Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4

blog.duolingo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 250 posts

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

#221

Post by dagurp »

RC_ITR wrote: post #212
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 faile…

I wish they would have tried harder. After I finished Spanish in tried to translate some articles but the UI was confusing and there was no motivation like the learning bit had

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

#222

Post by bspammer »

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.

Did you run out of hearts? Those recharge over time, you don’t need to pay.

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

#224

Post by bluehat974 »

Imagine tomorrow, with some hardware improvement (neuromorphic chips...), we will be able to have the full GPT-4 model (or more powerfull/specific LLM) directly on our own smartphone...

The potential to generate any type of content could be infiny (learn something, speak with virtual friends, analyse our medical record in real time, create a business with multiple virtual employee...)

We have just to install an application on our smartphone, which will configure a prompt, fetch data (conversation data, body data...) and magic happens

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

#225

Post by aleph_minus_one »

RC_ITR wrote: post #212
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 faile…

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

> They tried. They failed. They tried something new.

You only advertise with such a slogan if you are really sure that you will never have to pivot to a business model where you want to have the user pay (even if paying is "optional" (freemium)) since advertising slogans have a tendency to stick. ;-)

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

#226

Post by ben_w »

climb_stealth wrote: post #191
ben_w wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Fu…

> Well, if they are so focused on engagement metrics then surely they would notice an active user drop since the big UI update?

My guess is the "school homework assistant" market is very different from the "self-directed adult learning" market, and growth in the former outweighs loss from the latter.

Whatever the reason (I can invent many hypotheses, but they're just stories I can't test), Duo has gone from the app I enjoy making time for to the app I only bother with to keep my language lessons a little more diverse.

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

#227

Post by minxomat »

lock-the-spock wrote: post #93
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…

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…

Follow up recommendation: for Spanish, “Madrigals Key” is language transfer in book form. It can in fact be used as a workbook for this course.

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

#228

Post by sw104 »

culopatin wrote: post #216
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).

The Russian course on Duolingo is certifiable garbage.

- My Russian partner

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

#229

Post by eimrine »

culopatin wrote: post #216
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).

Russian and Ukrainian are my mother languages so, feel free to contact me if you want some practice. Just put my nickname, add @gmail.com and tell me that you are willing to practice your language in exchange of helping me to practice some English.
Post reply on HN