Neat. Here’s how you can delete your account: https://www.duolingo.com/help/delete-my-account-and-data
Perfect. Thank you.
Just in time for spring cleaning. Thanks.
Yay thanks
Can I delete my account if I never made an account in the first pace?
I’m wondering which of these 2 options is true for the chief techbro who came up with this:
- They are genuinely clueless, and have never used ChatGPT for more than 5 minutes
- They know the limitations of LLMs well, but they want to ride the AI hype to inflate their company value (and maybe cut some costs by downsizing)
They believe in infinite growth. They think LLMs are going to get reliable fast. LLMs have probably played a direct role in convincing them of that
Yep they’re paying lip service to the employees but this message is 100% to potential investors looking to bet on the AI wave.
it being an email from their CEO is basically all the evidence needed, CEOs don’t say anything that isn’t somehow meant to increase profits.
I was gonna say language learning is actually one of the few AI might be useful for, but they’re not talking about making their users learn with a little AI translator having a random conversation with them; they’re replacing their workforce with AI.
Fuck. I was considering using Duo once I finish school to give myself some more options to flee the US as we dive deeper into nazism. Any good alternatives?
Language Transfer, lingodeer
The problem with current AI text generation is that it can be wrong, which is bad if you are trusting it with giving correct information to learn
Deepl, even though its made for translating, it is often wrong
Anki is great for flashcards with lots of community generated decks for free download:
I know I’m going to sound like a stock Marxist from the 1930s, but: AI is a means of production and therefore should be collectivized.
the devs appropriated the models from the masses.
They already have AI driven conversations if you pay.
Which is about the extent AI could benefit a service like Duolingo. Gutting their workforce isn’t going to make it any better.
As someone learning Japanese
There’s no fucking way AI would be able to assist in learning a second language
Any good alternatives?
Join a class. These apps are a waste of time.
Find a personal tutor social media. Pay them money. It’s easier than it ever has been
i mean the way humans are made to learn languages is just simple immersion, consume media in the target language and your brain will figure it out.
the one thing to keep in mind is that you don’t want subtitles, because then you won’t actually be paying attention to the target language. If you can stomach it then children’s media is great because it’s specifically made to be simple and teach children the language.
Language Transfer on SoundCloud or Busuu if you want more of an app / exercises experience.
What language are you trying to learn?
For the first time ever, teaching as well as the best human tutors is within our reach.
No it fucking isn’t. The video calls are awful and don’t do anything to help you learn why what you said is wrong. Lilly just acts confused and ignores what you said. And in their normal explanations it just assumes why you didn’t know something, gives an answer for what it guessed, and doesn’t do anything else. The old explanations were much better than the new garbage they offer.
That’s pretty on point for the kind of stereotypical girl lily is supposed to be.
Opened the comments because I got stuck at this line for a bit. When I got to this part my brain added in commas and it took me a little because even though “teaching, as well as the best human tutors, is within our reach” doesn’t really make sense, it still seems less nonsensical than without the commas.
Humans-last
AI could make Duolingo better because it doesn’t teach a language in its current state. It could explain to the user why their answer is wrong and offer exercises. But instead of doing that, they simply replace employees to save money? What a garbage company. It’s a shame their app is so popular. It gives people nothing but a false sense of learning.
It could explain to the user why their answer is wrong
FWIW that feature has existed in the premium version for about a year or so
I abandoned Duolingo 6 months ago. If that’s true, they failed to advertise that to me. In any case, with modern llms you don’t need Duolingo for that. You can ask them. You can copy-paste any article on a subject that interests you, and ask an llm to simplify it to your A1-A2 level. You can ask it to generate exercises, to explain things. Flashcards? Please, Anki is free.
When I got rid of Duo, it had removed the crowd sourced explanations and only had the super-premium support in select countries, so even if I wanted to subscribe to it, as a non-American, I couldn’t.
Mind you, I didn’t want the AI-based version because yeah. I could use Anki + ChatGPT for free.
I haven’t used the app for a while, but I still have it installed. The delete account button doesn’t work, and neither does the feedback button. Cool.
