[HN Gopher] Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, f...
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Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
Author : Improvement
Score : 338 points
Date : 2025-05-26 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (htxt.co.za)
(TXT) w3m dump (htxt.co.za)
| i80and wrote:
| I was happily paying for Duolingo Super, despite being
| unconfident in its pedagogy, until they announced they were
| replacing their human curriculum writers.
|
| Dropped it instantly. I get the bargain-basement cost-cutting
| appeal from a (bad) CEO's perspective, but if I'm paying actual
| money for a service, I want said money going to humans.
| owebmaster wrote:
| If cutting costs using AI was really that good for business,
| companies would be using it as a competitive advantage, not
| advertising everywhere.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The value proposition gets even more dicey if the target
| language is one with a sizable online learning community. Those
| are churning out more tools and instructional content every
| day, most of which are made freely available, and this content
| has the benefit of not only being made by humans but also by
| people who are passionate about the language who care about the
| small details. These communities are much quicker to embrace
| experimental learning methods, too, and so generally the stuff
| that doesn't work gets filtered out in short order.
|
| And as others in these comments note, if one wants to use an
| LLM as a language tutor, you can do that for less than what
| Duolingo is charging while also getting the benefit of being
| able to tune it to your exact needs instead of being stuck with
| whatever Duolingo decided is best.
| spaceywilly wrote:
| Not to mention, at that point they are essentially just serving
| as the middle man between you and a LLM. Instead of paying for
| Duolingo to ask an LLM to generate a bunch of Spanish phrases
| for you, you can pay for the LLM and do that yourself plus a
| lot more. I'm not sure Duolingo has a solid understanding of
| why they exist as a business.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Their comments cemented to me that they have no long term value.
| If the ceo of Duolingo thinks AI will teach me a language then
| I'll use a low cost LLM to get there without Duolingo.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| I've noticed that a strong thread of the hacker community,
| including HN and the guys who wrote GNU and linux, are
| _extremely cheap_. Like, you 'd rather write a product clone
| yourself than pay $15/month for the official product. Why is
| this? What's with the inherent stinginess?
| adocomplete wrote:
| It's not stinginess, it's value.
|
| If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight
| to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my
| exact needs.
|
| I feel like so many AI products these days won't be around a
| few years from now once more people find out that all their
| doing is providing a slightly different UI to what you can
| get directly from OAI, Anthropic, Google for cheaper and
| better and more tailored to you.
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| LLMs cannot "teach you a language". They make for cool
| demos to show off. They can perhaps be a building block of
| a proper language learning experience.
|
| Then again, the only languages I actually learned - besides
| my mother tongue - to the point of being able to do things
| were English and Latin and both were very much acquired
| offline. I have plenty of experience with language learning
| apps and I'm not convinced tech is the solution or even
| part of the solution.
| adocomplete wrote:
| I think the best way to learn a language is offline
| through actual human interaction.
|
| I've used Duolingo in the past (and other apps) and
| quickly lost interest, it's a fun app, but I feel like
| you don't learn from it. If I had to learn a new language
| today, I'm confident I could make good progress with GPT
| or Gemini, but tailoring it to how I learn.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Using it and being surrounded by people writing and/or
| speaking the language is probably the right way to learn
| a language. That is how I learned Polish which is really
| difficult. I joined a community, and 2 years later, my
| Polish was quite good! YMMV.
|
| After 4 weeks I also learned Spanish enough to maintain
| casual conversations just from trying to talk to someone
| online who did not speak English. I am rusty now,
| however, because I do not speak it with anyone, nor do I
| see or hear Spanish anywhere. Spanish is way easier, IMO,
| in comparison to Polish.
|
| Thoughts?
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| > Thoughts?
|
| On what? If I understand you correctly you learned
| through people and practice and community.
| johnisgood wrote:
| On my method of learning a new language.
|
| It worked for me, and I found it to be the best way to
| learn a new language.
|
| I tried Duolingo but I got nowhere useful that way.
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| Oh, right. I think whatever works best for your
| personality but in general doing some exercises and/or
| interacting with people has been working for a couple ..
| ten thousands years at least. Hard to go wrong. I never
| heard someone make the believable claim that they
| interacted with too many people and it hampered their
| language learning.
|
| My take is that basically anything can be made to work if
| you are properly motivated. Tech is - at best - a
| secondary concern.
| nchmy wrote:
| False.
|
| Could I ask ChatGPT to just "teach me spanish"? Surely
| not. But if you've got even a slight idea of what to do
| (learn present tense and vocab, then progressive, future
| and past, then some conditional, hypothetical etc...), it
| can be an absolutely incredible tutor.
|
| I started using it when i was already at a pretty high
| level, but I'm quite certain that it would have been
| excellent from the very beginning. It translates, gives
| varied examples, explains syntax, compares verb tenses
| and conjugation and more.
| kbelder wrote:
| Plus, being stingy even if you have money benefits those
| who don't have money. It's why I buy the $0.50 macaroni and
| cheese instead of the $1.69 version. I don't really care;
| either would be fine. But I don't want companies to succeed
| in charging more. I want them to desperately need to cut
| their selling price in order to succeed.
|
| People buying expensive products (assuming they aren't
| truly _better_ ) are helping screw over poor people. Just
| slightly.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| i guess, but then youre not integrating the externalized
| costs of the cheaper food.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| The $.50 version is barely food. The $1.69 is not much
| better, and still very unhealthy for you. Have ground
| beef and a fiber rich low calorie food like brocoli or
| whole wheat whole grain noodles or something.
|
| Anyway you're not really helping the poor in practice
| when you do this. Corporations aren't hurting because one
| guy or even a dozen he inspires through HN stop buying a
| few boxes of kraft dinner.
|
| If more people did it, and it became a movement, like
| buying clothes from the thrift store is becoming, then
| clothiers will shift business focus. Which to some extent
| they seem to have done over the past 20 years. But only
| slightly.
| fao_ wrote:
| I don't agree with the person above you in as much as the
| way they are doing it is very individualist "vote with
| your wallet", and yes, you're right that it's very
| ineffective.
|
| The more effective way is to form a group, call it a
| "club" or whatever, that does it. The group can then
| advertise to other people and get more people to join the
| club. Eventually, it becomes large enough to gain
| political power. This is called "unionizing" -- people
| with a shared interest joining together for a common
| goal. Eventually you get large enough to hold the
| corporations over a barrel, either through strikes or a
| mass disinterest in buying products, etc.
|
| The only reason we have a 40-hour work week is because of
| unionizing, it's a very, very effective tactic that is
| severely underutilized.
| tredre3 wrote:
| I love how you make being upper middle class yet stingy
| to be about helping the poor. You're not buying cheap
| things because you're cheap and want to keep more of that
| money (and thus pay less taxes that would go to the
| poor), you're doing it to save the world!
| 90s_dev wrote:
| Many people do things like this out of a genuine guilt
| over having it better than many others financially and
| not knowing how to resolve that.
|
| I really liked the solution in the movie Our God's
| Brother adapted from a play written by Karol Wojtyla in
| the 1940s in Polish who later became Pope John Paul II.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go
| straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize
| it to my exact needs.
|
| Because the "customize it" part is not trivial. That is the
| value add for most people who can not do that customisation
| themselves.
|
| That said, I've found LLMs to be terrific if the goal is to
| learn the rules of language's grammar. But to actually
| learn to speak the language, find HelloTalk to be best,
| beaten by nothing other than actually sitting down with a
| native speaker.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| It is actually quite trivial.
| dotancohen wrote:
| And Dropbox is just rsync and a server.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Weird analogy. Not even close.
| slt2021 wrote:
| someone will leak the system prompt for Duolingo and
| thats it - all their moat is just a single git leak away.
|
| you cannot build a moat with LLMs, so there is no value
| in using any service that is wrapper around the chatpgt
| dotancohen wrote:
| Duolingo does not need a moat. They are already an
| established incumbent and have market inertia on their
| side. They can afford to experiment and make mistakes,
| and then to backtrack those mistakes.
|
| For what it's worth, I also stopped using Duolingo when
| the human forums closed. I often found as much value in
| the forums as in the actual course. And like GP, the
| hardest part was relinquishing my nearly 1000 day streak.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| If you enjoy building things why not do it yourself while
| also saving money?
|
| My dad likes doing oil changes himself which I'd never do,
| but it doesn't occur to me to insult and question why a
| person has different values than I do.
| lazide wrote:
| Well, or as many DIY'ers have figured out - 'why would I
| buy that for $500 when I can spend $1500 and 3 weeks making
| it myself?'
| adocomplete wrote:
| Depends on if you learn something while making yourself.
| The lesson itself could be worth 10x the monetary spend
| (in a positive and negative way).
| lazide wrote:
| Well, and as I always told myself - it's an investment in
| tools I'll use again later, and eventually it'll be
| cheaper to DIY myself.
|
| Which, at the point I was welding together solar panel
| mounts onto shipping containers _was true_. But maybe i
| could have asked myself 'should I' instead of 'can I'
| somewhere earlier in the process hah.
| raincole wrote:
| Where did the GP say they're going to build a Duolingo clone?
