take, but I think that for most users
| of Duolingo, it functions more as a game than as a tool which
| produces substantial gains in language knowledge. I'm a
| computational linguist, and whenever on hearing this people ask
| me what I think about Duolingo, I like to say it's language-
| flavored entertainment.
| demondemidi wrote:
| _____-flavored entertainment pretty much describes everything
| our culture consumes over TCP/IP.
| bavarianbob wrote:
| Is it necessary to specify TCP/IP? Is it not also
| applicable to books? Reading piles of pulp fiction is
| subtly different than language-flavored entertainment.
| vasco wrote:
| The way to think about Duolingo is like another mobile phone
| game. Except the "universe" of the game is language learning
| instead of a random farming or middle ages theme. And so you
| learn about the language in the same way you learn about
| farming or middle ages from those games. Meaning if you never
| read anything about farming or the middle ages now you know of
| some things, but you'd really be much faster ahead by picking
| up a proper book on the subject. So it is with language
| learning apps.
| manmal wrote:
| The vocab is definitely useful in the real world, and audio
| comprehension is improved. Foreign language textbooks also
| have vocab sections, and Duolingo makes that part easier.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| I've used it when visiting countries to pick up some very
| basics - if I wanted to actually learn a language I would get a
| tutor.
| sureglymop wrote:
| The thing is that their whole marketing and selling point is
| mostly to people who don't have real strong motivation or focus
| to learn a language or don't have the time. E.g. to the tone of
| "you'll need to do this for just two minutes a day", "it'll
| feel more like a game", " much easier than in a traditional
| classroom setting ", etc. But the truth is that it doesn't
| really work that way; someone with focus and motivation
| learning grammatical rules and more in a classroom will always
| be either more effective or progressing at least at the same
| pace (or at least be just as ineffective). Their business is
| more about selling the idea of learning a language and that it
| is actually easy, partly by presenting it in a gamified way. It
| kind of works because people fall for it and buy a subscription
| for ~3 months but probably eventually stop. They then need new
| subscribers and have to double down on that marketing/selling
| of the idea.
|
| In reality, there is no shortcut to learning something. It's
| just about having the curiosity, motivation and discipline to
| do so. And many people may think they have that or are enticed
| by the idea of learning a new language but their life doesn't
| depend on it enough to have the aforementioned qualities to do
| it.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > I spent 18 months on it and the learning was soundly thrashed
| by three weeks in a classroom, and for all the pupils, not just
| me, primed for success by 18 months with Duolingo.
|
| Yeah, but if you have time for 3 weeks in class, why do
| Duolingo in the first place? Those serve different markets.
| Duolingo is for low effort, low commitment, but interested
| enough to do it a bit in their spare time kind of people.
| attentive wrote:
| You said it yourself they were primed by 18months of duolingo.
| Your classroom experience could have been different otherwise.
| rpmisms wrote:
| It's excellent for building vocab and reinforcing basics.
| Expecting any more from it is silly.
| locallost wrote:
| Learning a language at an older age is anyway difficult and
| will only succeed with a lot of effort. As someone that's
| learned a foreign language at almost 30 in a classroom, I can
| say that Duolingo does some things well, mostly by forcing or
| motivating you to repeat to memorize things. I say I learned it
| in a classroom, but objectively I never would've made it if I
| was not in the country whose official language I was learning.
| So the classroom gives you some basics and then you need to
| practice a lot until it becomes something you don't need to
| think about. As they say, internalize it. This takes years, but
| also depends on the language, some are more difficult or have
| different learning curves. Duolingo is again good at the
| practice part.
|
| Most people try to use logic and comparisons to their native
| language, but this is imho not a good way. Kids don't learn
| like that. It's argued that grownups lose this ability, but
| personally I sometimes say thing where I have no idea why I
| said that and if it's really correct. But then it turns out it
| is. It's somewhere in my head and it got there by listening to
| other people speak or reading. I know a lot of people that got
| nowhere by going to class because they had their group of
| friends from e.g. Spain, China or Korea around them. I met a
| person from the US who was disappointed with the little
| progress they made and said "I don't understand that and why
| it's like that". My only answer was really "because it just
| is". So I think Duolingo has a place, as a sort of a virtual
| native speaker you can interact with.
| ozzydave wrote:
| The first time I used DuoLingo, I was just trying to get
| through the tree, without really learning, and that was
| useless. Now I have a different technique: I'll only listen
| (never read), and if I can't comprehend and respond
| immediately, I'll fail that exercise deliberately, so I'll be
| re-tested later. For me, I only understand the language if I
| can understand some one speaking to me and respond in real
| time.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I coincidentally saw a video recently about how Duolingo's AI
| model was getting some French things wrong. I use Duolingo, but
| it's a vocab tool more than anything.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| LLMs are the masters of bilingual bullshit, so really Duolingo
| has no choice but embrace them. The LLM stuff embedded in their
| existing product is challenging in a different and better way.
| graypegg wrote:
| Why would I use duolingo if it has about the same product as
| opening google translate, moving the target language side off the
| screen, typing in some inane sentence, guessing what it says, and
| revealing.
|
| You take a product that had the USP of "quality" and decided
| you'd rather play in the "AI sludge content" thunderdome where
| anyone with a vague understanding of web development and openAI
| api access can compete with you for functionally the same
| product.