Try a VPN to any EU country. I find that platforms can get really cooperative really fast when you wanna delete your account and they think GDPR applies
Unless you’re already in the EU in which case you could try “Mine” (saymine.com) although it’s been a minute and the AI stuff on their site does by fill me.with confidence
Them: this is not about replacing employees with AI
they then proceed to explain how they will give new work to AI first instead of hiring people
Thankfully this shit service has never seen a cent from me (and I know 2 languages), and I’ll definitely keep it this way…
It was a good app ten years ago when you could use it as much as you wanted for a few short ads. Now its an ad-ridden mtxfest.
that’s the really depressing part, they took something that could have kind of revolutionized the world (imagine everyone having easy access to learning the major languages), and just snapped its neck like a defenseless kitten
Ever since their content is being created or at least sub crrated by AI the quality has gone down noticeable, ive seen so many incorrect sentences which is shit when trying to learn a language. And if i, as a beginner learner can figure out wrong sentences what the actual fuck is ai doing?
Glad I finished my first Dutch unit just to get the basics and am deleting the app today. It feels like a real condemnation of the state of modern AI that I don’t trust a large language model with languages.
I was using Khan Academy when they went to AI. Suddenly my answers were being marked as incorrect, even though they matched the “correct” answer presented. Or they were marked incorrect becuase I used pi, when it said I could answer in terms of pi.
I’m expecting the same to happen here.
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Honestly I was thinking of removing duo before this. It’s just glorified flash cards making you memorize words associations instead of getting into how thimgs work. I still haven’t gotten the rules of how verb conjugation works in Italian. Just gonna read the books I got.
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You’re a bad description of it. >:E
This email makes no sense.
Let me paraphrase them:
We bet on mobile and won big. AI is great. AI tutors are a thing.
Therefore we’ll get AI to understand our codebase and get it to fo stuff people did before
This isn’t “betting on” AI. This is outsourcing to AI.
You can be an AI company (theoretically) - have people make AI models that are then deployed. Note the lack of recursively, made-by-AI-for-AI products and services.
Tbh, Duolingo was always a gimmick. It doesn’t teach you a language. It teaches you small snippets of 5-10 words each with little to no grammar. It’s repetitive and boring. It was that way before the lives they said they’d never add.
They lost me as a user when they rolled out lives.
Now, I hope they lose someone else.
Duolingo has potential. But learning a language always required a large time investmant, and it always will.
I assume its lessons will only get worse than they already are.
I’m working on Spanish now with it and I have to admit it’s significantly improved from the last time I used it a few years back. Fewer nonsense sentences to translate like “My bear loves your house”, which was frustrating and felt so useless. There’s way more listening and speaking modules, they are generally decent at speech to text, and the language pronunciation sounds more realistic with multiple very different voices.
However, I never know why I got a question wrong, and can’t do anything to rectify that other than report that the AI made a mistake, which helps with their model training, but does absolutely squat for my learning. Even the more gamified exercises are just fancy tests, where you are expected to ‘learn’ by getting things wrong, seeing the correct answer and regurgitating it. The community forums and explanations are gone, and each module has maybe one or two example sentences that typically don’t even cover the full range of content in the module.
My husband and I have a family plan, and he is a much more dedicated user than me, but I would never pay for duolingo on my own.
I left after seeing a lot of useful community suggestions completely ignored for a long time. A few months later they finally closed the community making clear they won’t hear anyone. I won’t bother trying to get anything from them.
I have found that Language Transfer is a far superior way to learn languages (including Spanish), and it’s free (although I make a monthly donation)!
It is available as YouTube videos, SoundCloud MP3s, or on a very simple but effective app.
https://www.languagetransfer.org/
I think you mean this, your link is broken. I love them too and recommend them all the time (it’s mostly a one guy effort actually, it’s super impressive).
Thanks, I fixed it.
And yes, I agree that he is amazing. One guy teaching courses in Spanish, Italian, Greek, Arabic, French, German, Turkish, and Swahili!
Just calling it out: The nonsense/goofy sentences were used because it was found by studies to be more effective for learning/recall.
That wasn’t a flaw, just a poorly/not at all broadcasted feature.