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Lol. Linus didn't pour decades of his life into Linux to save
| a buck. Neither did Stallman with GNU. Even if the
| alternatives at the time only cost $15, (hahahahahaha) free
| alternatives would still have been well worth making.
|
| Software freedom has never been about money, and always been
| about preserving public access to a software commons. You
| might believe your local bookstore is a better source of
| knowledge than your local library, but that's only because
| you don't really know what you're missing.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I agree with your point, but your analogy doesn't hold up.
| There are several topics I've had to go to book stores to
| learn more about because my local library (and the systems
| they connect with) don't have any relevant materials. I
| make a habit of checking the library for non-fiction books
| first. Sometimes it pays off, but often not.
| briankelly wrote:
| It's way more about control for the free software crowd. I do
| get it for tools of learning personally - managing your own
| knowledge base is important.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I think the opposite is true: I'm deliberately choosing the
| usually more expensive DIY route even though I'm aware of
| cheaper commercial offerings.
|
| If you hate ads, deception, and dark patterns as much as I
| do, then most software has a negative value. But I'll only
| pay for it if the value exceeds the price. That means there's
| a rather large (and probably growing) share of the software
| market that I'll just never pay even a penny for, because in
| my opinion, it has negative value. But it's not because I
| don't want to spend the money. It's because I want those
| companies that are peddling ad-laden bloatware to be a
| financial failure so that the market will intervene and offer
| better alternatives.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| First of all it's an infinitely difficult problem to justly
| gauge value for value approximations, so a roughly free
| market will always have price fluctuations where people
| experiment.
|
| And there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising. How
| else do you let your potential market know you have a
| product that they would benefit from? It's not always
| deception to get into their wallets, sometimes it's a
| genuine fair value trade.
|
| Though I do think modern practices are full of immoral
| patterns, especially what George Lucas pioneered of
| brainwashing children into buying things. So yeah I agree
| that in practice, most modern marketing is just plain
| deception.
|
| On the other hand, you then have millions of young,
| talented developers wasting their time and energy on open
| source projects that are hugely innovative and useful, but
| because they wholesale reject marketing, their projects
| never get anywhere, and they settle for unfulfilling jobs
| that society could do without.
|
| And maybe the saddest part of all is that many such young
| talented devs spent so much time making useful projects for
| free, and never saw a dime because of it, despite the fact
| that corporations are now profiting from their work daily.
| You may say, well, the dev put it out there for free and
| didn't ask for money, but in the current market, what other
| choice is there? The race to the bottom has already been
| won and first place was $0.
| codr7 wrote:
| If you're going to drag Linus and Stallman into this, at
| least read up on your history. A commercial Unix or Lisp
| Machine was quite a bit more expensive than $15/month. They
| both got shafted by companies that couldn't care less about
| anything beyond profit. It's part of the ugly side of
| capitalism, fuck people and fuck the world.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| Is that really all it is? That you're all just communists?
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| > you'd rather write a product clone yourself than pay
| $15/month for the official product
|
| Because when you write it yourself, you can share it with
| others. Those others can then build on what you did or use it
| themselves.
|
| Not everything needs to be a transaction - some people just
| want to make the world slightly better without asking for
| anything in return.
| senko wrote:
| Duolingo costing $15/month is not the problem.
|
| Duolingo being crap and costing anything/month is the
| problem.
|
| (Paid Duolingo user and long time GNU/Linux user here)
| jofla_net wrote:
| Exactly, you'd think a targeted, application-specific, purpose
| built tool would be what a vendor would gravitate to, not
| probabilistic, non deterministic hype, hot off a shelf. I
| really wish we could have overlords with at least some
| technical knowledge.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Ouch, this is so logically true given the CEO's previous
| statement. Even if it isn't in fact true.
|
| However the stock did rise about 25% after his comment so maybe
| it was at least working for the short term if some investor
| wanted to cash out?
| vendiddy wrote:
| I do think AI could be a better language tutor than an average
| language teacher, but I don't think Duolingo's approach is very
| effective.
|
| The ideal AI-powered tutor would work more closely to a private
| language tutor. It would speak with you and gradually
| integrating language concepts into the conversation. When you
| make mistakes, it could correct you on the spot and keep track
| of where your strengths and weaknesses are.
| dotancohen wrote:
| You should look at HelloTalk. It's real people communicating
| in each others' language. Unbelievably great service, almost
| as good as sitting down to a coffee with someone.
|
| Actually, in some ways better. HelloTalk has a "correct the
| other person's sentence" feature that shows an inline diff,
| yet it's simple enough for people who have never heard the
| term diff.
| a0123 wrote:
| > I do think AI could be a better language tutor than an
| average language teacher, but I don't think Duolingo's
| approach is very effective.
|
| No offense, I can tell you're neither a linguist nor a
| language teacher.
|
| This is one are where the human input is invaluable and
| irreplaceable. Because language (the complex kind) is
| inherently human. It quite literally is.
| astromoose wrote:
| Correction is not always desirable. The goal in learning a
| language is rarely to be grammatically "correct" in the
| language, but rather to communicate. And communication
| doesn't need perfect grammar.
|
| When I was working as language teacher, I was tasked
| specifically with teaching speaking. I would often use
| information gap activities. These are activities where two or
| more parties have pieces of information but need to obtain
| pieces from others in order to complete the task. Sometimes,
| these would us language forms (re: sentence structures), but
| most of the time they were free flow activities. It didn't
| matter how "correct" the language was so long as the idea was
| communicated.
|
| To think about it another, how often do we make mistakes when
| speaking? Writing? And yet, we still managed to communicate
| just fine.
|
| That's not to say there shouldn't be any focus on form, but
| simply that it's not nearly as important as many tend to
| think when it comes to language learning.
| jrflowers wrote:
| I cannot imagine being the CEO of a software company and
| proudly proclaiming that some _other_ software -- which we do
| not make and can easily be had very cheap or for free-- is
| better fit for purpose than what we've been able to accomplish
| in over a decade with almost a thousand employees, and
| expecting that to impress investors or users or both.
|
| Like that would be like the Chipotle CEO proudly announcing
| that they're firing their workers because they're getting all
| of their ingredients from Taco Bell now due to "Taco Bell's
| system being so much easier to operate" and "Taco Bell is so
| cheap and they have so many locations"
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Chipotle already doesn't manufacture the vast majority of
| their ingredients. Their business consists of delivering
| supplier-originated ingredients to a standardized storefront
| in your city and consistently assembling them into a quality
| burrito, with small amounts of prep work for things which
| can't be consistently sourced locally and in-store cooking
| for things which must be prepared fresh. I don't know where
| people get this idea that packaging and assembly are trivial
| tasks you can't build a business around.
| jrflowers wrote:
| You make a good point. Chipotle sources locally, cooks
| things in-store and sells fresh things, none of which are
| things that any Taco Bell does, so it would really be funny
| for them to announce that they are switching to being a
| place that puts Chipotle wrappers on Taco Bell food rather
| than what they have an established reputation for doing.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| That's not really accurate. Like many chains, they have
| distribution centers that are doing food prep work with
| better economy of scale.
|
| It would be quite surprising for there to be some other
| company with capacity to supply thousands of restaurants
| with exactly what you need.
| slt2021 wrote:
| US Foods and Sysco supply most of the restaurants,
| literally every single restaurant food you see is just a
| minimum wage wrapper around US Foods/Sysco produce
| criloz2 wrote:
| Those CEOs are killing their companies with this AI hype.
| nchmy wrote:
| I'm at a fairly high level in learning spanish, which mostly
| came from actually speaking the language and just studying the
| dictionary etc... Duolingo was absolutely useless - and that
| was 6 years ago. I can only imagine how terrible it is
| nowadays.
|
| Anyway, Im responding to you because i find ChatGPT to be a
| FANTASTIC tutor. Like I was absolutely blown away. It can do
| all the translation stuff, but also answer questions about
| different verb tenses, conjugations, syntax etc... I'm sure
| that an extremely good spanish teacher would be better, but I
| think ChatGPT is probably better than most. And it is free.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| The same is true for many subjects and LLMs.
|
| When I am learning something new in development, the LLM is
| immensely useful since it has unlimited patience, and I can
| zero it in on exactly the level of complexity or
| understanding that I need.
| techpineapple wrote:
| It's kind of interesting for the CEO to position DuoLingo this
| way, because without the human element, DuoLingo feels like
| exactly the kind of service to be disrupted by AI, which I guess
| is part of the reasons he's trying to take the foot out of his
| own mouth.
|
| But it does sort of highlight that I think sooner rather than
| later, human curation will be a selling point, once AI apps
| become more the norm.
| charcircuit wrote:
| If Duolingo doesn't disrupt themselves with AI someone else
| will. The strength of LLMs makes them now rival usefulness of
| SRS for language learning.
|
| >human curation will be a selling point
|
| Look at the success of TikTok. Automated recommendations
| enabled it to become one of the top apps in existence. There is
| not evidence that consumers care who curated the content. The
| quality of the recommendation is experimentally proven to be
| much much more important.
| wjholden wrote:
| Price point matters here. I keep getting ads for a competitor
| called Jumpspeak. They're very explicit that you're chatting
| with a bot, but their price is many times higher than
| Duolingo's subscription.
| highstep wrote:
| but Social media companies suppress human curation in favor
| of their algorithmic recommendations; while human curation
| doesn't scale as a business model, it still competes for
| attention--and is thus marginalized.
| retnuhllort wrote:
| Can someone explain the point of this article?
|
| How does any of this matter unless 1. customers stop using this
| app or 2. all employees quit. Neither one is happening,
| especially the one where customers leave, because customers are
| not using this app as a form of charity to fund salaries of
| contractors.
| sandspar wrote:
| There's a group of news readers who dislike CEO's and dislike
| AI. Many of these people have also heard of Duolingo. "CEO of
| [company you've heard of] makes an AI mistake" is a surefire
| way to get clicks.
| zugi wrote:
| That seems about right. Hacker News was once a more
| reasonable alternative to reddit, but these days sometimes
| it's reasonable, and sometimes it displays the same hive-mind
| reactions, depending on the thread.
|
| The app is absolutely gamified, but I've never paid them a
| dollar, waste about 1.5 minutes a day ignoring ads, and in
| exchange for nothing I get moderately useful foreign language
| learning. The gamification keeps me at it, where past study
| approaches eventually petered out.
|
| The use of AI in this and other tools is inevitable. The CEO
| certainly oversold it in his initial announcement, but the
| weird reaction of people stopping using the app because Due
| Lingo is going "AI first" seems inconsistent. Are people
| going to stop using Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and
| Nvidia because they're all-in on AI too?
| regularjack wrote:
| It is not at all surprising to me that humans care about
| other humans. Only a minority of humans are sociopaths,
| fortunately.
| lazide wrote:
| A _lot_ of customers left.
|
| And, typically CEO's say things like this to try to scare/get
| leverage on employees.
| retnuhllort wrote:
| Like at least 500? I'm sure that will hurt.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Enough that the CEO had to do damage control, which is the
| absolute last resort for a PR disaster.
