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LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

librelingo.app

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Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#371

Post by bmacho »

tylersmith wrote: post #278
salimmadjd wrote: post #228

Duolingo user here with a 4 year streak. Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill. Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga). If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games. I think you can lear…

The gamification is what made it work for me. I had 2 months to learn some Turkish before a trip and once I realized it was a game I beat everyone else in my cohort every day. When someone would come up on my heels I'd make sure to spend 30-60 extra minutes that day. I still know Turkish better than any other language and I've been immersed in Spanish for 3 years.

Competition or rivalry is probably the single best motivating factor.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#372

Post by mbs159 »

krick wrote: post #254
_fat_santa wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say Duolingo has some of the best corporate humor I've seen.

Some of the most annoying, that's for sure. I uninstalled it when it started to uglify the icon on my desktop when I neglect daily exercise. I mean, it's totally fine if it's just me, but since it was an impulsive action on my part, I would be curious to see if I wasn't one of the many. I wouldn't be fond of my company's PR department if they lose customers over stupid jokes. That said, after spending too much time o…

> I uninstalled it when it started to uglify the icon on my desktop when I neglect daily exercise

That's actually hilarious

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#373

Post by pabs3 »

thedumbname wrote: post #143
unbleaveable wrote: post #133

Having trouble understanding why you thought it was acceptable to steal their business name, and concept, and software application design. Would you call a competing word processor "Libre Word"? Is it acceptable to just copy their everything if you just add the word libre?

A lot of FOSS projects were sued for these things, see GAIM/Pidgin, etc. Newcomers should understand that is a copyright violation.

Trademark, not copyright.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#374

Post by int_19h »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #255
salimmadjd wrote: post #228

Duolingo user here with a 4 year streak. Duolingo is not a language teaching platform at its core. It’s a gaming platform with language as its gaming skill. Duolingo at some point became so focused on gamification that it just became a game (I believe they hired their lead PM from Zynga). If you’re on free version, just look at the ads you’re getting. Vast majority of the ads are for other games. I think you can lear…

Have a friend, who is on his 7th or 8th year of every day using DuoLingo (DL) "learning" German. His German is still terrible. Phrase structure goes all overboard, verbs are not adapted to time, person and whatever else. It is a bit painful to see. People also say that some languages just have terrible lessons on DL. Maybe German is one of those. I tried using it for Chinese/Mandarin, but apparently classified myself…

I know several people who're trying to learn various languages via Duolingo for several years now, and not a single one has anything to boast about.

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#375

Post by Alex-Programs »

endofreach wrote: post #362
Alex-Programs wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for letting me know. The front page items are translated with DeepL, which is used for text that's currently visible. My benchmark claims that it's actually pretty good at French (I haven't got data for Danish) - one of the reasons I'm currently remaking it! I hadn't heard of Kagi Translate; I'll add it to the benchmarking I do. And I'll see about adding Furigana there.

What's your benchmark? How many paid subscribers do you have that actually use it while browsing? And why do you think did duolingos competitor "toucan" not take off? How does nuenki do the job better? Seriously interested and happy to read more insights. Disclaimer: i did create an MVP of this exactly. But it was just to try and generate some cash quickly to finance my main project (dumb idea, of course). I did get…

My benchmark is at https://nuenki.app/blog . I'm currently working on a better one.

Toucan did take off; it's fairly well known, and if their website is anything to go by they have hundreds of thousands of people using it.

It translates on a per-word basis, which means that the translations are often simply wrong due to a lack of context. Nuenki doesn't translate single word "sentences" by default, despite me spending a few days trying to improve the quality, because there just isn't enough context to go off of.

They try to mitigate that by only translating certain words, mostly nouns, which limits how much you can learn from it.

They also only have three difficulty levels, while Nuenki assigns a numerical score to each sentence's difficulty and has much finer grained control.

The flip side of that is that it's free, while Nuenki needs to pay for the cost of translation.

I've got ~20 paid subscribers. People on HN seem to love it, and most of my users are from here, while capital-L language learners are hard to market to. There's a lot of AI slop in language learning, and I'm really not good at marketing!

Re: LibreLingo – FOSS Alternative to Duolingo

#376

Post by darkstar_16 »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #13
darkstar_16 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who are these people who have 30 minutes in the morning to make a smoothie and learn a foreign language ... :D

The people who prioritize learning a foreign language over some of the things that you prioritize.

You must be fun at parties :)
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