Lingodeer is pretty great. It has a similar free/premium model to Duo, but unlike Duo there is an option to buy premium perpetually rather than as a subscription (and it is on sale currently)
Grabbed a year on the Black Friday sale and, holy shit, it's so much better. Actual explanations and lessons is way better than the pointless gamification/leaderboards.
I guess because it’s the start of a long and slow process, that holds the context of it not being as shit before. Whereas without the prefix it suggests a more sudden, decisive and completed act.
The quality of duolingo has gone down massively in the past few years as they have done lay-offs, they don’t even have anyone checking the feedback coming from users any-more.
the courses themselves are worse too, designed more to stretch out app usage rather than teach more. I used to recommend duolingo as a good starter on learning a language, but it’s just so bad now that I won’t. And it seems to be a direct result of layoffs.
Duolingo is a steaming pile compared to what it used to be. The nags to pay went up and the quality went down. Their new learning path completely ruined the process for me.
Is there any better app you can recommend? I started with babbel in the beginning but after finishing the basic courses it got so dry and boring to use, that i swapped to Duo. Also because a few friends use it.
I strongly recommend [Language Transfer ](language transfer.org). The best language course I have ever done, and I have done many (I speak five languages, at varying levels of fluency).
They have an app, that is simple, streamlined, and very functional.
The app also has also an Introduction to Music Theory course which people say is very, very good.
I’ve been using LingoDeer for the past few days since hearing this news, and so far it’s not too bad. The social features are severely lacking compared to Duolingo (my friend group goes hard on the friends quests lol) but they have a lot more grammar explanation and whatnot available that duolingo doesn’t. Plus, LingoDeer seems much less focused on learning for tourism, and more for actual learning.
Note this is all for the Japanese course, no idea how their other courses are.
It has become very apparent, even in popular languages. Going to give y’all three examples here:
Spanish for English speakers assumes you’re learning North American Spanish, and marks a ton of things as mistakes as a result. On top of that, some of the things it teaches you are just not very correct in general. Yes, people will obviously understand you, but it’s the same as Google Translate saying something without understanding the nuances of what is going on
Russian for English speakers. This one was hilarious. I speak it at native level, and decided to do the placement test as a gag. I did not pass it. Half of the exercises were straight up garbage.
Japanese for English speakers teaches you practically nothing. It’s repetition and memorization of the same phrases, without any actual learning involved.
You are way better off using apps like Busuu. You get speaking practice, feedback from the system and other people, and it goes into an okay amount of detail for grammar and vocabulary, for the upcoming exercises. It’s not perfect, but it’s better. For Japanese specifically, just avoid these to begin with. It’s not a good time. Download yourself Renshuu for writing practice, and a copy of Genki for everything else
They’ve gone to complete shit since they’ve become a publicly traded company. Trash updates, removing the forum and comments/discussions on questions.
Money is priority over education when it’s tradable on the stock market.
Fuck them, I hope someone creates an AI based language learning app and Duolingo goes out of business. lol at their $215 stock price. It’ll be 1/20 of that in 3 years.
To be fair, it has been a long time of the decline and increased monetization.
I remember using it at a time where gems had only cosmetic use or you could freeze your streak.
I did not use it for a couple years and came back to gems being used for a whole lot more, a few free exercises and then it cost gems. Getting the final, I think gold, level of each exercise cost like 100 gems a try, no mistakes allowed.
The only reason I still kept using it was that in the early years I amassed 10000+ gems, so I was slowly using those up. Once that was over I stopped, unusable without paying and even then it does not provide more than vocabulary practise.
Whoever owns all these companies that are so keen on replacing everything with AI better invest in defense robots because people are going to have a lot of time on their hand and very little money.
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