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

Post by ACCount36 » Tue, May 27, 2025, 2:41 PM UTC

Archonical wrote: post #279

ACCount36 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by sandinmyjoints » Tue, May 27, 2025, 5:20 PM UTC

Zmajche wrote: post #237

sandinmyjoints wrote: post #53

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Curious if you have tried (or heard of) spanishdictionary.com? I work on it, and our users seem to like it and find it effective. The name is a bit misleading—started out as a dictionary but now has a full curriculum up through a couple years of college Spanish. We don’t really do any paid marketing (or any other kind for that matter) so I’m always curious about whether people have heard of it.

Someone mentioned on r/DuoLingo so I installed in order to try it. My biggest problem with it was the UI and lack of options to configure it. I would really like options to make fonts and buttons bigger. Altough I changed phone font size in order to use app, small height of buttons on the bottom are really getting on my nerves.

Post by kemiller » Tue, May 27, 2025, 8:10 PM UTC

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…

Post by whyowhy3484939 » Tue, May 27, 2025, 8:20 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #212

whyowhy3484939 wrote: post #139

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That's bad news for the millions that had to do just that and learned fine in fact better. I'm not saying you should read the Upanishads in the original, I'm saying a proper intro textbook is fine and some teacher-figure ("human") to actually use your body and read theirs. Heck, Latin even has a Latin-only method: LLPSI. "Roma in Italia est", you'll figure it out quickly enough.

As someone who had to learn languages from textbooks back when it was the only thing that existed, it was massively ineffective way of learning. The typical outcome was a person who spent a lot of effort and still was unable to do anything useful with the language after years (reading real book, watching movie, chatting).

Post by nchmy » Wed, May 28, 2025, 2:38 AM UTC

whyowhy3484939 wrote: post #316

nchmy wrote: post #228

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False. Could I ask ChatGPT to just "teach me spanish"? Surely not. But if you've got even a slight idea of what to do (learn present tense and vocab, then progressive, future and past, then some conditional, hypothetical etc...), it can be an absolutely incredible tutor. I started using it when i was already at a pretty high level, but I'm quite certain that it would have been excellent from the very beginning. It tr…

False. Those are all things books will give and people as well and often better. Can it be a tutor? Sure, if you squint. But "tutoring" you on some question you have is not the same as "learning a language".