| vintermann wrote:
| Well, these days, Google Translate is pretty bad as machine
| translation services go... it's much better to ask an
| instruction tuned multilingual LLM to translate for you.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > Why would I use duolingo if it has about the same product as
| opening google translate, moving the target language side off
| the screen, typing in some inane sentence, guessing what it
| says, and revealing.
|
| That seems like a way worse UX to me than what duolingo offers
| graypegg wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's exceptionally worse considering it's free
| vs begging you for microtransactions.
|
| Gamification is easy enough on your own, get some ice cream!
|
| If you need accountability, ask a friend.
|
| You could alternatively fill up millions of flash cards in
| Anki with random phrases out of chatGPT and really hone in on
| the Duolingo simplicity.
|
| Silly examples, but I just feel like "AI phrases with TTS
| audio displayed along side 1 of 20 PNGs of a cartoon
| character" isn't really a defendable product in a market that
| churns out multiple copies of that idea a month.
|
| They used to be a course that was designed by
| employees/volunteers interested in language (in theory), now
| it's a randomized. Eh.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is coming to all, including programming, just remember that.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| Indeed. Cheer on the tech if you like, but don't be surprised
| when you're out of work for the foreseeable future next.
| surfingdino wrote:
| AI translation falls flat on its face with gendered languages,
| when it is given text in English and has to translate it into
| French, German, or Polish. How is that even a consideration for a
| service that's supposed to be teaching people languages?
| frabcus wrote:
| Google Translate and DeepL are pretty bad at this, that's true.
| As far as I can tell they translate a sentence at a time.
|
| Using an LLM and giving more context, it can infer gender from
| signals earlier in the text. This based on testing we did at
| the last place I worked.
|
| What kind of cases do you have gender failing, with which
| tools?
| savanaly wrote:
| I'd be really interested in an example. Preferably a link to
| the actual conversation with GPT4 on ChatGPT or equivalent on
| another service, but even just typing out the sentence here
| with the translation you think is correct vs the translation
| you expect to receive would be helpful.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Can you give an example of this? In my experience (learning
| Polish) ChatGPT can usually derive the gender when the subject
| is a common name: Sure, here are the
| translations of your sentences into Polish: "You are
| beautiful Natalia" translates to "Jestes piekna Natalia."
| "You are beautiful Piotr" translates to "Jestes piekny Piotr."
|
| piekn- is correctly genered.
| baz00 wrote:
| Race to the bottom propelled by the current fad here we come.
|
| Duolingo has been completely fucking useless for me compared to
| spending a few hours in the country in question though. It's
| pretty much HOW DO I GO LEFT AT THE BAKERY level of teaching.
| cyberninja15 wrote:
| Duolingo was one of the first companies to partner with OpenAI on
| leveraging their language models. I think they were using GPT-3
| before ChatGPT was even popularized.
| gtmitchell wrote:
| This is sadly unsurprising. I have a foreign language degree and
| a bit over a decade ago, I spent some time trying to get a
| translation side-job off the ground.
|
| Even then it was clear that , except for a select few languages,
| it was a race to the bottom with machine translation software as
| the driving force. I gave up on that career idea quickly.
|
| Now I use ChatGPT and is does a great job. My experience with
| DuoLingo is it's barely better than flash cards for language
| learning, and it's no wonder they're having a hard time making
| any money offering a product thats competition is cheaper and
| better.
| demondemidi wrote:
| How does DuoLingo compare with Rosetta Stone? Is the latter
| better because it is expensive, or did Duolingo beat Rosetta by
| offering the same thing at a lower price? If Rosetta Stone is
| still better because it uses humans, I'd consider switching over,
| but it is like 3x the price of DL.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| I'm using Duolingo heavily and I've run already at least twice to
| a situation that: 1) my incorrect answer was accepted 2)
| incorrect English translation was provided by the app
| BarryMilo wrote:
| When you think about it, this is why using AI-generated text is
| no better than using a dictionary. I want to learn from someone
| who actually thought about the text and whether it makes sense
| in context, not just whether it's free from errors.
|
| In order to translate like a human, AI needs to be AGI.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| Eh, so many of these layoffs come disguised as one thing, but are
| really caused by another. How credible is the claim that AI is
| genuinely the cause?
| Zaskoda wrote:
| I see no problem, fundamentally, with leveraging the benefits of
| AI to generate content for whatever thing. I see the problem as
| those who contributed the content upon which the AI was trained
| not getting paid for the use of their content.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If anyone should be piling into AI, it should be Duolingo, or any
| kind of language teaching. Isn't translation what LLMs were for?
| cassepipe wrote:
| I see a lot of complaining about Duolingo being worthless but I
| beg to differ.
|
| First I have not used the app but IIRC it uses a lot of "Choose
| the correct word among those four" but it's quite bad for
| reinforcement. It's much better to reinforce what you learned to
| have to type a sentence from scratch. I recommend using it on a
| computer. Also, I don't know if that exercise is still ther, but
| having to pronounce a sentence is also good. The problem was it
| was too easy to pass though.
|
| The other thing is that it does not replace learning the
| language, that is reading a grammar in order to know what are the
| general rules of the language. But it does replace conversation
| if you are not able to speak the language and provide a a good
| source of daily reinforcement, and vocabulary.
|
| It's an effective tool when used correctly in my opinion.
| impute wrote:
| "I have not used the app"
| rafaelero wrote:
| That was predictable. The reaction of people here, saying that
| GPT4 output is of lower quality than of humans, is also a
| predictable cope.
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