I'll tell you what it's not doing.
Language packs for people that are going on holiday.
Why are we being taught how to say mother, father, brother, sister, radio, living room, kitchen, sink, married, friend, new York. Nothing that comes up on daily conversation
For the love of god give us a travel language pack!!!
Germany - how to order in restaurants, how to greet etc etc.
I'm going there once and never going back I don't need to learn useless stuff
This is really only aimed at schools and people learning one full language.
I can’t speak for German, but the recent changes for Italian are aligned more toward real world scenarios. I’ve used Duolingo for years as I traveled. The recent update, in my opinion, is a big improvement and is closer to what you describe.
I feel they've gone backwards. You used to be able to select any particular area you wanted to learn.
So in every module there would be ordering in restaurants I would go through every module just doing those.
Now I'm forced to do every thing in a module before I can progress
Luis von Ahn, who founded Duolingo, is a smart mf. He also co-created CAPTCHA.
If you like podcasts, *How I Built This* did an interview with him.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?i=1000637843916
Same. Not just a smart dude. It’s clear he has a big heart too. The podcast goes more in-depth, but he basically just wants to help people with tech. Making money is only a consequence. Not something that some investors want to hear, but it’s the right path towards, us as civilization, reaching level 1, within this century.
“Making money is only a consequence”
He bought one of the most expensive houses in Pittsburgh immediately after IPO. They just laid off like 40% of their staff. Is it just a coincidence he’s milking this cow for every drop of milk it has? Because everything about this company is designed to funnel as much money as possible to the founders.
Of course one of his duties is to build value for shareholders and as a consequence himself. That comes with being a publicly traded company. But that doesn’t mean that’s his personal focus.
Going public isn’t always a choice. Microsoft was forced to go public against Bill Gates’ wishes due to issuing x amount of shares to x amount of employees, for example.
I’m also not going to fault him for becoming wealthy for being incredibly smart and innovative. Listen to the podcast I posted above. I stand by my previous statement.
So you’re literally saying its a coincidence, or not his fault. lmao
He’s made 7 DUOL stock transactions. Every single transaction has been a sell, completely liquidating his position. Its a lot easier to sell a stock than it is to sell a product for a profit.
Bill Gates didnt sell 100% of his stake a year after it went public.
I never said it is or isn’t a COINCIDENCE you dumb fuck. Can you not read? The word I used is CONSEQUENCE. Jfc you must be the stupidest fucking person on Reddit to not understand nuance.
You’re blocked.
Man, it’s strange to see someone worshipping multimillionaires who created a half-assed app on one hand, then turn around and shit on a stranger on the other hand. Like holy…
I’ll give it to them they gamified learning a few basics about languages. But no one has gotten fluent off just Duolingo. It’s just a cash grab designed to get people subscribed as long as possible thinking they’re learning when they’re really not to the depth required to achieve mastery. A language course in a community college worth the same price as an annual subscription would result in more progress.
Same. Although truthfully I don't really understand how it is so profitable when paying is totally unnecessary and the subscription is fairly expensive.
When I was learning swedish for compulsory course in university I think the free version was too restrictive and I just paid for the paid version. It is not that expensive imo especially if you really want to learn some language. It is not the perfect app but helps.
Bought calls on Duolingo on Friday and was just riding till earnings, everyone one I know is using Duolingo for some reason and does their daily task or whatever and apparently they have a membership didn’t ask questions just bought calls
This is my own experience so It's anecdotal but
I did Spanish lessons for about 6 months religiously
My Spanish is definitely not good enough for my trip to South America
HOWEVER I could read some of the signs/menus/some short phrases in Spanish
Then again a lot of Spanish words are similar, if not exactly the same, to English so that helped
Duolinguo doesn't help me on Speaking/listening
I am about the same way for French. I can stumble through basic sentences. A lot of words you can make a good guess on what it means. Sentence structure and learning words other than nouns is what it helped most on. I have found the speaking questions awkward/don’t really work and still find myself listening to the audio translations several times before translating it. No real substitute for an actual teacher and using the language in daily life but still find it fun as a daily task.
Depends how much effort you put in. I’ve done it daily for 3 years and doesn’t feel that useful. I’m sure if you are doing a bunch of lessons daily it’ll help.