| retnuhllort wrote:
| All ceos constantly do pr, and respond to media coverage.
| This is literally another just another day.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Not buying a lot of them left over this.
|
| The reaction to their AI announcement doesn't feel organic at
| all with oceans and oceans of content creators flooding feeds
| with samesy half-deprecating bashes of them using AI.
|
| I think for every person who genuinely was put off, even more
| either didn't care, or were using ChatGPT for language
| learning and would try it to see what they mean by an AI-
| first approach.
|
| -
|
| And for anyone who thinks they'd never take that kind of bad
| publicity on purpose: this is the brand that "killed" their
| beloved mascot a few months ago and similarly managed to
| saturate multiple channels with creators bashing them for
| that.
|
| This is straight out of the "stop hiring humans" playbook.
| watwut wrote:
| I genuinely doubt so. The app did not changed at all. And
| more importantly, they experiment with limiting free users
| more - meaning they can afford loosing users.
|
| Duolingo was also growing - both in terms of earnings and
| number of employees. They can afford some looses.
| amsilprotag wrote:
| I stopped using duolingo regularly about a month ago. It's
| wonderful that Luis von Ahn says in interviews that he tries to
| prevent teams from cluttering the app, but it seems like he lost
| the battle. You can get 10+ pop-ups after a lesson. The friend
| feed is cluttered with meaningless achievements. The web app is
| tolerable, but the phone experience is miserable. But if you're
| behind a computer and keyboard, there are much more effective
| ways to learn. Busuu is a much warmer product on either device,
| with videos of native-language speakers to help with listening.
|
| Duolingo has scaling and distribution. It makes no sense to
| scrimp for pennies on a product (e.g. English learning Spanish)
| that has millions of daily users. The AI radio lessons feel
| alienating and demoralizing compared to voice-acted stories, and
| the quality control is much worse.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It's wonderful that Luis von Ahn says in interviews that he
| tries to prevent teams from cluttering the app, but it seems
| like he lost the battle.
|
| This is classic PR spin. Do one thing, publicly say you're not
| doing it. Try to get the benefit of good intentions while doing
| the opposite.
|
| The CEO doesn't lose any battles with the product managers. He
| could reverse the changes in a matter of days by calling a
| meeting or sending an email.
|
| What's actually happening here is they Product Managers are
| responding to what gets rewarded at the company, which
| ultimately comes from the CEO.
| amsilprotag wrote:
| A CEO has the power to do anything, but employees have the
| power to collectively, quietly sandbag if they don't like the
| leadership. I think the AI effort led to a broad
| disillusionment, causing an unwillingness to put extra effort
| into their work. Across the company, everyone starts to take
| the path of least resistance. The CEO senses his influence
| waning and becomes more accommodating to avoid further morale
| death spiral. So situations can arise where a CEO would like
| a cleaner product (no one likes to ship garbage), but has
| lost the political capital to make it happen.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The CEO senses his influence waning and becomes more
| accommodating to avoid further morale death spiral.
|
| If you read the article you'll see how the CEO wrote a memo
| about how productivity expectations will rise and started
| cutting contractors in favor of AI.
|
| To suggest that this CEO was afraid of reducing morale by
| asking employees to put fewer pop-ups in the app is
| completely backward.
|
| I don't understand why you're so intent on defending this
| particular CEO as trying to maintain morale when we're
| quite literally in a comment section for an article where
| the CEO made a drastic anti-employee move that everyone
| could have seen was a morale destroyer.
|
| It's also hard to imagine a situation where the people
| making the app really, really want to pollute it with pop-
| ups and other junk, and they have to band together to
| resist the CEO's efforts to make a good app, and then on
| top of all that the CEO rolls over and lets them do it
| despite wishing they wouldn't.
|
| The simplest explanation is that the employees are building
| the app and setting direction as mandated by executives.
| The app we see is the result of what executives are
| rewarding and asking for.
| amsilprotag wrote:
| Maybe you are right that I give too much benefit of the
| doubt. I have been following the saga and I believe the
| AI turn was a bad move on every level. That's why I
| stopped using the app. But I can still believe that the
| CEO doesn't want to ship the cluttered garbage that is
| the present app. I think the pop-ups are a net-negative
| even purely financially with churn outweighing
| subscriptions. So my model for the situation is that he
| spent his credibility on AI, which was bad, and now
| doesn't have the credibility to spend to change the
| metrics that guide every team's behavior, so the company
| decays entropically. Maybe the clutter comes from the CEO
| trying to up subscriptions, but based on the first 10
| years of the app, I believe he has better taste than to
| do that, so I look for a more complex explanation. Again,
| may be giving too much benefit of the doubt.
|
| [edit: thinking about it more, I think I have built up a
| lot of goodwill with the app over the years, and it's a
| strange mental process for years of goodwill to evaporate
| over the course of a few weeks]
| davidcbc wrote:
| > But I can still believe that the CEO doesn't want to
| ship the cluttered garbage that is the present app.
|
| If the CEO truly wants this he should resign because he
| is at best a completely ineffectual leader. The reality
| is he wants more money so he wants to pack as much
| engagement bait into the app as possible to juice numbers
| as please investors
| Apreche wrote:
| > "I don't know exactly what's going to happen with AI, but I do
| know it's going to fundamentally change the way we work, and we
| have to get ahead of it," admits the man who just a few weeks ago
| crowed about how vital AI was to Duolingo's business.
|
| > "AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond
| to this with fear or curiosity. I've always encouraged our team
| to embrace new technology (that's why we originally built for
| mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach
| with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI
| now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own
| product and our mission," writes von Ahn.
|
| We don't know what is _going_ to happen, but we can plainly see
| what has already happened. The overwhelming majority of it has
| been absolute garbage. We're not responding with fear or
| curiosity. We are responding with disdain.
|
| To be fair, language translation is one of the use cases that are
| an acceptable and legitimate use of LLMs, but they still are not
| all the way there yet. If I were Duolingo CEO, I would have
| people doing R&D with them, but I would not be using it at all in
| any way whatsoever on any production product. Publicly, in terms
| of marketing, I would shit all over them. I would make myself out
| to be the non-evil non-AI tech CEO. Even if the R&D is a success
| and I later have to eat crow, that's fine. I'm a wealthy CEO, who
| cares?
|
| As for me using Duolingo, I think I'm going to switch to live
| human tutoring over video and/or in-person.
| lolinder wrote:
| My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after
| years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over
| learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid
| version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping
| her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a
| streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak.
|
| The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this article
| from a few years ago [0]. It's a piece by Duolingo's CPO (who was
| a former Zynga employee) where he discusses at length how
| Duolingo started using streaks and other gamification techniques
| to optimize their numbers. He has a lot to say about manipulating
| users into spending more time with them, but in the entire piece
| he barely even gives a token nod to the supposed mission of the
| company to help people learn. The date he cites for the beginning
| of their efforts to optimize numbers pretty closely correlates to
| my sense for when my wife began to complain about Duolingo
| feeling more and more manipulative and less and less useful.
|
| This past month they finally jumped the shark and she decided to
| quit after 6+ years. The subsequent announcement that they'd be
| using AI to churn out even more lackluster content gave us a good
| laugh but was hardly surprising: they'd given up on prioritizing
| learning a long while ago.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435
| smallnix wrote:
| I think it's about expectations, for me it's my favorite mobile
| game with a minor learning side effect.
| baq wrote:
| I've got a 3 year streak and gamification was obvious to me on
| day 2. Some of their feature flag experiments are very in your
| face, too.
|
| Still, 3 minutes per day is just about my tempo. I don't care
| about literally anything in there except the learning part and
| consistently doing only one lesson per day makes them very nice
| and polite most of the time - I feel like I'm in the 'beg-
| these-for-money' instead of 'milk-them-dry' cohort. (Or maybe
| I'm in the permanent 'lets-be-nice-for-them' long running
| experiment?)
| dbbk wrote:
| This isn't a secret though, their CEO openly said on the
| Decoder podcast this is their strategy so I don't know how that
| passed her by
| sarchertech wrote:
| She doesn't read tech news like 99% of the population?
| dbbk wrote:
| Oh sorry I read this as she quit working at the company
| busymom0 wrote:
| > she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the
| sake of maintaining a streak
|
| A friend of mine said the exact same thing. And then a YouTube
| creator I follow recently made a video where he said the exact
| same thing too about cancelling Duolingo because he had become
| more addicted to maintaining the streak than learning.
| gre wrote:
| A streak where you actually learn every day makes sense to
| me. Missing a day and then paying money to maintain your
| streak doesn't. I know I missed a day, and if the streak
| isn't for me, then who is it for?
| latentsea wrote:
| The thing is... when you're actually learning, the learning
| itself provides the dopamine hits generating a positive
| feedback loop to keep coming back and doing more learning.
|
| Gamification of the streak itself means its wholly
| unnecessary for the app to facilitate learning to produce
| engagement.
|
| Duolingo is the junk food of language learning. Always has
| been.
| Sanzig wrote:
| Duolingo is really only useful at the A1/A2 levels anyway. Once
| you reach B1, you're pretty much past the point where the vocab
| and grammar basics from Duolingo is useful and you need to move
| on to other activities (watching TV in your target language,
| having conversations with native speakers, reading books in
| your target language, etc).
| cogman10 wrote:
| Early on, the Duolingo stated goals was to teach language to
| the point where it's learners could ultimately start
| translating documents. They were going to sell cheap
| mechanical turk style translation services. (Think captcha
| style translation)
|
| Unfortunately as they got popular automated translation
| services got good enough that nobody was going to pay for a
| slightly better and slower translation enmass.
|
| Once that happened, that's when it seemed like they dumped
| their goals of teaching language and instead focused on dark
| pattern money extraction.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It seems like with sufficient funds, Khan Academy could offer
| this experience (language learning) without the
| enshittification Duolingo demonstrated. Think how Evernote
| faded away, but for different reasons.
