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Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

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Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#171

Post by ben_w »

teekert wrote: post #80
lolinder wrote: post #18

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…

My daughter gave up because the mascot turned more and more scary (she’s not allowed to use the iPad that much). Any alternatives?

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?

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#172

Post by regularjack »

zugi wrote: post #120
sandspar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 keep…

It is not at all surprising to me that humans care about other humans. Only a minority of humans are sociopaths, fortunately.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#173

Post by leoc »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #128
leoc wrote: post #104

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://…

The language-specific subreddits also have excellent advice.

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.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#174

Post by hbn »

eigenspace wrote: post #110

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 spea…

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.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#175

Post by eigenspace »

Archonical wrote: post #124
eigenspace wrote: post #110

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 spea…

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.

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.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#176

Post by catigula »

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.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#177

Post by 90s_dev »

kbelder wrote: post #32
adocomplete wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#178

Post by joenot443 »

telchior wrote: post #123
namenumber wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, constan…

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.

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.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#179

Post by eigenspace »

hbn wrote: post #174
eigenspace wrote: post #110

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 spea…

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…

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!

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#180

Post by ben_w »

rzz3 wrote: post #163
morkalork wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like they suffer from the same illness as dating apps: Being successful means users graduating and leaving the platform.

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.

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."

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