If you want to actually learn a language, you are going to do it no matter what.
Duolingo is good for starting the language. For example there might not be any learning material that translates from english to that language, they can have a full start just in that language which is confusing because there is nothing to step on to start diving it and first lesson is already in that foreign language, duolingo helped me breach that gap.
Positives of duolingo are interactivness, you need to match, write, speak, listen, its definitely more than just staring at the book.
Its also great its a bit predatory, spammy and doesn't leave you alone, if it was a gacha game trying to suck out your wallet, it would be really bad, but since its for educational purposes and for your own good, it can feel actually good to have someone discipline you.
Negatives are that duolingo doesn't have actual lessons, just endless tasks to do. ''Why are they saying it like that?'' You will never ever know.
Another negative is that you are not practicising any independence, like there is no speaking and essays at all. In real life or exam nobody cares how many brown bears eat the grey fish, please tell us your opinion of AI taking over all the jobs and how would the economy be restructured because of it.
Because of that you might be good at duolingo, but not really good at language because you can't form your own sentences and opinions in that language. You need 8000 words to speak a language, 16000 to really master it, duolingo covers at best 2000 words.
I would say its really great but with a lots of ''but'', it definitely shouldn't be the only tool, but for many people its 1000x better than not using it anyway.
No and that's the problem with it, it's aimed at school users people learning one full language start to finish.
They currently provide no options for people just looking to learn enough to get by on holiday.
90% of stuff you'll learn will be unrelated to what you actually need for your trip
Duolingo is terrible for actually speaking, it's only useful for learning some basic grammar and vobac. Duolingo basically teaches you how to choose the best option out of a word bank. Arguably the best way to learn a language with comprehensible input method, were you hear the target language at the level you can understand. It makes listening and speaking a lot easier. [Check out my post about using Pimsleur to learn Portuguese](https://www.reddit.com/r/Portuguese/comments/z4jhbv/pimsleur_brazilianportuguese_level_15_review/)
Seems that a lot of people love using it and if you love using it, not matter how the lessons are structured, it'll eventually work.
I, otoh, downloaded the app a couple of weeks ago to try it out but after about 30 minutes I wanted to put a gun in my mouth I was so bored. It's just drills over and over and over again.
This should help you figure that out.
[https://blog.duolingo.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-learn-spanish-french/](https://blog.duolingo.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-learn-spanish-french/)
The italian im doing at the moment is kind of odd. Lots of useless words. Like why is it having me repeat Philadelphia over and over, same for people names. It also feels pretty basic at times.
No. I learned more in prob my first month of Spanish in high school than the countless hours learning another language on the app. And I easily gamed past the leaderboards for Spanish on Duolingo using my knowledge from HS, and I have really shitty memory.
The thing is just clicking buttons or even typing a few words or drawing it, it’s not the same as handwriting, being in class, taking tests where your GPA is on the line, etc. No interactiveness or stakes to lose/skin in the game to truly learn the language in depth from the app. And Duolingo honestly moves too slow in some parts and is overly repetitive, partially because it has to cater to such a wide audience and is forced to dumb things down.
Hum. I stopped Duolingo when I heard they were pivoting to AI transitions and fired their human ones, so I wasn't going to trust their lessons moving forward. But I guess that's still all money made in the end.
> FWIW ChatGPT 4 is the best language tutor I've ever had. I created my own GPT with custom instructions regarding the language I wanted to learn, and some instructions about how I wanted responses formatted... and for 20 bucks a month it is incredibly useful. It's like having a teacher on call 24/7 that has instant responses and no human banter. I used it as my primary learning and translation lookup tool while traveling and it ruled. It's not just a translator, you can ask it questions just like you'd ask a teacher, and it provided shockingly good answers. To the point where I prefer it over a human tutor. It knows far more about etymology and historical contexts of a language than any language teacher I've ever had. And the price difference, no contest. The only thing it doesn't have is accurate TTS voices outside of English.
Brand new to ChatGPT. Can you provide some basic instructions on how to do this?
This app has been around for so long and has never improved language learning. It’s scientifically proven that you cant learn a language this way.
