Duolingo has seemed like a very sketchy app to me for a long time. I have used and recommended it when it first came out. However, when I used it more seriously, I realized he Duolingo is nearly pointless. It is pretty terrible way to fool yourself into thinking you are learning a language. It is at best a way to kind of get familiar with the language but it is not a primary or secondary resource, perhaps more of a fifth or sixth resource and only then more as a break. I think you can just spend a lot of time on Duolingo, which they want, accomplishes nothing at all other than accumulating their useless badges. If they want to go “AI first,” I invite to consider just shutting down their business altogether and tell people to just use ChatGPT for learning, or better yet, with their vision of the future, just tell people not yo bother learning another language at all.
Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
271–280 of 348 posts
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#272Their comments cemented to me that they have no long term value. If the ceo of Duolingo thinks AI will teach me a language then I’ll use a low cost LLM to get there without Duolingo.
I've noticed that a strong thread of the hacker community, including HN and the guys who wrote GNU and linux, are extremely cheap . Like, you'd rather write a product clone yourself than pay $15/month for the official product. Why is this? What's with the inherent stinginess?
> What's with the inherent stinginess?
Let me introduce you to the ancient lore of BrandonM, in his epic treatise "rsync v Dropbox": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This sort of notification-barrage is a common problem in mobile apps with multiple teams That makes me think about how everyone defining an operational alert/warning thinks theirs is very important, leading to so many that users time them all out and everyone loses.
It’s especially frustrating when DoorDash will happily use notifications for both order status/issues and spam various deal/promotion notifications. There’s simply no way to turn them completely off so you only get order status notifications on iOS. I ended up disabling notifications completely (and eventually just deleting it)
You can get order status via SMS. That way you can disable all notifs
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Duolingo is just a mobile game where you role play learning a language. Similar to how you role play being an emperor in Civ: you learn a thing or two but it's no where near what the real thing is. That's fine as a game!
Woah. Comparing duolingo to civ is not fair to civ.
I have to say I very much agree with you. I think you learn a lot more about empires and resources with Civ than whatever Duolingo telling you it is for.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do people prefer games over hard work while learning? Because this is how we used to naturally learn. Kids having fun playing hide and seek? Wrestling and throwing stones? They are learning hunting/survival skills. Today with more abstract knowledge needed it is harder, but the concept of making abstract learning a game again, is a very smart one in general. It of course fails, if engagement becomes the metric an…
But in your analogy, the base Duolingo app without its gamification is the gamification of learning a language. The streaks and points and everything else is a gamification of gamification of learning.
That doesn't make any sense. Gamifying gamification sounds like giving your eng teams streaks for CLs that improve gamification, not just... gamifying more.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#276Earlier 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…
Note that this reasonable comment about HackerNews groupthink has been downvoted to grey.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#277My 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…
A real question: did she actually learn a language? 6 years should be enough to be fluent at any language. My opinion is Duolingo just doesn’t work and never will. People are fooled by the gamification but it’s a time wasting app/game that gives an illusion of productivity. Like Minecraft with words.
Exactly, I did the free Language Transfer audio courses in Spanish and French and actually learnt some real useful basics of the language (they're very much introductory courses but very good).
Previously I'd spend far more time in Duolingo trying to learn and hadn't really learnt any useful language skills at all. I can see it being helpful for drilling some vocab if you were learning elsewhere, but it just doesn't work to actually learn a language.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#278My 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…
People get some small joy and relaxation out of playing dumb games on their phone, better Duolingo than Candy Crush or scrolling TikTok.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Humans don't learn the grammar by "understanding the theory". Humans learn the grammar by using the language repeatedly. But a book on theory can be mass produced and sold to everyone who wants to learn a language. Can't bottle and mass produce an actual experience of using the language for years. So theory it is.
That's a big generalization. Do you have any data to back up that first claim?
For German, knowing grammatical cases {Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive} has been helpful as an on-ramp to using the language repeatedly correctly.
Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails
#280It is astonishing that a CMU professor can sink so low. Then again, he also invented reCaptcha. Of course, DuoLingo is superfluous. Watching movies in the target language with subtitles in you own language is more fun and has quicker results.
It's embarrassing. It's not Richard Grenell bad, but it's close.