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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

#231

Post by ben_w »

dagurp wrote: post #221
RC_ITR wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I also wish that was still part of the product.

Not only was there more diverse content when learning (though for that I can at least recommend Clozemaster), but now that some part of my mobile experience keeps defaulting to showing me wikipedia in German[0], I keep realising how out of sync the different languages of wikipedia are.

[0] a bit of a tangent from the article, but it's been irritating me for ages now.

I'm in Germany, but English is the top entry in Settings.app Preferred Languages, and I'm using iOS 16: highlight a word, e.g. "German"; in the context menu select «Look Up»; this text is all correctly in English; tap either the title or in the links list the wikipedia link; what do I get?

""" https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language

German language

Dieser Artikel existiert nicht.

Möglichst ganze Wörter eingeben, die im Artikeltext, insbesondere aber im Lemma vorkommen sollen.

Hilfe:Suche – weitere Möglichkeiten zur Suche nach Artikeln

Suche nach German language in anderssprachigen Wikipedias

"""

I don't even know if this is Apple's bug or Wikipedia's bug

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

#232

Post by ben_w »

recuter wrote: post #177
Kailhus wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon?

After just 5 hours on a Duolingo Max I have become fluent at useful everyday language needs, behold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grA5XmBRC6g

De ezt rosszul fordították magyarból, nem fordították rosszul franciára. Szerintem ez a vígjáték megfelelőbb:

https://youtu.be/mh_ePgI4n3Y

;)

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

#234

Post by benatkin »

dyno12345 wrote: post #131
gardenhedge wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. When the reception asks if you want to check in or the shopkeeper asks if you need a bag.. you won't get that from Duolingo. You'll learn the word for an apple though and if your memory is good you'll be able to recall it when needed.

or my personal favorite, getting tripped up by a followup question from a server like "do you want mustard with that?" etc.

One of the first places I ate at in a majority Spanish speaking country was called Mostaza. It means mustard in Spanish and is a burger place.

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

#235

Post by dotancohen »

NoInkling wrote: post #211
dotancohen wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you, this looks great.

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

#236

Post by chrisfosterelli »

izolate wrote: post #163
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness to duolingo, nearly everything duolingo does is like this. They are extremely metric and process driven (for better and worse of actual users).

I'd be very interested to know exactly what metrics allow them to ignore the fact that their most-recent app redesign has been, from what I can tell, unanimously disliked and shown to frustrate their userbase.

This is exactly the example I was thinking of. There is a Reddit AMA where a user asks why they keep it even though it's universally disliked and the CEO essentially says "I hear you but DAU is higher on the redesign".

I think it's an example where metrics are taken too far. Yes, better DAU is good, but if you are alienating 100% of your power users and getting more engagement from your short-term, new signup users that's going to look great for a few quarters but kill your app over the long term as the community experts start telling everyone they used to recommend Duolingo to to go use something else.

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

#237

Post by ted_bunny »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #199
ted_bunny wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I mean is, DL refuses to teach that deeper understanding. You have to beg in the comments to identify a declension.

And the memory thing - I don't have to think about what a sentence means. This is phrasebook teaching, a piss-poor method.

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

#238

Post by ted_bunny »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #198
ted_bunny wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you identify a declension? The gender and case are never provided, forcing reliance on comment replies. Now those are locked.

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

#239

Post by mgoetzke »

mgoetzke wrote: post #223

Where can this be tried though to find out whether its marketing fluff or has real value ?

ok found it. I cannot see it on the website in my profile I have to go into the AppStore on iOS under subscriptions.

Says: 250 EUR/y per family. Which costs my 120 EUR/y right now. So more than twice as expensive.

With no way to try that I am not sure I would want to go down that road

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

#240

Post by bayesian_horse »

thewebcount wrote: post #207
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...

I don’t understand. Why aren’t the notes in the app? I can already search for language information on the web. But I’d prefer it was just in the language learning app I’m using already.

Duolingo is driven by analytics. My guess is that they saw that almost nobody is using the notes compared to the app and it's too much work to maintain them. Also they have to keep them working for three platforms, which isn't all that trivial.
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