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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

#211

Post by NoInkling »

dotancohen wrote: post #172
jghn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to try Super Duolingo. But I've also been tapering off my usage as they keep forcing to use the word bank instead of keyboard at an increasing rate. I've no desire to use the word bank, they seem to have no desire to let me use the keyboard. Unless that's buried in one of the premium options I see the writing on the wall.

Try supplementing Duolingo with Anki / Ankidroid. Every word that I learn in Duolingo, I put into Anki. I do all my reviews in Ankidroid on a small E-Ink device but it's actually designed for phones. You can configure Ankidroid to require you to spell the words properly.

Also worth checking out something like Clozemaster.

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

#212

Post by RC_ITR »

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." :-(

> The issue is: from beginning on and for a long time Duolingo advertised with "Learn a language for free. Forever." :-(

The original business model (from the guy who made Captcha) was that the learners would translate text for others, for a fee. So the payment was labor.

Unsurprisingly that didn’t work out.

The alternative to charging was going out of business, so hard to vilify them too much.

They tried. They failed. They tried something new.

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

#214

Post by jhugo »

bundze wrote: post #88
dotancohen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work? Do you just tell it that you are learning and to correct your mistakes, then converse with it in German? Does it infer your German level from your own chats with it?

Yes, you can tell it that you are learning the language at the beginning of the conversation in plain English and ask it to correct any mistakes. You can easily start a bilingual conversation with ChatGPT, some random example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/112xgp2/practicing... To show you what I meant when I mentioned "enriching sentences", I've just generated an example of a B1-level English senten…

> User: Please improve this sentence: "Many people want to learn languages because they like to travel"

> ChatGPT: "Learning languages is a popular pursuit because it enables people to travel and explore different cultures with greater ease."

How is this an "improvement"?

The user gave a concise sentence without errors. ChatGPT made it more verbose and added additional meaning that wasn't present in the original sentence (thus going beyond mere "improvement"). Even if it stopped before the "and", the ChatGPT version is worse: it uses more words for no benefit.

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

#215

Post by DennisAleynikov »

csomar wrote: post #202
hndamien wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still learn a language for free with Duo Lingo.

No. I got duped into that too. After a few sessions they required payment.

what did you click in duolingo that required payment?

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

#216

Post by culopatin »

jake_morrison wrote: post #185

I have been using Duolingo for years. I find that you can't really learn anything, you can only practice something you already know. You won't learn grammar, it's only useful for sentence translation drills. And those drills are artificial, e.g. one sentence at a time, not using context, which is a big part of Japanese. It also has problems with characters with multiple readings (many). It often introduces a characte…

Every time I try it I waste time learning random crap like “the bear is vegetarian” or “Apple and milk”. I cannot yet say good morning or thank you, but I can say “radio” in Russian (only because it happens to be radio as well).

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

#217

Post by pallas_athena »

aeturnum wrote: post #20

This is interesting because my impression is that LLMs perform poorly on non-english languages[1]. This is likely 'just' a corpus size problem - but it's not like that is going to be fixed any time soon. That said, at least in language instruction there's a lot of meta material that will be helpful. I wonder how Duolingo is detecting when GPT-4 is hallucinating. [1] https://twitter.com/asmelashteka/status/16309662332…

>the only courses that can utilize these new features are Spanish and French for English speakers

>We also constantly review AI-generated explanations in Roleplay and Explain My Answer to ensure that the answers are factually correct

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

#218

Post by TheDong »

NoPicklez wrote: post #176
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.

How dare you try to make money to pay your employees

Yup. Having and paying employees is a good that deflects from all criticism of price.

When I doubled prices in my coffee shop, at first people were unhappy, but as soon as I told them I threw out the coffee grinding machine and replaced it with 3 new jobs of "hand-grinders", people were overjoyed and immediately stopped criticizing the price increase. I was just making money to pay employees afterall.

When I had to raise prices again because all the hand-coffee-grinder employees suffered severe medical injuries, everyone understood that too.

.....

My point, obviously, is that hiring a bunch of employees to design ways to trick people into clicking more ads (sorry, ahem, improving user engagement) doesn't mean that the company making money is suddenly an obvious and unquestionable good that can be used as a shield from other criticism

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