101–110 of 348 posts
Of course, DuoLingo is superfluous. Watching movies in the target language with subtitles in you own language is more fun and has quicker results.
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 a…
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).
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.
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.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/instil
> Australia, Ireland and UK standard spelling of instill.
(And presumably South Africa as well)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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’r…
[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]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
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 yo…
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.
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)