For traveling, I like to be able to order off the menu in the native language. I got sick of #Duolingo's gamification and tried #Pimsleur for French. That's what I'd use if I were spending significant time there: Pimsleur is hard but no nonsense. I'm now on #Babbel but it's even easier than Duolingo and doesn't feel like I'm advancing at all. I might go back to Duolingo and submit to the gamification. Thoughts?
Learning the important things from #Babbel, namely swearing. 🤬
The little warnings about the strength of expletives is cute, especially from an Irish perspective. 😂
From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.
There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.
All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.
Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.
@alexhaydock@fullfathomfive I've found #Babbel really good for both Spanish (beginner - advanced) & German (beginner). But it is expensive so definitely keep an eye out for half-price deals. They pop up every once in a while on their website. Also if you're likely to use it long-term for multiple languages, they have a lifetime sub which is good value when their half-price sales happen.
Ich kenne den von Autor beschriebenen Effekt bei #duolingo: Lieber noch ein paar Punkte schürfen, indem man zum tausendsten mal die gleichen Sätze in der Sprachübung wiederholt, als neue Lektionen lernen. Man will ja nicht aus der Diamant-Liga absteigen!
Bin mit Duolingo trotzdem erfolgreicher bei der Stange geblieben als mit #babbel.
Life:
School: English grades 5-13, French grades 7-10, Russian club grades 9-10, Spanish with tapes and a book around grade 9-10, Italian grades 11-13, Chinese while I was in the US for a year, then as evening class.
Uni: Turkish 1, Russian 1 during break, Russian 2, Arabic 1-5, Turkish 2, Dutch 1-2, German Sign Language 1-2.
Work: Spanish 1-5, Portuguese Duolingo, Chinese 2-3, some Hebrew, Danish, Ukrainian