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Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

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Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#281

Post by 90s_dev »

fao_ wrote: post #252
90s_dev wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The $.50 version is barely food. The $1.69 is not much better, and still very unhealthy for you. Have ground beef and a fiber rich low calorie food like brocoli or whole wheat whole grain noodles or something. Anyway you're not really helping the poor in practice when you do this. Corporations aren't hurting because one guy or even a dozen he inspires through HN stop buying a few boxes of kraft dinner. If more people…

I don't agree with the person above you in as much as the way they are doing it is very individualist "vote with your wallet", and yes, you're right that it's very ineffective. The more effective way is to form a group, call it a "club" or whatever, that does it. The group can then advertise to other people and get more people to join the club. Eventually, it becomes large enough to gain political power. This is call…

Influencing is far more powerful than unionizing. And activism is an ineffective form of influencing.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#283

Post by nchmy »

rchaud wrote: post #270
nchmy wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at a fairly high level in learning spanish, which mostly came from actually speaking the language and just studying the dictionary etc... Duolingo was absolutely useless - and that was 6 years ago. I can only imagine how terrible it is nowadays. Anyway, Im responding to you because i find ChatGPT to be a FANTASTIC tutor. Like I was absolutely blown away. It can do all the translation stuff, but also answer questi…

But as you yourself admit, you were at a high level already, so you know how to ask the LLM good questions. If you were a beginner with zero knowledge, you wouldn't have that advantage, so the LLM's ability to help you would be far less. How many ESL learners are asking ChatGPT when to use the past participle or present perfect tense?

Believe it or not, I have a high level of understanding of my native language as well - as surely most 2nd language learners do.

You don't even need to know any grammatical terms (I barely do for English, and suspect most people don't either for their native language), so long as you can speak a language. Like, I don't have a clue what past participle or present perfect tense mean in either language. Nor do I particularly need to know them.

Though, I'll admit that it would surely be easier to learn Spanish if I knew and understood the equivalent constructs in English. Case in point - when I was a kid and they taught us French in school, it was just an exercise in memorization rather than understanding, because they hadn't taught us the English versions. Apparently that's just what happened where I'm from for an extended period of time. Yet, I'm very significantly literate.

Still, you just ask chatgpt "how do I say _ in Spanish?" and then ask questions with variations for subject, object, tense, etc. You obviously would start easy "how do I say 'I eat bread'", but can progress to 'I ate/will eat/am going to eat/had eaten/would have eaten/could eat bread'

And you could eventually make it quite complicated eg "if you had told me xyz as you should have, I would have asked him about it. Now I am hoping that etc..." There's a huge mix of grammatical concepts in that (and I know very few of their names), and chatgpt would easily translate it and explain the concepts to whatever degree I desire.

If I was sufficiently motivated, I am quite sure that chatgpt could rapidly and effectively teach me all English and Spanish grammar.

Perhaps it would be a different story if learning something wildly different - eg Vietnamese. Yet, there's surely still similar constructs underlying it, since they all have to reflect the same world.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#284

Post by hbn »

sumeno wrote: post #249
hbn wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that Duolingo gives me some kind of curriculum and guides me through new concepts so I'm exposed to new words and study them for a few days at a time. But you have to be intentional with your learning to actually learn. Learning a language is hard, and Duolingo knows people will stop using their app if they challenge people too much and the app becomes a place to feel bad about how little Spanish you know. So…

> My main wish from Duolingo is some kind of lesson I could go into that just grabs questions from old lessons with words/phrases you haven't done in a while. This exists, but not for free users.

I am paying, whatever you're thinking does this is not doing it very well. Occasionally there will be lessons that claim to target "weak skills" but I don't believe they're doing anything very sophisticated to determine what a "weak skill" of mine is because they're always a cakewalk.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#286

Post by username135 »

The app has gone down hill but i still use it because i cant find any decent Irish programs elsewhere. I dont mind the gamification but can see why its annoying. Once I fond a suitable replacement, i will cancel my membership. I will say this, ive learned quite a lot of the language simply through the app. I am highly motivated though.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#287

Post by marssaxman »

theoreticalmal wrote: post #111
lolinder wrote: post #18

My 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…

My Duolingo streak is 37 days and I just jumped on to do a lesson and retain my position on the leaderboard. I feel like the app itself is right on the cusp of being a valuable learning tool compared to being a silly game. I am okay with the idea of paying for “just okay” teaching if it helps me stay motivated and interested in the content. That may change in the future, I guess we’ll see!

