141–150 of 250 posts
Language learning in general seems like something that should be on the way out. All technical building blocks for simultaneous translation exist and modern speech synthesis systems can even emulate the sound of your voice in the foreign language. Eventually it might even be considered rude to bother people in foreign countries with your broken language skills, given that you could use a perfectly serviceable automat…
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Awesome observation re: censorship. Last I looked into training sets, Chinese and English were the frontrunners by far in available corpus size, and benefit from a certain amount of government-enforced-homogeneity (a standard mode is taught in compulsory education). Arabic is safe from automation due to its limited exposure to the open web and extreme variability of dialects, and Icelandic will remain obscure due to…
The islandic government is apparently partnering with OpenAI to "preserve their language". I suppose they have a GPT-4 customized for that language.
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I mean, sure, that's more or less how a company operates. You make a new product, you charge for it, you advertise it. What's the big issue? This all seems pretty standard.
> What's the big issue? This all seems pretty standard I would say this one feels more later stage capitalism than usual, all it's missing is some tiktok influesters hyping it up.
Ugh. You can just feel the management layers in this. Management wants to do something with AI. It's so hot right now. Your product guy got an idea for a cool new feature. Tests show that users actually like it. It's helpful. Great. But now you need to explain how you made Duolingo money. First idea, your product has a paid tier, add it as a feature to the paid tier too boost paid user retention and new signups. Grea…
I have severely mixed feelings about Duolingo. I can't imagine paying more than I already do for the "Super" option. If you're trying to learn Spanish or French, it seems like a pretty full-featured app. Unfortunately, I'm trying to learn Greek and every aspect of it is sub-par compared to other languages. It doesn't even read you questions correctly. (It uses flat intonation as if it's saying a statement.) There are…
Oh, I see the Greek course has gotten worse. Before the UX update at the end of last year, I was trying Arabic (something like 2 years of daily lessons and I still couldn't manage the alphabet), Greek (felt worse than before the preceding UX change but I couldn't say why exactly), Esperanto (the audio sounded like it was done by a volunteer at their own home?), Dutch, German, and Spanish. I'm still doing German, beca…
I have severely mixed feelings about Duolingo. I can't imagine paying more than I already do for the "Super" option. If you're trying to learn Spanish or French, it seems like a pretty full-featured app. Unfortunately, I'm trying to learn Greek and every aspect of it is sub-par compared to other languages. It doesn't even read you questions correctly. (It uses flat intonation as if it's saying a statement.) There are…
You shoud google for duolingo grammar notes. You'll find some for every course I imagine. The same people who originally created those courses made unofficial wikia or other pages and populate unofficial discords. You just have to know to look for them...
Ugh. You can just feel the management layers in this. Management wants to do something with AI. It's so hot right now. Your product guy got an idea for a cool new feature. Tests show that users actually like it. It's helpful. Great. But now you need to explain how you made Duolingo money. First idea, your product has a paid tier, add it as a feature to the paid tier too boost paid user retention and new signups. Grea…
And the first thing that comes to mind is to complain about them adding a pricing tier? I know HN tends to be cynical, but really?
I have severely mixed feelings about Duolingo. I can't imagine paying more than I already do for the "Super" option. If you're trying to learn Spanish or French, it seems like a pretty full-featured app. Unfortunately, I'm trying to learn Greek and every aspect of it is sub-par compared to other languages. It doesn't even read you questions correctly. (It uses flat intonation as if it's saying a statement.) There are…
Not relevant to the discussion but possibly for you: I discovered this 100% free no-signup audio-only course for Greek through a previous HN post. Amazing approach (like Michel Thomas but more charming and modern and free!): https://www.languagetransfer.org/about Of all the language apps I used Duolingo has by far been the least useful. I've spent hundreds of hours but took barely anything away (for FR, ES) If you mu…
I’m Greek and I’ve never heard of LanguageTransfer before (it’s even created by another Greek, Michalis). I used for a few months the free tier of Duolingo in the past, but it wasn’t to my liking and although it helped a bit, I can’t say it taught me Spanish (perhaps the paid version is better).
For sure I’m going to try the free Spanish course from LanguageTransfer ;-)
With GPT-4, I'm thinking if Duolingo has fundamentally been reduced to a game. The key network effect left is pretty much a leaderboard that fuels their daily retention. So any existing game company could potentially create another gamified learning app as part of their game pools.
There are lots of educational games or apps around language learning. Nobody is as successful as Duolingo. Or as useful as Duolingo, at least in whatever Duolingo chooses to do. I don't even think they think being compared to a game is a bad thing. What makes Duolingo the best in its field is the content and the varied exercises with a high quality.
But the exercises aren't varied or high quality. Try drilling a particular skill and you'll soon memorize all their sentences, to a degree that it trivializes the practice. Not to mention they're absolutely riddled with errors that strongly imply they don't even run the translations by a native English speaker. Voice exercises with numbers are simply broken in Russian. And all the comments are locked, with many of the complaints ignored.