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| Which would be perfectly fine. A1/A2 require plenty of time
| to master. I know the internet is filled with people going "i
| learned A2 in one week" but that doesnt mean that its really
| internalized.
| leoc wrote:
| Even at those levels there doesn't seem to be any reason why
| you wouldn't be better off putting your time into Dreaming
| Spanish https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ or Muzzy
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzy_in_Gondoland , just to
| name some famously approachable beginner material.
|
| To be a bit cynical about it: the typical DuoLingo player has
| probably been misled to some extent about its effectiveness,
| yes, but also many of them don't particularly _want_ to learn
| a new language. I suspect that they 're happy to be able to
| play a popular mobile game that everyone else is also playing
| without the stigma of being a "Candy Crush addict" and
| "timewaster". "I'm learning a language!" is the welcome
| figleaf. https://youtu.be/F3SzNuEGmwQ?t=243
| rzz3 wrote:
| I disagree. In Spanish, learning the subjunctive is essential
| and that's part of B2, and I think Duolingo did a good job of
| teaching it. If you can't understand "Que te vaya bien" even
| completing a purchase at a store would be a bit difficult.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Learning a new language to any degree of proficiency requires
| motivation. It's easy to start and hard to continue if you're
| not willing to put in the effort.
|
| There's a valid argument to be made that gamification helps to
| provide that motivation, but the argument doesn't hold up if
| the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using the app.
|
| In other words, gamification isn't inherently bad, but their
| motivations don't appear to be good.
| lolinder wrote:
| Agreed. Duolingo _started out_ on the right foot: they had
| gamification, but not too much of it, and they clearly cared
| about helping you learn. For a long time it was the most
| highly recommended app for learning new languages and that
| wasn 't just naivete, it actually did work.
|
| That's changed gradually over the last few years as they
| switched from using gamification in pursuit of learning to
| using a veneer of learning as a pitch to get people to try
| their game.
| Treegarden wrote:
| internal motivation means that someones acts without external
| stimuli, their drive comes from within, its internal.
| External motivation means that an external stimuli is used to
| make someone act. I.e. a monetary reward, or validation etc.
| When someone is internally motivated, they can have a stable
| state. When external motivation is introduced, it can replace
| the internal motivation and will. Now what happens when you
| then lose the external motivation, the external stimuli
| again? The internal motivation is gone and this means all
| motivation is gone, the act stops.
|
| On top of this, some people say motivation is cheap,
| discipline is what matters.
| zdragnar wrote:
| In the case of language learning, the external motivation
| provided by gamification is supplanted by the external
| motivation of having access to conversations, music, movies
| and literature that you previously didn't have access to,
| or required third party interpretation to appreciate. Being
| able to converse directly is a massive boon in the right
| situations, such as when travelling where you need to know
| the language to get around, or when your coworkers natively
| speak that language but not your own.
|
| Discipline is well and good, and if you're willing to put
| in the effort to become better disciplined to push through
| difficult things, I agree that you're probably better off.
| I do _not_ agree that someone who already has that level of
| discipline would be hurt by a gamified system, though. The
| rewards of gamification on their own are fairly minimal, as
| they merely provide a (possibly false) sense of progress
| independent of their own assessment of how they are doing.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Replacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards
| cheapens the activity and makes it less enjoyable. Awarding
| me badges for brushing my teeth and taking out the trash is
| a great way to help me do boring tasks. Awarding me badges
| for having deep, meaningful conversations with my partner .
| . . not so helpful. Alfie Kohn has collected decades of
| studies and written about that in his book _Punished by
| Rewards_. It 's one of the books I try to give away to
| friends and coworkers who are interested in the subject.
| The pro-gamification folks seem to want to pretend that
| they're doing something totally different this time and
| they can ignore all the previous data.
|
| https://www.alfiekohn.org/topics/motivation-inside/
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| It requires habit more than motivation. I was bored during
| covid and started Japanese and four years later im still
| keeping it going. I lost my motivation multiple times during
| those years (because good god what an ridiculous language
| coming from a European one), but my habit kept me going until
| i found my motivation again.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| I disagree with this in principle. Gamification is something
| we should be very wary of because it is inherently bad. It
| reduces what you care about in an activity to points and a
| progress bar.
|
| Instead of sticking with language learning because you have
| some intrinsic reason to want to learn it (or even a external
| one such as wanting a new job) you're substituting that with
| whatever Duolingo puts for their gamification. To the degree
| you engage with and are motivated by the gamification you are
| substituting your own metrics of success and progress for
| points and streaks.
|
| And soon enough we end up here, where Duolingo has gamified
| their internal numbers and in doing so gamified your
| "learning".
| lukan wrote:
| Why do people prefer games over hard work while learning?
| Because this is how we used to naturally learn.
|
| Kids having fun playing hide and seek? Wrestling and
| throwing stones? They are learning hunting/survival skills.
|
| Today with more abstract knowledge needed it is harder, but
| the concept of making abstract learning a game again, is a
| very smart one in general. It of course fails, if
| engagement becomes the metric and not gaining knowledge.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| But in your analogy, the base Duolingo app _without_ its
| gamification is the gamification of learning a language.
|
| The streaks and points and everything else is a
| gamification of gamification of learning.
| verisimilidude wrote:
| If the gamification is fully disclosed, I don't see the
| problem. People should be able to agree to game themselves,
| if it helps them complete a task they otherwise wouldn't
| finish.
|
| But consent is key. Maybe we need regulation that compels
| companies to disclose these manipulative techniques in
| digital services. Give people the chance to opt in or out.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| People should be allowed to game themselves. But this
| isn't language learners setting up little games for
| themselves to learn more. This is 1 version of
| gamification pushed on all of it's users, whether or not
| it would work for them (or at all).
| toss1 wrote:
| Seems we need to define what is meant by "gamification" in
| this context.
|
| If we're just talking about tracking and making visible
| streaks, vocab words learned, tenses mastered, etc. that
| seems fine; little different than in fitness training where
| one tracks workouts, miles run, pace improved, weights
| lifted, etc.. Adding in a few goals and milestones met can
| be helpful
|
| OTOH, if we're talking about skewing the content to
| maximize psychological manipulation at the cost of actual
| learning, _that_ is toxic gamification, and certainly
| against the user 's goals.
|
| Haven't used DuoLingo, so I'm not sure which one we have
| here?
| rzz3 wrote:
| So I agree they go over the top with it, _but_ I reached
| fluency in Spanish in about 2.5 years and Duolingo was an
| indispensable part of it.
|
| > if the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using
| the app
|
| Learning a language to fluency requires real commitment, and
| I'd say an app could never possibly do it on its own. One of
| the most key things Duolingo gave me was consistency and a
| lack of an excuse to constantly practice and learn. But you
| also have to (and I did) use the language daily, watch
| content in the target language, travel and speak with locals
| in the language, etc. I'm not sure where Duolingo ever
| claimed that it alone was enough to actually reach
| proficiency or fluency.
|
| Duolingo's gamification and streaks and leaderboards gave me
| a reason to put a lot of effort into learning the language,
| and I don't know where I'd be without it. There's a lot of
| things about Duolingo I don't love but I'm incredibly
| grateful that it exists.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I sort of wonder whether they realized gamification works for
| certain kinds of tasks, but not for others, and then decided
| to design their language learning app for gamification,
| rather than designing a gamification system to support
| language learning. In other words, I don't think Duolingo's
| system can really make you fluent in a language, but what it
| seems to excel in is making you use Duolingo every day. In
| _other_ other words, you always hear people talking about how
| long their streak is ( "500 days!") rather than how well they
| speak the language.
| morkalork wrote:
| Sounds like they suffer from the same illness as dating apps:
| Being successful means users graduating and leaving the
| platform.
| rzz3 wrote:
| It doesn't have to be that way; learning a language is a long
| process. I took about 3 years to reach real practical
| fluency, and I still have to say "what?" more often than I'd
| like and I still need to learn a ton of more advanced
| vocabulary. Duolingo unfortunately doesn't offer any C1
| content so I'm stuck using other methods.
| ben_w wrote:
| Imagine the shareholders saying:
|
| "Why settle for 3 years when you can milk people for a
| lifetime? If it takes 10,000 hours to master something," it
| doesn't but they'll likely use that meme, "and you plan to
| spread that learning over 72 years, they must not spend
| more than 22 minutes a day actually learning anything! The
| rest of the day should be adverts and retention."
| rzz3 wrote:
| I could see it as well. For me currently, I've completed
| 100% of the Spanish course, and I'd like to keep learning
| more, but there's no more content. I think there's a lot
| of more legitimate opportunities they could find, in the
| way of more content, to keep me coming back. Right now to
| be honest I just continue using it to maintain my streak,
| since I'm already fluent. But! I've recently started
| learning Italian, and maybe that way they can get a
| couple more years out of me.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I caught a random podcast with an early Duolingo employee who
| said all the same things: Much bragging about how they gamified
| their app to juice user engagement and growth, not even a
| feigned mention of optimizing for learning.
|
| By now my friends who use Duolingo all know it's a game, not a
| real learning experience. I think they got lucky and filled a
| void in the market for things people think they want (learning
| a new language) while avoiding the parts they dislike (the
| effort of learning).
|
| It got recommended by default for years when people asked for
| an easy way to learn a language, but they leaned hard into the
| path of gamification instead of trying to improve the learning
| experience for those who wanted to learn.
| jmward01 wrote:
| This isn't my field, but I can imagine it is hard to optimize
| for learning only since the reward signal is clearly user
| engagement (meaning subscription revenue). Finding a reward
| signal that does both, help people learn -and- make money is
| hard. I am a Duolingo user and I definitely notice the
| gamification but I really don't know how it would be done
| better since that gets people engaged in an activity that is
| associated with learning. This is their whole job to find these
| signals, but honestly, what is it? What signal would you put in
| place that would keep users AND actually teach them something?
| crmd wrote:
| >... it is hard to optimize for learning only since the
| reward signal is clearly user engagement (meaning
| subscription revenue).
|
| Schools can give reward signals for demonstrating subject
| mastery, or for tuition payment and attendance. It seems like
| Duolingo gamified the latter instead of the former.
| jajko wrote:
| Why education should be done for maximal profit? Oh the poor
| CEO, he just wants to bring more value to shareholders!
| Clearly folks are fed up with eventual inevitable result.
|
| Things like education or healthcare shouldnt be privatized,
| since that _always_ eventually ends up as profit-first game.
| The product suffers since milking is obvious, and quality of
| service is at best secondary concern.
|
| Is is really that hard to see all this?
| teekert wrote:
| My daughter gave up because the mascot turned more and more
| scary (she's not allowed to use the iPad that much). Any
| alternatives?
