- 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.
Where is the discussion for replacing CEOs with AI? Seems like predicting market trends based off of historical data and managing corporate resources would be just the sort of thing that AI would be good at. Plus it would cost way less and not require massive bonuses nor ownership of the company.
Well, the crux of the problem is that AI is trying to approximate intelligence. That’s not useful for a CEO.
boom
Tl;Dr: skip the apps unless they’re part of a bigger in-person course. Prefer reputable sources like pimsleur and mango languages. If you have no rush, get graded readers and watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, etc.
Ok, so here are my two cents on learning languages and the whole category of learning apps. They are all flawed on some major way or another. But mostly it is about pacing learning progress.
Teaching absolute beginners is easy. They know nothing, thus anything you show them will be progress. The actual difficulty when learning a language is finding appropriate material for your level of understanding, such that you understand most of it, but still find new things to learn. This is known as comprehensible input. The difficulty of most apps is that they are not capable of detecting then adapting study content accordingly to the student’s progress. So they typically go way too slow, or sometimes too fast. Leaving the student frustrated and halting learning.
Jumping with some nonzero knowledge into any app is also torture. It’s known as the valley of despair. The beginner content is too boring and dull, now that you know a bit, but the intermediate level is way too much of a gap for you yet.
My advice is to skip language learning apps. The “motivation via gamification hypothesis” is flawed and lacks nuance and understanding of behavioral science. People don’t stop studying out of a lack of tokens, gems, streaks or achievement badges. It’s because the content itself is uninteresting and bores them. Sure, the celebration and streaks work at first, but they usually lose effect by something known as reinforcement depreciation. The same stimulus shown too much or too frequently stops being gratifying. The biggest reward for learning a language is actually using it.
A method that is known to work is to find graded readers. Watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, social media, in the target language (avoid the language learning influencers) listen to native influencers speaking about topics you care about. Books work, in-person courses work, learning apps are good to start you up form absolute zero. But most learning happens on what you do in your everyday life. Using the language is the most effective way of becoming good at the language. Everything else is just excuses for using it.
exactly. I also don’t appreciate the app changing the icon to guilt trip me back into their odd choice of/irrelevant vocabulary that I am supposed to learn
You put into words exactly how I’ve felt about language learning apps. Every time I try a game or app that’s supposed to teach you, it feels like I’m starting over, and it never actually becomes fun. I tried Duolingo, but after a while, I found myself just doing super easy lessons to keep my streak going so I wouldn’t have to sit through the boring ones. It felt pretty bad, so I stopped using it when I hit 800 days.
My friend didn’t use any apps and instead started by texting and talking with people and managed to learn Korean in just a year, well enough for casual, everyday conversations or hobby-related stuff. Meanwhile, I’ve been using apps and still can’t hold a conversation with anyone…
…or join a reputable language learning academy and go to class in person.
Though I know this is not for everyone. But neither is self-learning online.
I deleted the app the second he said this. Get fucked, AI.
Make sure you also start the account deletion process.
Classic “I’ve made a HUGE mistake” moment from yet another “thought leader” suffering from AI/layoff FOMO. 🙄
Bragging about replacing your employees publicly over and over before actually being able to do so might cause an employee crisis
crazy how fast they ruined the reputation of this company. just a couple months ago, duo mascot and Duolingo streaks were cool and fun. they had a good thing going. but now it’s just another shit tech company again. they lost all the good will in like a month.
crazy how fast they ruined the reputation of this company.
they lost all the good will in like a month.
Twitter enter the chat
I uninstalled yesterday, good riddance Duo.
AI is social cancer
It’s a lie told by marketing companies that have gaslit artists into automating their creativity and gaslit governments into automating fascism
AI is social lung cancer. Behind social media, which is social bone cancer metastasized.
I hear good things about Pimsleur as an alternative.
Interesting.
I have switched to Mango Languages because my library gives free access to it. So I’ve been trying to share that information with people. Or, at least, check your local library to see if they offer something.
That’s great advice. At least for as long as libraries still exist. 😫
It can go either way, some people like the method, others hâte it because it’s not gamified. Pro tip, get pimsleur courses from your library if you want to try them for a real trial rather than what they give you
I used Pimsleur to get started on my L2 way back when. I am now pretty much fluent, after living immersively for a long time. The immersion, and dedication, and tutors, and language school did the heavy lifting. But Pimsleur gets big credit for helping me get started and get confidence.
Last year in February I uninstalled the app on a perfect, 2000-day streak when I got the first whiff of AI; I’m probably never going back
Now say it in Spanish.
People are unfair with this “CEO”. Its statement helped me move on from duolingo, which has seen significant decline in quality while never going beyond “a moderately bad way to start learning”, toward better, more developed, more cared for, cheaper, solutions.
So, thanks for that.
Please do share :)
I’m mainly interested in Japanese, so I’m currently looking at https://www.renshuu.org/ . In addition to just throwing random stuff at you, it gots some more in-depth training, explanations of stuff (something that never happened in duolingo), additional hints for alphabets including some mnemonics, and years of dedicated experience in the language. I can’t tell how it would feel long term, but so far even having some basic explanations is a great improvement.
What I’d wonder is why it’s such massive expensive for Duolingo to hire 2 or 3 people to cover a language anyway. Presumably most of the work is contractual - hire somebody competent to produce a course, get somebody to say the lines, refine the course based on feed back and that’s mostly it.
Terminal MBA brain
I would assume it is more about time than money. It is a big investment making a whole functional system with llm (I have a hard time believing it is actually AI), it will cost a lot if done wrong (just like everything else). You can’t just prompt “make a course in Spanish” and get anything good out of it and you still need ppl who can quality check the output. I could see them use it to mass produce sentences and stories in different levels (not the actual story) and voice recordings, but not actually anything creative and I would assume that is the goal. But we have seen too many shitty products to believe in anything with llm.
I just started using Duolingo to learn Spanish. Can anyone recommend alternatives they have had success with that function the same way?
Use free Anki and get a free 1k or 5k high-frequency community deck from Anki website. Or get Refold 1k deck (paid) for anki.
If you find Anki too complicated and you don’t mind paying a sub (look for discount/vouchers), use lingvist (paid) or memrise (not sure how this app is now after the changes) to learn 1k words. Any app that focuses on high frequency vocab is fine I think.
Cancel subscription once you have learnt 1k words or can read comfortably a simple native book or graded books, or understand a podcast designed for learner (example InnerFrench), probably will take 1-3 months at about 10-30 words a day.
The main difference between 1k and 5k decks is that the 5k decks include very common type of words like “the”, “a”, “he”, “she”, “is”, “are”, which are so high frequency that you will acquire them by just doing anything in the language. Either type of deck is fine, it is up to you.
Try reading graded readers with audio at the same time as you are going through your deck so you are getting more context for new words you learn. You will encounter new words while reading before seeing them in the deck, which has a positive effect in remembering the word. Reading also helps serve to test how much you have improved in using the language.
Read up on some basic high frequency grammar in your target language. Depending on language you will have to also actively learn the alphabet, numbers, phonic and so on before doing any of the above.
The main idea of learning high frequency vocab is to start consuming content as soon as possible. Never forget that using(reading, listening, writing, speaking) the language is the main purpose of learning languages.
If you like gamification and keeping scores, count the books/article read, count the words learnt, count the hours spend listening don’t count coins or gems.
Anki - https://apps.ankiweb.net/
AnkiDroid - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki
Anki shared decks - https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=french
Refold decks - https://refold.la/category/decks/?show=all
Lingvist - https://lingvist.com/