If it's working for you, don't let the negativity get you down! A year of daily Duolingo got me far enough along that I can now generally follow YouTube videos, news articles, and Reddit threads in the language I've been learning, with the occasional dip into Google Translate for unfamiliar words or phrases. The feeling of being able to just listen or read, and not have to consciously translate, felt like a door opening up in the world - a powerful motivation to keep working at it. Duolingo may not work for everyone, but in my experience there really has been value in it.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#288

Post by g9yuayon »

lolinder wrote: post #18

My 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…

> how Duolingo started using streaks and other gamification techniques to optimize their numbers

These two tactics per se are alright, right? If anything, I'd appreciate that Duolingo tries to keep me engaged. Besides, the more one spends time on learning language, the faster they learn.

The issue with Duolingo is not about gamification, but that translation is ineffective and boring, no matter how much gamification there is. Personally I find that the most effective way to learn a new language is starting with Comprehensible Input and then moving on with tons of output. Take Spanish for example, Easy Spanish, Dreaming in Spanish, Español Sí!, Extra, and Destinos offers lots of fun input for beginners. Paco Ardit's graded readers are great too.

Another problem with Duolingo is that it does not help listening comprehension at all. It turns out that we can only pick up sounds in context with tons of repetitions and combinations in consecutive sentences - a feature that is exactly what Duolingo misses. Yes, it has introduced listening and stories, but the amount of them is too little to be useful. Another lesson is that reading does not help improving listening much. When we read, we see individual words and phrases easily, while it's really hard to pick up individual words when listening. I didn't understand the difference and spent a lot more time reading than listening. As a result, my reading was at the level C1 yet I could only understand slow Spanish at the level of A2.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#289

Post by jmward01 »

crmd wrote: post #114
jmward01 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't my field, but I can imagine it is hard to optimize for learning only since the reward signal is clearly user engagement (meaning subscription revenue). Finding a reward signal that does both, help people learn -and- make money is hard. I am a Duolingo user and I definitely notice the gamification but I really don't know how it would be done better since that gets people engaged in an activity that is assoc…

>… it is hard to optimize for learning only since the reward signal is clearly user engagement (meaning subscription revenue). Schools can give reward signals for demonstrating subject mastery, or for tuition payment and attendance. It seems like Duolingo gamified the latter instead of the former.

Schools do have other resources Duolingo doesn't: Compulsory attendance (primary education) and certificates/degree programs that are required for jobs and other opportunities. I doubt Duoligno could easily create a meaningful degree/cert program but it could be an avenue to pursue. To drive home the point, would you consider going to a college that wasn't accredited and put in 4 years of effort + tuition? I'm not saying it can't be done but just learning as a goal is really hard to monetize.

Re: Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

#290

Post by hintymad »

vasusen wrote: post #186
lolinder wrote: post #18

My 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…

(disclosure: I am no longer at Coursera) When Duolingo added that viral post on Growth hacking, it caused quite a stir about the push-notifications and gamification tactics they use. Ultimately, we decided it wasn't worth it for Coursera to veer into edu-tainment. However, it is interesting to watch how much gamification works in adding and retaining users. In 2023, Duolingo's marketcap was 5x of Coursera. Now at sim…

> In 2023, Duolingo's marketcap was 5x of Coursera

Maybe this is because Coursera requires a lot more effort? My pessimistic view is that most people do not like learning, let alone learning in their leisure time with their own bucks. On the other hand, Duolingo gives more people the false impression that it's easy to learn a new language. And check out their math and chess program. They are really really easy, like pre-school level easy. Naturally, more people would be using Duolingo.

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