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| It's a little bare bones for someone young, but you could try
| Anki. It's a generic spaced-repetition app, so you would need
| to grab a deck of flashcards from the AnkiHub community for
| your language of choice.
| ben_w wrote:
| As an adult learner:
|
| For apps, I use Clozemaster and Babbel. Unfortunately Babbel
| is starting to feel like it's also chasing gamification, but
| it does have sensible content.
|
| For podcasts and YouTube content, I follow EasyGerman and
| Coffee Break German, and both are part of larger brands for
| other languages:
|
| https://www.easy-languages.org/our-languages
|
| https://coffeebreakacademy.com/
|
| For kids... what about kids books in the target language?
| namenumber wrote:
| I got started on Duolingo back when it was still a "Help
| translate the world" app. I've always liked it for getting to
| dip my toes in a language and learn some basics whilst
| exploring the language myself through other methods, and I've
| shown my support of it by paying for Duolingo Super or whatever
| they're calling it for years on end whilst hopping on and off
| my language tracks.
|
| But it's just so horrible now, constant gamification, attempts
| to pull me in with streaks and freezes and notifications and
| "did you know you can have us nag you even more"-breaks between
| the lessons I'm actually there for. It's gotten to the point
| where I'm just done because I've already paid for the service
| and i just want to be left alone to do the exercises, but they
| never let me get from one exercise to the next without having
| to go through at least two or three of those annoying
| "gamification and engagement" attempts.
| mattl wrote:
| Yeah the first thing I translated on DuoLingo was the
| Wikipedia article for Ubuntu.
| janosch_123 wrote:
| I finished the Spanish course many years ago (is finishing
| still possible?)
|
| Thanks for reminding me it had page translations, I did a
| few of those and enjoyed it! Shame it went.
| mattl wrote:
| Yeah it really helped me at the time as I didn't know any
| Spanish but did know a lot about Ubuntu.
| telchior wrote:
| When I returned to Duolingo recently -- I used to use it
| heavily but set it aside for 2 years -- I counted 14
| gamification popups in a row after my first lesson in a new
| language.
|
| 14! The damned popups lasted longer than the lesson had!
|
| I switched over to Busuu, which has blatantly copied some of
| Duolingo's mechanics but at least uses them with a modicum of
| restraint.
| joenot443 wrote:
| This sort of notification-barrage is a common problem in
| mobile apps with multiple teams and I really wish it
| wasn't. I still use Facebook quite a bit and I'm
| consistently frustrated by how degenerate the concept of a
| "notification" has become. Some of the finest engineers I
| know work at Meta, I know it's not a technical problem, I
| think it's an organizational problem. For example...
|
| Team A ships feature X and sets their KPI to some arbitrary
| measure of engagement. They miss, obviously, but instead of
| regrouping and hitting the drawing board, A doubles down
| and pressures Team B to point towards X in feature Y. A
| sees some marginal level of gain in engagement for X,
| obviously, so the intervention is deemed a success. 6mos
| later, Team A is asked to return the favor and add a modal
| pointing to new feature Z, per the request of Team B.
|
| I don't really know what the solution is except outside of
| careful org-wide watchdogging to ensure this sort of user-
| hostile engagement infighting gets nipped in the bud.
| LaundroMat wrote:
| It makes you wonder whether they use the app
| themselves...
| Terr_ wrote:
| > This sort of notification-barrage is a common problem
| in mobile apps with multiple teams
|
| That makes me think about how everyone defining an
| operational alert/warning thinks theirs is very
| important, leading to so many that users time them all
| out and everyone loses.
| redserk wrote:
| It's especially frustrating when DoorDash will happily
| use notifications for both order status/issues _and_ spam
| various deal /promotion notifications. There's simply no
| way to turn them completely off so you only get order
| status notifications on iOS.
|
| I ended up disabling notifications completely (and
| eventually just deleting it)
| bigiain wrote:
| > Some of the finest engineers I know work at Meta,
|
| "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how
| to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff
| Hammerbacher
| smcin wrote:
| Some (but not most or all) of Duolingo's social and
| gamification features/social nags/upsells/"reminders" default
| on but can be turned off in the settings. But yes it's out of
| control and a strong reaason to disable Auto-update on the
| Duolingo app to not constantly the ever-more-AI-driven-
| nags/upsells. DL is becoming its own antipattern in the quest
| for revenue $$$ growth at all costs, e.g. reducing the actual
| amount of language being learned, beyond a certain plateau.
| I've been saying that here for a couple of years:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287456
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297240
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35679783
| gruturo wrote:
| I disabled all possible notifications hoping I would only
| have the streak reminder, but no - it still abuses them with
| random crap. I then set an iPhone reminder for the streak,
| and completely disabled duolingo's notifications from the
| phone settings. Peace.
|
| It still spams you after every lesson, but I often just kill
| the app when it does. Quite a few ads also fail to load due
| to Lockdown mode or my pihole (also when away from home, due
| to the vpn I always keep).
|
| I may just be their worst customer, having never given them a
| cent or even clicked an ad (and often not even impressions).
| On the other hand a bunch of people use it because of me and
| follow me due to having a long streak, so maybe I'm still
| worth keeping around.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Right. Something that businesses don't appreciate enough is
| that while an unpopular decision may sound small enough that
| they shouldn't lose customers over it, not all of them were
| happy to start with.
|
| The timing of when I finally quit Twitter was when they shut
| down third-party clients, but that was after I was already half
| checked out because it had been in decline for a few years
| already (predating the change in ownership.)
| huevosabio wrote:
| Duolingo is just a mobile game where you role play learning a
| language.
|
| Similar to how you role play being an emperor in Civ: you learn
| a thing or two but it's no where near what the real thing is.
|
| That's fine as a game!
| boringg wrote:
| Woah. Comparing duolingo to civ is not fair to civ.
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| My Duolingo streak is 37 days and I just jumped on to do a
| lesson and retain my position on the leaderboard. I feel like
| the app itself is right on the cusp of being a valuable
| learning tool compared to being a silly game. I am okay with
| the idea of paying for "just okay" teaching if it helps me stay
| motivated and interested in the content. That may change in the
| future, I guess we'll see!
| lolinder wrote:
| What you're missing is that it's right on the cusp of being a
| learning tool instead of a silly game because it has
| _regressed_ below the cusp. It _was_ a useful learning tool,
| and its trajectory has been strictly downward for years now.
| BlarfMcFlarf wrote:
| I found that with other study options, I learn faster and get
| tired less quickly (since they are less "puzzle-y" and more
| just language learning plain).
| nico wrote:
| What platforms do you think could fill that space up?
|
| Recently discovered brilliant.org, do you have an opinion about
| them?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Hot damn six years is no joke. Is she fluent in any of the
| languages she's attempted to learn?
| zer00eyz wrote:
| This is a theme for Duolingo... and they have been overt about
| it for a long time (first vid is a ted talk from a year ago!)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6FORpg0KVo
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0UE2ZY3QB0
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUsDbgGQmIM
|
| (As an aside I hate that videos are now "source material" for a
| discussion... it feels somewhat lame).
|
| > wife began to complain about Duolingo feeling more and more
| manipulative and less and less useful.
|
| I think this is a great bit of insight into what a lot of what
| the web has become! If they had been more manipulative and
| stepped up the quality and utility of the product would that
| have been acceptable to remain competitive vs something like
| tiktok?
| boringg wrote:
| CPO from Zynga is quite a red flag.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Really seems like a lot of bad people came out of that
| company. It's surprisingly that they're widely accepted in
| the industry given how terrible that company's culture seems
| to have been.
| vasusen wrote:
| (disclosure: I am no longer at Coursera)
|
| When Duolingo added that viral post on Growth hacking, it
| caused quite a stir about the push-notifications and
| gamification tactics they use. Ultimately, we decided it wasn't
| worth it for Coursera to veer into edu-tainment.
|
| However, it is interesting to watch how much gamification works
| in adding and retaining users. In 2023, Duolingo's marketcap
| was 5x of Coursera. Now at similar revenue it is 20x of
| Coursera.
|
| As a user, I think Duolingo is over-gamified (stopped using it)
| but Coursera is severely on the other spectrum where it comes
| off as too bland/boring to keep up the motivation. I am sure
| there's a happy medium to be found between reminding users to
| engage in something hard while doing right by learners.
| techjamie wrote:
| My girlfriend has been "learning" a language on Duolingo for
| about 5-6 years now, but rarely engages with her target
| language outside of Duolingo and some of her music library.
| She's been at roughly beginner level the entire time when, with
| proper language immersion and practice, she should
| realistically have a large vocab and be able to engage in
| casual conversation without looking up stuff. This is not the
| case.
|
| I've just accepted for some time, to her chagrin, that she's
| effectively playing a game that just so happens to be language
| themed.
| baq wrote:
| 5 minutes per day for a year or two is about equivalent to
| ~2-3 weeks of traveling to your country of choice and just
| trying to talk with people on purpose. It's probably easier
| to do in Italy than in Finland, but ultimately nothing beats
| just being there. Duolingo might just be enough to give you
| an okish on-ramp to that experience.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| That's a feature, though. If she's too disinterested in
| making other moves like reading books or the news, then at
| least she still has that base Duolingo momentum that might
| make the move possible in the future.
|
| People always assume the alternative to Duolingo is that
| everyone will start a habit of reading BBC Mundo in Spanish
| or something, and it's obviously not true for many if not
| most people. And that's fine, some people are only going to
| scoot by with a dilettante level of interest until they take
| a real plunge.
