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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

#301

Post by jcul »

eigenspace wrote: post #175
Archonical wrote: post #124

Earlier 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.

Agreed. Even Seedlang was of limited use to me past a certain point, I just think it did a much better job at the same niche as Duolingo. For me as someone who has never taken actual German courses, the biggest thing that contributed to my fluency was just listening to podcasts in German non-stop. Didn't matter if I wasn't understanding anything for months and months at the start. I think the listening played a huge…

I think this kind of understanding is really important too, if speaking to native speakers of a language.

You're level may be basic and not super fluent, but if you can make yourself understood you can have a conversation. But if your listening comprehension is not good enough and the person is not slowing down (or if it's multiple native speakers speaking at a natural cadence) then you're lost.

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

#302

Post by vinceguidry »

zdragnar wrote: post #67
vinceguidry wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. Linus didn't pour decades of his life into Linux to save a buck. Neither did Stallman with GNU. Even if the alternatives at the time only cost $15, (hahahahahaha) free alternatives would still have been well worth making. Software freedom has never been about money, and always been about preserving public access to a software commons. You might believe your local bookstore is a better source of knowledge than yo…

I agree with your point, but your analogy doesn't hold up. There are several topics I've had to go to book stores to learn more about because my local library (and the systems they connect with) don't have any relevant materials. I make a habit of checking the library for non-fiction books first. Sometimes it pays off, but often not.

Profit motive store will be better at serving profit motive needs yes.

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

#303

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

hintymad wrote: post #290
vasusen wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

> My pessimistic view is that most people do not like learning, let alone learning in their leisure time with their own bucks.

Sadly, I have come to the same conclusion.

I have been training and giving seminars for ages. I don’t think that I’m the world’s best teacher, but I’m not that bad.

Geeks can be fun to teach, because they actually enjoy learning. It’s really a fundamental requirement for our industry.

Non-geeks; not so much. I often try to teach non-geeks how to do some small thing (usually around using tech). They almost always basically tell me that they don’t want to learn. Instead, they want me to do it for them.

There are definitely geeks that have leveraged this, to become fairly wealthy, but I find it kind of depressing.

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

#304

Post by ben_w »

rzz3 wrote: post #241
ben_w wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the shareholders saying: "Why settle for 3 years when you can milk people for a lifetime? If it takes 10,000 hours to master something," it doesn't but they'll likely use that meme, "and you plan to spread that learning over 72 years, they must not spend more than 22 minutes a day actually learning anything! The rest of the day should be adverts and retention."

I could see it as well. For me currently, I’ve completed 100% of the Spanish course, and I’d like to keep learning more, but there’s no more content. I think there’s a lot of more legitimate opportunities they could find, in the way of more content, to keep me coming back. Right now to be honest I just continue using it to maintain my streak, since I’m already fluent. But! I’ve recently started learning Italian, and…

I completed the Duolingo German course several times as they kept changing the course rendering the previous all-gold as more-to-learn. And the Esperanto course. Tried Arabic for a few years over the course of the pandemic.

I can hardly remember any of the Esperanto, I never even mastered the Arabic alphabet let alone basic phrases, and actually living in Germany rapidly revealed how mediocre it had been at teaching me German.

I stopped at a 2500 day streak, shortly after one of the big controversial UI changes.

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

#305

Post by rgavuliak »

Terr_ wrote: post #240
joenot443 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of notification-barrage is a common problem in mobile apps with multiple teams and I really wish it wasn’t. I still use Facebook quite a bit and I’m consistently frustrated by how degenerate the concept of a “notification” has become. Some of the finest engineers I know work at Meta, I know it’s not a technical problem, I think it’s an organizational problem. For example… Team A ships feature X and sets the…

> 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.

For the team that worked on a feature for month it's the whole world at the time of release. Being mindful that is not the end-users whole world, but just a tiny insignificant fraction is something easily lost in denial.

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

#306

Post by RemainsOfTheDay »

zzzeek wrote: post #149
zahllos wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is an odd take. I live in Switzerland, which has 4 national languages (Swiss German is spoken in dialect form that varies between towns, while Romansh has well-defined idioms with distinct spelling, although the 5 or so idioms are mutually intelligible). I speak French, passable German and one of the Romanshes, and I'm a native of none of them. Between French and Romansh I can more or less read Itali…

So I think people who grew up in Europe surrounded by many languages have a huge language learning advantage over mono-lingual Americans. Also exercises like "get a pen and paper and learn vocab by repeatedly writing it down" this is exactly what language applications have you do, just minus the pen and paper. (I'm not a young person so I have deep familiarity with pens and paper)

I don't think that Europeans have language advantages over Americans. America is way more multinational than Europe, by design. There are few European countries with multiple official languages; most only have one, like the US.

