I read through the article, and while I don’t use Duolingo, I’m not sure if the tulip analogy works one to one with your depression of Duolingo.
The point of the tulip crash was that there was perceived value that was completely detached from the actual value. The most common modern reference points that people point to are the meme stocks (GME and the like) and NFTs/crypto. People were buying, selling, and trading on hype.
The corporate pressure to wring money out of the users is just the “duty to shareholders” that every corporation pushes all year round. Rent seeking is frustrating, but it’s nothing unique to Duolingo. Choosing to deprecate a section of their code, even if The Tree has benefits, is likely a long-term cost-saving measure. It’s quite possible that they looked at a graph and said “We can continue to sink man-hours into maintaining the tree and adding to it when new lessons come along, or we can utilize those resources elsewhere in a way that has a more perceivable effect.” It sucks, but as a business they need to look at averages and totals alongside their associated costs. If the choice was between maintaining The Tree but requiring some layoffs of their staff, and dropping The Tree and keeping staff, I think dropping The Tree is better for the company. And the other alternative would be to rake in less profit, which just won’t be done.
I remember trying duolingo and it sucked it was so artficial and felt like all translations and pronounciations where done by AI even i knew some of the things where wrong.
This is a nice post but I would also like to see a comprehensive list of languages available on each suggested platform. They did that for some of them.
In my experience Duolingo is still pretty fantastic, as long as you unlock premium with the ReVanced patcher (the app is basically unusable otherwise). There really isn’t another option anywhere close to Duolingo’s effectiveness for the major languages on the platform.
I think you should check out Language Transfer . Not as many languages as DuoLingo, and some of them are only introductory courses, but completely free and – more important – far, far better. I’m a native English speaker, and I have learned French, German, Sesotho, and Japanese, but LT’s Spanish program was the most effective I’ve ever done.
One of the languages they list is Ingles. I’ve never heard of it and every search just returns results as if I had typed “English” or was looking for a store of that name.
I’m monolingual English, but it looks somehow related to Spanish.
It’s a course in basic English for Spanish speakers. The same system, but allowing Spanish speakers to use the knowledge they already have to communicate in English.
Could not agree more with this. Duolingo is not “fantastic” ever. If you actually want to learn and use a language Duolingo actively works against that goal by teaching you useless vocab, not explaining anything and in some cases teaching you things that are just flatout wrong.
Duolingo is only great if you want to pretend you are learning a language. Yes I am salty because I wasted a year and a half of doing their shit daily before I realised that it was not helping me in the slightest and has actually made things harder for me in the long run as I now have to unlearn some of the trash it has taught me.
Conversely listening to language transfer was like an aha moment. It actually helps teach you the language in a useful, usable way and doesn’t just try and get you memorise bullshit phrases and random vocab.
I use a cracked DuoLingo but I don’t think I would ever call it fantastic. Even without their paywall restrictions it’s still quite annoying with how the lessons are laid out. I’ll be practicing a certain lesson, getting perfect scores, and go try to ‘Legendary’ that lesson, then start seeing words I hadn’t seen in that lesson and sometimes ever. I’ve been using it mildly for several years now and have watched the quality drop tremendously.
With that said, I still think it is one of the easiest ways to immediately jump into a new language because it’s everywhere.
Also, I submit reports every time I get a sentence about feeding ducks bread because they really love to say that, and people really should not be doing that.
Oh yeah the new progression system is horrible. I liked the less linear one before way better. I could work on several lessons at the same time and level them up. I would usually get 1-4 and then level the up all by 1 level and continie cycling through them until they were all at max. Now with the new system I have barely progressed at all because the app itself dictates which lesson I can do and which I cannot. So I mainly do speaking practice with a cracked app. The problem you described with legendary just happened to me yesterday with a regular 3 exercise lesson. I did 2 of them and then the next day I did the last one to finish it and half the exercises used words that were either not in the previous 2 lessons or ones I don’t even remember learning. I also remember they reordered some stuff when they changed the progression system and suddenly some things I already did were locked as if I had not learned that yet and some the other way around so I struggled a bit when I had to know words I had not yet learned. There really are a myriad of problems with duolingo. I sadly will stick to it because I have not found a better alternative for learning Norwegian.
Duolingo is valued at over a billion dollars by investors. The path is bad for some disabled people, and the reason they can’t maintain both systems simultaneously is that their code is poorly architectured and they can’t afford to fix it because of investor pressure. Their venture capital business model isn’t sustainable. medium.com/…/duolingo-is-a-dutch-tulip-that-hates…
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