| kozikow wrote:
| Mindless optimization of basic "attention grab" metric is why
| the whole internet feels like a slots machine. Be it reddit,
| Facebook, YouTube, any google result
|
| Thankfully this won't happen with LLMs, as compute is too
| expensive so execs can't just take an easy way out of
| optimizing for number of questions asked
| janalsncm wrote:
| When you think about it, if Duolingo does a good job of
| teaching language, people will stop using it. It's the same
| problem with Tinder: people who stay together delete the app.
| dlisboa wrote:
| A real question: did she actually learn a language? 6 years
| should be enough to be fluent at any language. My opinion is
| Duolingo just doesn't work and never will. People are fooled by
| the gamification but it's a time wasting app/game that gives an
| illusion of productivity. Like Minecraft with words.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978
|
| The leaked AI memo had phrases like "productivity expectations
| will rise" and off comments about how they now know that LLMs
| "work better with context".
|
| It felt like the Duolingo CEO saw the trend of companies
| embracing AI coding tools and tried to come up with a way of
| being the on of the most extreme thought leaders in going "AI
| first", without really understanding anything beyond surface
| level.
| zzzeek wrote:
| im re-visiting learning Spanish in my spare time and am working
| with Babbel, LingoDeer and a pretty good independent site
| morpheem (https://morpheem.org/) that has the heaviest use of AI
| of all three. I didn't even consider duolingo as LingoDeer is
| generally better in the "cutesy gamified language learning"
| space.
| sandinmyjoints wrote:
| Curious if you have tried (or heard of) spanishdictionary.com?
| I work on it, and our users seem to like it and find it
| effective. The name is a bit misleading--started out as a
| dictionary but now has a full curriculum up through a couple
| years of college Spanish. We don't really do any paid marketing
| (or any other kind for that matter) so I'm always curious about
| whether people have heard of it.
| Zmajche wrote:
| Someone mentioned on r/DuoLingo so I installed in order to
| try it. My biggest problem with it was the UI and lack of
| options to configure it. I would really like options to make
| fonts and buttons bigger. Altough I changed phone font size
| in order to use app, small height of buttons on the bottom
| are really getting on my nerves.
| zzzeek wrote:
| I will try it. From my other comments you can gather I'm a
| sad lifelong monolinguist despite having a terrific Spanish
| foundation in middle school, and I can hardly imagine ever
| being conversational. But it's only been a week
| NKosmatos wrote:
| My favorite punch line from the post "...serves to highlight just
| how out of touch the wealthy are with regular people..."
| claytongulick wrote:
| It feels to me like business culture is on the peak "hill of
| stupidity" of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
|
| Collectively, businesses haven't yet realized what many
| developers have - the significant hidden costs with AI coding.
|
| We went through this with offshoring as well.
| vitro wrote:
| I'll chip in with my shameless plug - Latudio [0]. A language
| learning app where all the content was written and audio recorded
| by real humans(tm).
|
| We purposedly went that way, with no ads and a one-time payment
| option.
|
| I feel that human touch is what makes our interactions special as
| everyone is different, unique, imperfect while being the same
| like everyone else, in a way...
|
| Howewer as a relatively new and bootstrapped app in the market we
| have still some way to go. As a next step we are investigating
| how to add audiobooks and podcasts. Would someone be interested
| to cooperate?
|
| To se what's inside: [1]
|
| [0] https://www.latudio.com
|
| [1] https://www.latudio.com/whats-inside
| BrandiATMuhkuh wrote:
| I wish I had the funds and a curriculum expert on my side to
| build a language learning app with LLMs.
|
| Part of my PhD thesis[1] was to study how robots (voice agents)
| can influence human language. The key component is a social
| connection. Back in 2017 I did that in the lab. But the research
| is pretty clear about it.
|
| Also my own experience (trying to learn Arabic) is, that I only
| remember words/phrases which I picked up during social gathering
| (camping in the dessert).
|
| The "perfect" learning app would work like how children learn: by
| interacting with their social surroundings. No need to learn the
| vocabulary or the alphabet at the beginning. The hard part is, to
| create a social interaction between the learner and the AI that
| evolves over time.
|
| [1]
| https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/items/7da0e989-aa9f-4b92-86bd-92...
| ema wrote:
| It's not quite as effective as a real social connection but the
| para-social connection you get from say listening to a podcast
| in the language you're learning does work too in my experience.
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| Ah, Duolingo. What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book
| and talking to people. All this tech and I wonder how many people
| are now fluent in multiple languages compared to say a few
| decades ago.
|
| This is not academic. All signs are saying we are heading in the
| wrong direction[1] and more tech ain't going to solve shit.
| Literacy rates and numerical abilities are going down the drain
| faster than you can say "Claude". I suggest we really, really get
| our acts together and stop trusting tech to solve our non-tech
| problems.[2]
|
| "It is actually hard to imagine that every third person you meet
| on the street has difficulties reading even simple things." [3]
|
| [1] https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-
| releases/2024/12/ad...
|
| [2] https://archive.is/zCxBl (The Atlantic: the elite college
| students who can't read books)
|
| [3] https://archive.is/4k96F#selection-1989.261-1989.387
| (Financial Times: are we becoming a post-literate society?)
| zzzeek wrote:
| > What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and
| talking to people.
|
| odd take, do you have the same negative sentiment for the
| entire field of language instruction? introductory German class
| at a local college? 7th grade French ? things like that?
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| What introductory German class does not use books and does
| not talk to people?
| zzzeek wrote:
| oh, so you only mean like the gamified nature of duolingo?
| Lots of language apps have lessons that are interactive
| versions of language books and they also include
| conversational practice with language models.
| Conversational practice with humans is not necessarily
| easily available nor is it that appropriate if you are just
| learning a language and can't have simple conversations
| yet. Babbel for example is pretty comparable to a
| traditional language class in how it's structured. It's
| pretty convenient that I can use it any time of day and as
| often as I want, from my car or whatever.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I suggest that they meant that the process does not
| involve "reading a book" or "talking to people."
| watwut wrote:
| In most of them, you talk to people with an equally
| horrible accent as you have.
| cpmsmith wrote:
| Surely those things entail reading books and talking to
| people.
| croes wrote:
| You definitely meet other people in local colleges
| davidcbc wrote:
| And few of them are native speakers of the language you're
| learning.
| zahllos wrote:
| I don't think it is an odd take. I live in Switzerland, which
| has 4 national languages (Swiss German is spoken in dialect
| form that varies between towns, while Romansh has well-
| defined idioms with distinct spelling, although the 5 or so
| idioms are mutually intelligible). I speak French, passable
| German and one of the Romanshes, and I'm a native of none of
| them. Between French and Romansh I can more or less read
| Italian, although I can't understand it when spoken.
|
| The same thing that has worked for me as a method for
| learning languages has always been the same. Get books,
| particularly short stories or children's stories aimed at
| A2/B1 level, and read them. Practice grammar. Get a pen and
| paper and learn vocab by repeatedly writing it down. Boring
| but effective. And of course practice listening and talking,
| which means either having native friends, doing a course,
| using audio materials from somewhere, etc. Courses with
| actual humans make learning go faster (in the case of
| Romansh, it would have been impossible without the course).
|
| I don't find duolingo to be effective at all, as others
| mention beyond the A1/A2 level. I'd be a bit more skeptical
| and say even A2 you need to expand your horizons.
| zzzeek wrote:
| So I think people who grew up in Europe surrounded by many
| languages have a huge language learning advantage over
| mono-lingual Americans. Also exercises like "get a pen and
| paper and learn vocab by repeatedly writing it down" this
| is exactly what language applications have you do, just
| minus the pen and paper. (I'm not a young person so I have
| deep familiarity with pens and paper)
| wannadingo wrote:
| All your counter-examples directly depend on the part you
| quoted and are presumably arguing against.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| good thing most of the people driving techno fascism dont news
| to meet those street people
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Duolingo is techno fascism?
|
| I looked up the definition as:
|
| > authoritarian rule, often involving the fusion of state and
| corporate tech power, where technology is seen as the driving
| force of the regime and used to consolidate control, suppress
| dissent, and erode public trust.
|
| I'm trying to connect the dots between the above and
| Duolingo.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| So, anyone with a lot of money parroting the line that AI
| will replace human workers is a good bet to be with the
| techno fascists headed by Musk and Theil.
|
| Are you not into reading the news and extrapolating basic
| fact patterns?
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Wait so Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are coordinating with
| the government and Duolingo to exert absolute control
| over our lives?
|
| I searched about Peter Thiel's views on AI seem fairly
| generic and cautionary. Maybe he's lying?
| qgin wrote:
| Duolingo is for getting to an A2 level. It's hard for most
| people to get much value from trying to read a book or talk
| with someone unless they're at least at A2 level
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| That's bad news for the millions that had to do just that and
| learned fine in fact better. I'm not saying you should read
| the Upanishads in the original, I'm saying a proper intro
| textbook is fine and some teacher-figure ("human") to
| actually use your body and read theirs.
|
| Heck, Latin even has a Latin-only method: LLPSI. "Roma in
| Italia est", you'll figure it out quickly enough.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Humans are (very) expensive and Duolingo is free if you can
| put up with the advertising.
| watwut wrote:
| As someone who had to learn languages from textbooks back
| when it was the only thing that existed, it was massively
| ineffective way of learning.
|
| The typical outcome was a person who spent a lot of effort
| and still was unable to do anything useful with the
| language after years (reading real book, watching movie,
| chatting).
| pessimizer wrote:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=graded+readers
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dual+language+book
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=comic+book
| wilg wrote:
| I recently started using Duolingo and it seems pretty good.
| j_timberlake wrote:
| They don't have a moat. They could have built one by turning the
| app into an actual game. Casuals love farming games, give them a
| farm where the crops grow by learning new words. Too late now
| though.
| 827a wrote:
| To be frank, their curriculum (IME) is so bad already that even
| if implementing more AI could only maintain continuity of quality
| (it can't, it'll be worse), they're still a doomed company. AI
| might help them make more languages available; or it could help
| them design deeper & longer courses. But neither of those things
| remotely capture Duolingo's problem; their problem is that a ton
| of their courses suck, from day 1. They teach the wrong things,
| in the wrong way, there's no logic in the order of why words and
| concepts are taught in the way they are, there's no attempt at
| understanding why someone is learning the language and catering
| courses to their needs, they constantly teach incorrect
| translations or use really bad AI voice-overs which don't capture
| native accents, and they don't actually correct problems when
| they're reported.