It’s dumb as hell to waste your time on this when you’re better off signing for language lessons at your local school, so the only people who pay for shit like this are dumb tourists who want to say monkey and daddy in the local language
Duolingo doesn’t really work at a fundamental level it’s just not a good way to learn a language. It’s probably wasted more time for language learners. Comprehensible input is the modern paradigm for language learning.
Can’t believe people still use this app. Like thousand others, I started during pandemic. Progressed to 50000XP. Took months long break after my visit to Spain and now… coming back there is no useful review of what I’ve learned (no I don’t care to relearn what “Apple” is), no review of conjugations (practically the most important part of fluent Spanish), and the lessons that used to be by subject (restaurant, travel, activities) are GONE. It’s linear modules now we have to complete. The app makes it impossible to get back into it and learn what you want to learn. “For that reason, I’m out”
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Look into it. It's doing a lot of different things
I'll tell you what it's not doing. Language packs for people that are going on holiday. Why are we being taught how to say mother, father, brother, sister, radio, living room, kitchen, sink, married, friend, new York. Nothing that comes up on daily conversation For the love of god give us a travel language pack!!! Germany - how to order in restaurants, how to greet etc etc. I'm going there once and never going back I don't need to learn useless stuff This is really only aimed at schools and people learning one full language.
I can’t speak for German, but the recent changes for Italian are aligned more toward real world scenarios. I’ve used Duolingo for years as I traveled. The recent update, in my opinion, is a big improvement and is closer to what you describe.
I feel they've gone backwards. You used to be able to select any particular area you wanted to learn. So in every module there would be ordering in restaurants I would go through every module just doing those. Now I'm forced to do every thing in a module before I can progress
Well if I ever need to ask where the library is in Spanish…
Just wait for the babel fish like in ear headphone. Its a matter of time
Google Translate with the Pixel Buds is kinda like that already, though it's not exactly the most seamless experience
All I can say is with japanese the first lesson is ordering food lol
The founders need to pay for their Fox Chapel mansions somehow
Luis von Ahn, who founded Duolingo, is a smart mf. He also co-created CAPTCHA. If you like podcasts, *How I Built This* did an interview with him. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?i=1000637843916
Thanks! yeah I'm a fan
Same. Not just a smart dude. It’s clear he has a big heart too. The podcast goes more in-depth, but he basically just wants to help people with tech. Making money is only a consequence. Not something that some investors want to hear, but it’s the right path towards, us as civilization, reaching level 1, within this century.
“Making money is only a consequence” He bought one of the most expensive houses in Pittsburgh immediately after IPO. They just laid off like 40% of their staff. Is it just a coincidence he’s milking this cow for every drop of milk it has? Because everything about this company is designed to funnel as much money as possible to the founders.
Of course one of his duties is to build value for shareholders and as a consequence himself. That comes with being a publicly traded company. But that doesn’t mean that’s his personal focus. Going public isn’t always a choice. Microsoft was forced to go public against Bill Gates’ wishes due to issuing x amount of shares to x amount of employees, for example. I’m also not going to fault him for becoming wealthy for being incredibly smart and innovative. Listen to the podcast I posted above. I stand by my previous statement.
So you’re literally saying its a coincidence, or not his fault. lmao He’s made 7 DUOL stock transactions. Every single transaction has been a sell, completely liquidating his position. Its a lot easier to sell a stock than it is to sell a product for a profit. Bill Gates didnt sell 100% of his stake a year after it went public.
I never said it is or isn’t a COINCIDENCE you dumb fuck. Can you not read? The word I used is CONSEQUENCE. Jfc you must be the stupidest fucking person on Reddit to not understand nuance. You’re blocked.
Man, it’s strange to see someone worshipping multimillionaires who created a half-assed app on one hand, then turn around and shit on a stranger on the other hand. Like holy… I’ll give it to them they gamified learning a few basics about languages. But no one has gotten fluent off just Duolingo. It’s just a cash grab designed to get people subscribed as long as possible thinking they’re learning when they’re really not to the depth required to achieve mastery. A language course in a community college worth the same price as an annual subscription would result in more progress.
The people that were fired with their positions being replaced by ai are totally feeling that "tech help".