It's just that most Europeans' native language is not English or some other language spoken by hundreds of millions or billions of people. So they have to learn at least one foreign language to function in the modern world. And many European countries require children to learn two of them. Some require passing language exams as part of the high school graduation.

I studied English and French in school. My native tongue is spoken by about 15 million people in the world, the official language of my native country (which I also speak fluently) is spoken by about 20. One gets a lot of motivation from knowing that, by learning English, one will be able to speak to billions.

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

#307

Post by Barrin92 »

djeastm wrote: post #224

I learned a foreign language as an adult, but the way I did it was by being an Army linguist who spent a year and a half in full-time training with native speakers, plus multiple re-trainings for the next five years. I have no idea how people are learning a language using an app for a few minutes a day.

> I have no idea how people are learning a language using an app for a few minutes a day

They don't but this is also not the point and seems to account for the frustrations expressed in the conversation. Before I decided to get serious about learning Japanese I spent a few months on Duolingo. It taught me hiragana, katakana, a few kanji, maybe 1k words but obviously I couldn't really speak Japanese. But I also didn't expect to, I looked at it as "it's better than wasting another 10 minutes on twitter". And for that it worked perfectly well, honestly better than I thought.

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

#308

Post by xrtatee »

qgin wrote: post #136
whyowhy3484939 wrote: post #68

Ah, Duolingo. What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. All this tech and I wonder how many people are now fluent in multiple languages compared to say a few decades ago. This is not academic. All signs are saying we are heading in the wrong direction[1] and more tech ain't going to solve shit. Literacy rates and numerical abilities are going down the drain faster than you can say "Cl…

Duolingo is for getting to an A2 level. It’s hard for most people to get much value from trying to read a book or talk with someone unless they’re at least at A2 level

[flagged]

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

#309

Post by nickfromseattle »

My conversations with non-tech friends and family indicates non-tech people don't like AI because of the perception that it will negatively impact their jobs / career, and ability to pay bills. This makes sense to me. 54% of Americans have below a 6th grade reading level, these folks will not be orchestrating AI agents, they will be replaced by AI agents.

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

#310

Post by zahllos »

RemainsOfTheDay wrote: post #306
zzzeek wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I think people who grew up in Europe surrounded by many languages have a huge language learning advantage over mono-lingual Americans. Also exercises like "get a pen and paper and learn vocab by repeatedly writing it down" this is exactly what language applications have you do, just minus the pen and paper. (I'm not a young person so I have deep familiarity with pens and paper)

I don't think that Europeans have language advantages over Americans. America is way more multinational than Europe, by design. There are few European countries with multiple official languages; most only have one, like the US. It's just that most Europeans' native language is not English or some other language spoken by hundreds of millions or billions of people. So they have to learn at least one foreign language t…

I agree with this to some extent. I am from the UK, which is pretty monolingual and with the same advantage as the US: we're native English speakers. So I think we do have a slight advantage, or put another way the incentive to learn another language isn't always there.

I think, based on my own experience, it is harder to to from English to another language for a variety of factors. Many native speakers will jump on the opportunity to practice with you, understandably. Everyone has different motivations and some will ask why are you even bothering if you speak English. Since there's almost always an English source for what you want, you have to avoid laziness as much as you can. Lastly a great majority of entertainment is in English - things like french rap are basically a crime against humanity.

That doesn't mean that every European you meet is automatically multilingual or automatically has English in one of their languages. Go to rural France and you will find plenty of monolingual french people. Italy is also somewhere English is not as widely spoken as you might think given the tourism (in fact outside major tourist areas, good luck). Go to the mountains in Switzerland and you might find people who speak a couple of national languages but no English.

You can however go "the other way" and for major languages there is an abundance of materials. I agree 100% with the sibling comment that there is something about the act of writing things out that helps with memorisation. I've done this with a few languages and I don't think flashcard apps are enough. Can they help? I guess a little. Are they going to make you fluent? Not a chance. Absolutely nothing beats taking a course and being dedicated to it, in my experience.

More generally I think what I am saying is that there is no magic shortcut, except being born to parents speaking multiple languages at you.

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