|
| Duolingo is, in my mind, _the_ categorical example of a tech
| company. Think about what it means to say "we're an AI first
| company". Who is the audience of a statement like that? Who reads
| that and thinks "heck yeah"? Its not customers; customers, at
| best, don't care, but at worst have had so many negative
| experiences with AI that it reflects very poorly. Its not
| employees; Luis von Ahn is digging a grave while saying "no we're
| not going to kill you, we're just killing the contractors". The
| answer is: Its a statement for Duolingo's real customers, not
| their users, but the US Financial Markets.
| k__ wrote:
| I switched to Busuu.
|
| It's very similar to Duolingo, but quite cheaper and has videos
| and certificates.
| leeoniya wrote:
| well if it has certificates!
|
| <take my money meme>
| manquer wrote:
| You joke, but certification is important for some jobs,
| university admissions and visa applications in many
| countries.
|
| For example Cambridge has a big program for English which
| tons of universities in the english speaking world use for
| admissions of foreign students
|
| I don't know if Busuu certificates are accepted anywhere
| major yet but it is not a bad idea, not every major language
| has standardized tests and rating systems like CEFR, there is
| room for new players especially in non European languages
| colordrops wrote:
| Duolingo has gone to such shit after they've removed humanistic
| feature in the app such as the question discussion board and
| avatar photos. It's so dry and mechanistic now. It's ironic as
| the whole purpose of language learning is human connection.
| latenightcoding wrote:
| It's crazy this app has barely changed in like a decade, they
| even went public but the learning experience is just worse
| InTheArena wrote:
| Given the typo at the very start of the article (maybe it's a .za
| thing?) "Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as
| this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in
| the firm's users." it's worth pointing out that Grammarly would
| have caught that.
| brightbeige wrote:
| Instil?
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/instil
|
| > Australia, Ireland and UK standard spelling of instill.
|
| (And presumably South Africa as well)
| bgwalter wrote:
| It is astonishing that a CMU professor can sink so low. Then
| again, he also invented reCaptcha.
|
| Of course, DuoLingo is superfluous. Watching movies in the target
| language with subtitles in you own language is more fun and has
| quicker results.
| InTheArena wrote:
| Anyone who doesn't think that AI is going to disrupt everything
| in software hasn't watched as software ate the rest of the world.
| this is the latest iteration.
| owebmaster wrote:
| AI will change everything but the companies trying to adapt
| like Duolingo or Shopify are doing will become the new Yahoos
| and Nokias.
| przemub wrote:
| People behave as if AI were going to eat the software. I, and
| many others, don't believe that is going to happen.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I'm guessing you're a SW engineer.
|
| It doesn't matter what you think. It matters what high level
| managers/CEOs think.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| In the short term, maybe.
|
| In the long term, actual results will tell us what parts of
| the process matter.
| Thrymr wrote:
| > I'm guessing you're a SW engineer.
|
| > It doesn't matter what you think. It matters what high
| level managers/CEOs think.
|
| In the short term, perhaps. In the longer term, it matters
| whether it actually works.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It seems like a combination of
|
| 1) extreme denial of the possibility of change anywhere ever
| (which is standard middle-class anxiety - your extremely
| specialized skills have been devalued, and now you're poor),
| and
|
| 2) cynicism is safe because most things fail. Cynicism is even
| safer when a bunch of people are trying to sell you something,
| because most of them are going to be con-men.
|
| But I think the modern machine learning methods of the past few
| years are as important as the computer, and we're just starting
| the period between the computer and the transistor, during
| which time we're using vacuum tubes and giant iron rings to
| build them. When the AI-transistor comes along, it's going to
| be the engine of all human technological process for the next
| century.
|
| edit: if there's anything that AI is going to be really, really
| good at, very soon, it's going to be teaching people languages.
| I don't have a problem with Duolingo going to AI; it wasn't
| exactly great before. It's just a brand and cartoons, not a
| method. Being that it wasn't great before, though, I have no
| idea what qualifies Duolingo to come up with language-teaching
| AI. I don't think gamification skills transfer.
|
| If anything, they need to be furiously hiring extremely high
| level, extremely expensive AI people and second-language
| learning academics/linguists.
|
| Duolingo lost its purpose as an app when it figured out that
| creating a translation army was pointless, and it lost most of
| its usefulness when it froze, then deleted the forums. Now it's
| just a cloud of IP. They might as well start selling a soda
| pop.
| leoc wrote:
| I've never had the pleasure of experiencing DuoLingo myself, but
| by all accounts it's an exceptionally time-inefficient way of
| learning a language. If the objective is to have fun playing a
| buzzy mobile game with the rest of the world then whatever, but
| if you actually want to make progress in a language you'd be much
| better advised to head over to something like Refold
| https://refold.la/ or Dreaming Spanish
| https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ . Even if you simply must have a
| phone app which does everything for you, you'd probably do better
| with something like Busuu https://www.busuu.com or Glossika
| https://ai.glossika.com/ .
|
| So the AI furore is a bit ironic: people profess to hate
| "bullshit jobs", but if anything is a bullshit job it's probably
| providing the manpower for a language-learning app which doesn't
| actually teach languages effectively. Replacing mechanical-Turk
| slop with AI slop probably is a genuine productivity gain
| unleashed by AI here, yes? OTOH a drop in subscriber numbers and
| total user-hours is probably a good thing _too_ , so don't let
| any of this put you off from giving up on DuoLingo.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| The language-specific subreddits also have excellent advice.
| leoc wrote:
| The quality of advice on Reddit seems to be variable,
| unfortunately. Apparently
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese is full of people
| who've spent years doing Genki
| (https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/ , probably an even
| bigger sinkhole for money, time and enthusiasm than DuoLingo)
| with little to show for it who are determined to drag
| everyone else into the same crab-bucket, for instance. OTOH
| https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/ used to be very helpful.
| eigenspace wrote:
| For me, the problem with Duolingo has always been that the
| content is just too lowest-common-denominator, and this will just
| bring it down even lower.
|
| I switched a while ago to Seedlang (https://www.seedlang.com/),
| and while it only supports French, German, and Spanish, I can at
| least say that the German course is everything I actually wanted
| from Duolingo.
|
| Every exercise involves a real video of a real German speaker
| speaking in German. You get to hear them at the same time as you
| see their face, which is not something you'd think is a big deal,
| but absolutely does make a big difference.
|
| When it's your turn to say a phrase, it records your voice and
| plays it back to you, rather than use some shitty model to try
| and guess if you spoke correctly. By listening to your own voice
| you can clearly hear when you're getting things right versus when
| you're getting things wrong. Early on, German speakers would
| often comment on how my accent was quite good for my level, and I
| think this is big part of that.
|
| IMO Duolingo's attempt to try and scale to every language as fast
| as possible just makes it a worse product than something
| 'artisanal' like Seedlang (though of course, if there's no
| artisanal resources, then Duolingo might have some value to
| offer)
| Archonical wrote:
| I studied German for 3 years in university, dabbled in German
| duo-lingo, and completed all German courses on Memrise.
|
| I don't see how one can learn German fluently using Duolingo
| (or even Memrise, which I think is much better). It's great for
| vocabulary, but I think understanding the grammar requires
| understanding the theory which I didn't see when I used these
| applications.
| tetris11 wrote:
| I did every German module on Duolingo in a 5-month
| preparation for moving to Germany for my job, and I got the
| coveted Golden Owl to prove my proficiency...
|
| ... only for me to get to Germany and realise very early on
| that I would need to do a basic A1 language course.
|
| The app was gibberish; the pronunciations were wrong, the
| genders were misleading, and the daily interactions they
| tried to drill in me were far from useful.
|
| The overinflated proficiency instilled in me by the app, made
| me genuinely believe I could interact easily with a German -
| a delusion I was quickly and painfully made aware of, much to
| my chagrin.
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| I used Duolingo maybe ten years ago to get myself up to
| approx A1, mid-A2 level German. Back then every new piece of
| grammar actually had an explanatory page that you could study
| before jumping in to the quiz games. As the enshittification
| began, they made these harder to find so that instead
| encountering a new linguistic concept in the quiz felt like a
| cruel guessing game.
|
| For beginners to German these days, I heartily recommend the
| free "Nicos Weg" course from DW that goes up to B1 at least.
| Also has, unusually for language classes, a cast of likeable
| characters played by reasonably good actors carrying a
| consistent, building storyline throughout the lessons.
| hbn wrote:
| > Back then every new piece of grammar actually had an
| explanatory page that you could study before jumping in to
| the quiz games.
|
| These still exist but they're hidden in a little unlabelled
| button at the top right of the unit overview and I don't
| think they ever mentioned it to me or do any hinting to go
| look at them. It's silly cause they're quite useful. I
| guess they just want people doing the lessons (playing the
| game) and not boring them with asking them to read about
| grammar.
| Sharlin wrote:
| At least it's still clearly labelled "guidebook" in the
| web version (which has always been better than the app in
| some ways). But the content is dumbed down and
| enshittified too. These days it just contains a couple of
| random phrases from the unit rather than any actual
| pedagogical content.
| davidcbc wrote:
| It's a big button that looks like a notebook at the top of
| the screen. It's not hidden at all. As I recall it _used_
| to be only on the desktop and not in the app, but it 's
| readily available in the app now
| eigenspace wrote:
| Agreed. Even Seedlang was of limited use to me past a certain
| point, I just think it did a much better job at the same
| niche as Duolingo.
|
| For me as someone who has never taken actual German courses,
| the biggest thing that contributed to my fluency was just
| listening to podcasts in German non-stop. Didn't matter if I
| wasn't understanding anything for months and months at the
| start.
|
| I think the listening played a huge role in familiarizing my
| brain with wide swathes of the language. It made it so that
| when I learned other things later on, instead of being
| actually 'new', it was things I recognized and already had a
| sort of 'feel' for by association, even if I didn't know what
| it actually meant.
