- Following backlash to statements that Duolingo will be AI-first, threatening jobs in the process, CEO Luis von Ahn has tried to walk back his statement.
- Unfortunately, the CEO doesn’t walk back any of the key points he originally outlined, choosing instead to try, and fail to placate the maddening crowd.
- Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in the firm’s users.
I mean, it is too late. Canceled my sub, won’t be coming back.
Same. Deleted the app this weekend and let my 918 day streak evaporate.
I’m actually kind of surprised at how little it affected me, to be honest. I had a little bit pre-regret about losing the streak before deleting the app, but now a couple days later that feeling certainly doesn’t exist. AND there’s that benefit of no stupid owl guilt tripping you every day.
Check out “Language Drops” and “Rosetta Stone” if you’re looking for replacements. They both have very different approaches to language learning (both from each other and from Duolingo), but their content is at the very least much better curated than Duolingo’s.
I haven’t gone out of my way to check but AFAIK neither of them is jumping on the AI-before-anything-else train.
My recommendation is Language Transfer, a freely-available system for multiple languages that, in my opinion, helps you to think in another language better than any other system I have tried.
It has only 10 languages :(
Many libraries also give out subscriptions.to Mango. That is usually a paid app and much better than doulingo
Drops had an ai feature where it would show you a “fact” at the end of each session, which was often completely wrong etymology.
Thanks for the recommendations!
I have actually switched over to Mango Languages because my library gives free access to it.
But if I don’t end up liking that I’ll give these a shot.
Any recommendations for japanese?
I think both of them have Japanese (I remember seeing Rosetta Stone being praised for its Japanese content 20 years ago and I hope it would only have improved since), but I haven’t gone very far in the language in either app.
Would you recommend one over the other and if so why?
As a complete beginner, Drops is pretty good for learning random words and increasing vocabulary. As you advance through it you start seeing sentences too, but it doesn’t teach you how to make your own sentences, only to memorize the ones they pre-created.
Rosetta Stone doesn’t translate anything. All of the content is in the language you want to learn and it tries to introduce you to things in a natural way. For example it shows a picture of someone biting an apple and says “the man eats an apple”, then later shows other pictures related to one or multiple men, fruits and verbs, so you can get used to the differences between things just by observing those.
I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?
Sometimes the icons annoy me too and I wish the app had an option to always show the icon’s label, but at least you can tap on the icon to see the label.
I canceled my sub, but sadly not out of principle on the AI thing. I just accidentally hit the button that accepts an upgrade to the family plan and it didn’t look like there was an easy way to undo it so I just killed the whole subscription.