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Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

blog.duolingo.com

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Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#191

Post by climb_stealth »

ben_w wrote: post #89
thewebcount wrote: post #79

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…

Well, if they are so focused on engagement metrics then surely they would notice an active user drop since the big UI update? Both my partner and I were using the app daily and completely dropped it since then. Going from the reviews we are not the only ones. It is just such a clusterfuck and I'm still feeling bitter about it.

Personally I find the German voice actors super annoying. The Indonesian ones seem fine. Funny how this is experienced differently for different people :)

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#192

Post by xdennis »

I imagine this will lead to people speaking foreign languages with bot influences.

It will probably be similar to how people speak when they have a low number of co-speakers. For example, my (Romanian) sister moved to China and has a son now, but since he only talks to her in Romanian, he sometimes uses feminine words when talking about himself since that's now my sister talks.

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#194

Post by fooker »

xdennis wrote: post #192

I imagine this will lead to people speaking foreign languages with bot influences. It will probably be similar to how people speak when they have a low number of co-speakers. For example, my (Romanian) sister moved to China and has a son now, but since he only talks to her in Romanian, he sometimes uses feminine words when talking about himself since that's now my sister talks.

That seems okay, and correctible with a bit of watching movies and reading children's books/comics.

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#195

Post by fooker »

comex wrote: post #184
simonw wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm asking pretty basic questions - "Why moven there and not mover?" kind of level - and the responses are obviously correct to me.

I recently asked GPT-3.5 ChatGPT to explain the grammar of a Japanese sentence using an obscure informal verb form, and it gave an answer that was obviously wrong. I just tried again with GPT-4, and it gave an answer that was more plausible, but which is almost certainly also wrong, because it contradicts the much-more-convincing Stack Exchange answer I had previously found via Google. (I only asked ChatGPT the quest…

How do you know the Stack Exchange answer was correct?

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#196

Post by elecush »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #181
skeaker wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You make a new product, you charge for it, you advertise it. What's the big issue? The issue is: from beginning on and for a long time Duolingo advertised with "Learn a language for free. Forever." :-(

investing in yourself is the best investment you can make, and yet you don't want to spend any money

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#197

Post by bayesian_horse »

alanh wrote: post #125
bayesian_horse wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another useless definition of "woke". Also if you wrote it exactly as in this comment, then the first sentence is grammatically correct, the second does not compute because of the quotation marks. It may not be a conspiracy you may just be too stupid to use it. Also it's not a translation app. Also Trump objectively wasn't a great president, he cowered to Putin, mispronounced his own damn country all the time and…

"Ideological oppression is good because you’re stupid and the oppressors are right" Also, I didn't define "woke," if you want to be a pedant. But we all know what it means. Are you unaware of the famous examples of ChatGPT refusing to say nice things about Trump because OpenAI has forbidden it from doing so? This was a major story. You don’t have to like Trump to find this disturbing. GPT should be a neutral tool.

You use it wrong, then you complain. That's neither smart nor oppression.

I don't even believe the example is real, that's how little faith I have in people who drink the drivel from Fox News which simultaneously lies for Trump and hates Trump so much.

You are making tough accusations with zero actual evidence. Even if it were true GPT-3 or 4 had this bias (it certainly has a few others which are decidedly "not woke") I don't care at all because it's probably not a conspiracy but just a result of the training corpus to be confusing around Trump... He just naturally engenders more hate and animosity if for no other reason that he uses hate and animosity in his daily lies...

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#198

Post by bayesian_horse »

ted_bunny wrote: post #147
bayesian_horse wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's ridiculous. DL makes some really bafflingly stupid choices that make its product near-useless for serious study.

I'm using it for serious study in multiple languages. It's still plenty useful.

They are just not hosting the community interactions anymore. Probably because it was too difficult to keep it clean from abuse and they decided to be about educational technology rather than about hosting and curating social content.

Re: Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

#199

Post by bayesian_horse »

ted_bunny wrote: post #150
bayesian_horse wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, the gamification is the major positive feature that gets people to stick to it. 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 n…

I never run into those issues. I use about 6 courses, and the English sentences have always been grammatically correct.

There's nothing wrong with memorizing example sentences. Your brain is not a digital memory bank, memorizing is impossible without forming some deeper understanding on the fly.

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