|
| It was really cool watching as I went through a bit of a
| 'phase-change' at one point where one week I felt like I
| wasn't understanding more than few words per sentence and not
| able to actually follow conversations without looking stuff
| up, and then the next week it suddenly 'melted' and I was
| able to bridge the meaning between words and _was_ actually
| understanding and following entire conversations.
|
| My German still isn't perfect, especially my grammar and I
| probably should take some courses for that though. But I am
| at least fluent which is great.
| EdiX wrote:
| I speak three languages and I'm learning a fourth. Don't
| study grammar, ever, it's a waste of time. Grammar rules
| always fall into one of two categories: the ones that are so
| obvious that you would have learned them after two examples
| anyway or the ones that are too vague and complicated to be
| useful. For an example of the latter look up people making
| flowcharts for the subjunctive or for the ga/wa distinction.
| Or, for that matter, find me the place in an english grammar
| that explains why you get "on" a train, but "in" a car.
| Archonical wrote:
| For me, it's been helpful to understand grammar in German
| and I don't consider it a waste of time. Your experience
| seems to be different and I'm glad you enjoy it that way.
| watwut wrote:
| Duolingo itself claims its German course goes up to B1
| content, so I really do not understand why would anyone
| expect fluency as an outcome.
|
| It is reasonable to expect to be a litle bit more then A2.
| Fluency is not.
| ACCount36 wrote:
| Humans don't learn the grammar by "understanding the theory".
| Humans learn the grammar by using the language repeatedly.
|
| But a book on theory can be mass produced and sold to
| everyone who wants to learn a language. Can't bottle and mass
| produce an actual experience of using the language for years.
| So theory it is.
| hbn wrote:
| I like that Duolingo gives me some kind of curriculum and
| guides me through new concepts so I'm exposed to new words and
| study them for a few days at a time. But you have to be
| intentional with your learning to actually learn. Learning a
| language is hard, and Duolingo knows people will stop using
| their app if they challenge people too much and the app becomes
| a place to feel bad about how little Spanish you know. So their
| lessons are designed to be passable and not frustrating rather
| than a method of learning.
|
| Some techniques I use is not looking at the words when they're
| being read out to practice my listening (though sometimes the
| TTS voices make things unnecessarily difficult to understand),
| and I also try not to look at the word bank before trying to
| translate a sentence in my head first.
|
| My main wish from Duolingo is some kind of lesson I could go
| into that just grabs questions from old lessons with
| words/phrases you haven't done in a while. It's a little too
| easy to get into the swing of a unit where the words are fresh
| in your brain's cache, but having them pulled out from cold
| storage would makes sure you've actually got them locked into
| your memory.
|
| Also they should have a setting to disable word banks so you're
| forced to type everything.
|
| Seedlang seems cool though, I'm gonna give it a download later.
| eigenspace wrote:
| Seedlang also has a curriculum design (and one that I think
| makes more sense).
|
| > My main wish from Duolingo is some kind of lesson I could
| go into that just grabs questions from old lessons with
| words/phrases you haven't done in a while. It's a little too
| easy to get into the swing of a unit where the words are
| fresh in your brain's cache, but having them pulled out of
| nowhere would makes sure you've actually got them locked into
| your memory
|
| Seedlang does this too. There's a gigantic library of all the
| exercises and you can go through them and put them in your
| review lists. Each time you review an exercise, you rate the
| exercise as 'hard' or 'easy', and depening on the rating,
| that exercise will then show up more or less often in the
| future. Eventually if the interval gets to be a year long,
| it'll give you the option to retire an exercise.
|
| Each time you do a lesson, it'll list all the exercises from
| that lesson and you can choose which ones you want added to
| your review queue. It's really nice. Lots of control over
| your own spaced-reptition needs.
|
| > Also they should have a setting to disable word banks so
| you're forced to type everything.
|
| Yeah definitely. Seedlang also does this btw!
| hbn wrote:
| I'll definitely be giving it a shot!
| davidcbc wrote:
| > My main wish from Duolingo is some kind of lesson I could
| go into that just grabs questions from old lessons with
| words/phrases you haven't done in a while.
|
| This exists, but not for free users.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Why can't the customers go AI-first, no?
|
| Just ask your favorite LLM to teach you <language>.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| This might be a nice time for me to plug the FOSS software I've
| been quietly building over the last ~3 years for English speaking
| learners of Finnish specifically. I've recently collected them
| all onto a little landing page at https://finbug.xyz/ .
|
| I run into other immigrants to this country semi-regularly now
| who say they've used at least one of these tools, most commonly
| the frequency deck or reverse-conjugator/decliner. It's been a
| surprisingly fruitful way to make professional connections here.
| thenberlin wrote:
| If an LLM is what's going to teach me a new language, why would I
| ever pay some middleman $100-200 a year for an app wrapper? This
| guy doesn't seem to realize that embracing AI-first doesn't just
| put his employees on the chopping block, it actually suggests his
| whole company is unnecessary.
|
| This is what I don't think the "AI-first" business crowd
| understands -- in many cases, the moment you admit the humans in
| your organization can be wholesale replaced by AI, that's a sign
| it's possible your whole ass business case could be unnecessary
| LLM middleware.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Literally millions of people already pay for LLM wrappers for
| all sorts of different products and services.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Welcome to the Scam Altman future hellscape
| foxfired wrote:
| Slight tangent. I remember many jobs ago when our CEO went on a
| mobile-first campaign. I literally watched him talk about the
| type of innovations we were making to cater to our customers,
| while I was writing a regex to redirect mobile to m.example.com.
|
| Before the year was over, the campaign had switched to Big Data.
| We signed up for some big data services, the CEO talked to the
| media about it, but we never did anything with the service. The
| thing is, it worked. The company was sold for over a billion
| dollars.
|
| I've written about Duolingo being a game first before anything
| else. I still get the occasional email that "Exposes" me and
| asked me to retract the article. But for Duolingo's CEO, none of
| this matters because it's a PR stunt that either works or
| doesn't. And right now, it looks like it didn't work. But that's
| ok, because quantum is going to change the game.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| It is my informed opinion as an educator, most recently in
| English as a second language, and as a language learner that
| duolingo is at best woefully old fashioned and at worst
| completely broken, pedagogically speaking. It's high time the owl
| fell from its high perch.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > woefully old fashioned and at worst completely broken
|
| This is the part that I'm shocked people don't notice. A young
| high school teacher who keeps up with the literature is going
| to be miles ahead of Duolingo pedagogically. One of the reasons
| I'm bullish on AI in language learning is that you could do
| fully-reactive, individualized TPRS* with AI. You could even
| simulate other students.
|
| [*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPR_Storytelling
| landl0rd wrote:
| For the most part consumers do stuff like this and then change
| their minds or forget about it. Boycotts like this rarely work.
| Don't overestimate the conscientiousness of the average consumer.
| Duolingo is still going to do this, and probably get worse, and
| users will continue to use it.
| catigula wrote:
| The CEO of my company is the same person.
|
| Narcissism blinders on, "you can develop an entire application in
| minutes, we can fire our whole staff".
|
| Doesn't realize that if this was true he'd be fired as well.
|
| The entrepreneurial mind isn't responding well to the realities
| and risks of AI. It appears to be oil and water.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I was not surprised when Klarna or Shoppify made these inane AI
| uber alles type statements to placate the investor class. Having
| followed and envied Louis for quite some time, I did fee very
| disappointed when he jumped into the deep end of the AI pool
| without looking.
| bonif wrote:
| The Dildo of AI Rarely Arrives Lubed
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| Kind of funny to watch the crazy AI hype group-think that
| probably originates in the CEO group-chats gradually evaporate as
| reality hits that AI is a useful tool instead of a be-all, end-
| all.
| bayareapsycho wrote:
| Their PE ratio is 256. What really matters is convincing wall
| street to keep funneling money into their company stock
|
| So what he's doing makes a lot of sense. Have to keep the stock
| high and sell off before reality kicks in. All of this money
| floating around incentivizes this behavior
| in_ab wrote:
| I fear AI will lead to inevitable decline in software quality. A
| lot of companies are going to try to replace humans with AI. And
| if the end result doesn't elicit backlash, more will follow. It
| may not fly in some domains, but a lot of people are already used
| to using buggy software.
| einrealist wrote:
| Good times for ex-contractors of Duolingo to have AI help them
| build a honest competitor app. Just watched a video about Sears
| today and it reminded me how fast top dogs can fail.
| djeastm wrote:
| I learned a foreign language as an adult, but the way I did it
| was by being an Army linguist who spent a year and a half in
| full-time training with native speakers, plus multiple re-
| trainings for the next five years. I have no idea how people are
| learning a language using an app for a few minutes a day.
| nchmy wrote:
| Genuine question:
|
| If Duolingo was being started today by a solo developer, and they
| essentially just created some sort of wrapper over [insert LLM]
| to be a language tutor, would there be outrage? I suspect not.
| So, this seems to be more about getting rid of workers than it is
| about AI.
|
| Would people use it? Probably, and I think it would VERY well -
| at least in comparison to current options. ChatGPT is a fantastic
| Spanish tutor (though I'm largely self-taught, through
| immersion). So, something that actually has some sort of
| structured curriculum and the LLM assesses your progress, gives
| guidance, explains why things are the way they are and how they
| compare (eg particular verb tenses and conjugations, order of
| words/syntax etc...), could surely be enormously useful. It
| probably wouldnt even be that hard to open-source some system
| prompts for a curriculum...
| ark296 wrote:
| I'm kinda shocked by how people thought DuoLingo was ever going
| to be any different. They are a high-growth startup, through and
| through.
|
| The founder gets on podcasts and extolls the virtues of
| relentless A/B tests. They very openly admit that their primary
| value add is gamification (otherwise people churn from language
| learning apps).
|
| I suppose the lesson here is that the words you say to Silicon
| Valley types you want to impress are sometimes overheard by your
| core audience, who may not like your opinions.
| jwilber wrote:
| I've worked in AI for years (and still do!), but something about
| the callousness of his comments, the almost celebratory
| replacement of human labor, immediately made me delete Duolingo.
| I was a daily user and have switched over to Pimsleur.
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