If I could make a recommendation for Spanish specifically that helped me - I’ll paste a comment I made a few months ago
I highly recommend checking out Dreaming Spanish - it’s a channel/site that teaches Spanish through a method called comprehensible input. Basically, all you do is watch, listen, and read in Spanish totally in Spanish, no translations whatsoever. That sounds intimidating, but the beginner stages they really talk at you like you’re a baby almost. They talk with their hands a lot and use drawings. That’s the most important part, because in the beginning you won’t be able to understand any Spanish or hardly any. But by making it so simple you can basically understand even though you don’t know the words. After a hundred or so hours of this, you can move on to slightly less easy content. And so on and so on until you can understand just regular media in spanish. At that point, your learning will really take off, because you can watch things that you’re actually interested in and that will capture your attention more.
They don’t do any explicit grammar or vocabulary practice. That’s on purpose, the arguments of comprehensible input is that language isn’t learned, it’s acquired. You didn’t learn English by rote memorization, you listened a lot. If you can hear a few words and make the connection to the meaning by watching, and then you hear that word dozens or hundreds of times more - you will have a better understanding of that word than a simple translation flashcard could ever give you. Because words don’t have just one meeting they’re complex and change in different situations. But the best part is through this method you won’t even realize that you’re learning these words. Same goes with grammar, with this method things just kind of sound right. You can use the correct grammar, but you might not necessarily be able to explain why. Just like native speakers.
I’ve personally listened, or watched over a thousand hours of things in Spanish in a bit over a year. And at this point most media is almost as easy to watch as English for me. I also read the full Harry Potter series in Spanish. (It was rough at first, but after I got used to the writing style a lot of the times I’d forget it was in Spanish in the more exciting sections) I need to practice speaking more, I can definitely do it and be understood but it lacks pretty significantly behind my understanding but that is really just a question of how much practice I can get. But once you’ve banked 1k, 1.5k hours the rate at which your speaking will improve is way faster than the process of learning so far.
Check out this this playlist of videos that really explains things in more depth. It has English subtitles you’ll have to turn on. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlpPf-YgbU7GrtxQ9yde-J2tfxJDvReNf
They have a ton of free content, and if you want more you can pay just $8 a month - but honestly if you do a few hours a day after a couple months you’ll be able to just watch some YouTube videos of native speakers and you won’t really need dreaming Spanish anymore. But the site does have a handy hour tracker that you don’t need to pay for at all that I still use to this day.
I’ve tried to learn French, german, and even Spanish before but until this try when I discovered this method, I didn’t really get anywhere. At this point I’m almost comfortable saying that I’m bilingual. And it really doesn’t take that much effort just make it a routine, and once you can get into more advanced and interesting videos just watch things that you’re interested in. When you really get good, you can just watch the TV shows and movies that you already like to watch, but put on the Spanish dub. It’s that easy. I’m not doing anything differently now than I was before I knew Spanish but I’m learning every day because I just do the things I normally did but in spanish!
You can start their Super Beginner (most basic level) here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlpPf-YgbU7GbOHc3siOGQ5KmVSngZucl
But I’d recommend doing it on https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ where it will automatically track your watch time, let you filter by person/accent/level/topic, etc.
The beginning is by far the hardest part. The least interesting videos, the least level of comprehension. It will feel like a chore. Luckily the beginning is where you have the most motivation to push through it.
I am not learning Spanish at the moment but I learn more with this kind of approach. And I will definitiveley bookmark this.
I bought the book Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata: Familia Romana which teaches latin in latin with the additional help of pictures. It is awesome.
Does anyone know similar books for other languages? At the moment I learn Romanian, but I would love to have something similar for Polish, too.
Ditto on Dreaming Spanish. It’s fantastic. I’m trying to pull together a program of it and keep duolingo in while we have a subscription, but I’m hoping to switch to a service with personal conversation training or something once we finish the year.
I would also recommend Butterfly Spanish (also on YT), if you want some variety.
Another one I’m hoping to use more is Yabla. Its a site that hosts tv shows, movies, documentaries, songs in different languages and turns them into lessons and you can speed up, slow down and watch with or without english or Spanish subtitles. You can also select media from different countries so you can start learning accents and dialects.
Thanks for the heads up. Deleted my account and unistalled their app.