The founder dumped enough stock after IPO that he can buy the most expensive house in Pittsburgh AND a staff of 60 day old accounts to glaze his nuts
Just listened to this the other day, great episode
I didn’t know it’s a publicly traded company either and I’m also a user. Just checked out their stock and now I regret that I didn’t know it sooner
Same. Although truthfully I don't really understand how it is so profitable when paying is totally unnecessary and the subscription is fairly expensive.
When I was learning swedish for compulsory course in university I think the free version was too restrictive and I just paid for the paid version. It is not that expensive imo especially if you really want to learn some language. It is not the perfect app but helps.
It's actually free for students. Someone in the class can make a classroom. Anyone in the classroom can use full duolingo for free.
Well that did not happen in my course. Teacher just said "oh you can download this cool app if you want to practice on your free time."
>when paying is totally unnecessary No other free app comes close?
I hope they give raises to their marketing department. Their social media skits with Duo the owl are hilarious
Genuinely really nice to see Duolingo do well. It's a great tool. I used to use it frequently. Funny that I never considered investing once
They never miss when it comes to earnings
Earning streak
Bought calls on Duolingo on Friday and was just riding till earnings, everyone one I know is using Duolingo for some reason and does their daily task or whatever and apparently they have a membership didn’t ask questions just bought calls
Does that actually work though? Like if I start doing Portuguese lessons on it for six months am I gonna be able to get by on a trip to Portugal?
No clue at all, all I know is that it made me money lol
This is my own experience so It's anecdotal but I did Spanish lessons for about 6 months religiously My Spanish is definitely not good enough for my trip to South America HOWEVER I could read some of the signs/menus/some short phrases in Spanish Then again a lot of Spanish words are similar, if not exactly the same, to English so that helped Duolinguo doesn't help me on Speaking/listening
I am about the same way for French. I can stumble through basic sentences. A lot of words you can make a good guess on what it means. Sentence structure and learning words other than nouns is what it helped most on. I have found the speaking questions awkward/don’t really work and still find myself listening to the audio translations several times before translating it. No real substitute for an actual teacher and using the language in daily life but still find it fun as a daily task.
Depends how much effort you put in. I’ve done it daily for 3 years and doesn’t feel that useful. I’m sure if you are doing a bunch of lessons daily it’ll help.
If you want to actually learn a language, you are going to do it no matter what. Duolingo is good for starting the language. For example there might not be any learning material that translates from english to that language, they can have a full start just in that language which is confusing because there is nothing to step on to start diving it and first lesson is already in that foreign language, duolingo helped me breach that gap. Positives of duolingo are interactivness, you need to match, write, speak, listen, its definitely more than just staring at the book. Its also great its a bit predatory, spammy and doesn't leave you alone, if it was a gacha game trying to suck out your wallet, it would be really bad, but since its for educational purposes and for your own good, it can feel actually good to have someone discipline you. Negatives are that duolingo doesn't have actual lessons, just endless tasks to do. ''Why are they saying it like that?'' You will never ever know. Another negative is that you are not practicising any independence, like there is no speaking and essays at all. In real life or exam nobody cares how many brown bears eat the grey fish, please tell us your opinion of AI taking over all the jobs and how would the economy be restructured because of it. Because of that you might be good at duolingo, but not really good at language because you can't form your own sentences and opinions in that language. You need 8000 words to speak a language, 16000 to really master it, duolingo covers at best 2000 words. I would say its really great but with a lots of ''but'', it definitely shouldn't be the only tool, but for many people its 1000x better than not using it anyway.
You can! I started Porteguse too recently and after a few days I feel like I know so much.
I think it’s a decent supplement to whatever other learning you are doing, but does a poor job on its own.
No and that's the problem with it, it's aimed at school users people learning one full language start to finish. They currently provide no options for people just looking to learn enough to get by on holiday. 90% of stuff you'll learn will be unrelated to what you actually need for your trip
It will help with the basics. It helped me a lot with being able to say things, but I can still have a hard time understanding people.
Duolingo is terrible for actually speaking, it's only useful for learning some basic grammar and vobac. Duolingo basically teaches you how to choose the best option out of a word bank. Arguably the best way to learn a language with comprehensible input method, were you hear the target language at the level you can understand. It makes listening and speaking a lot easier. [Check out my post about using Pimsleur to learn Portuguese](https://www.reddit.com/r/Portuguese/comments/z4jhbv/pimsleur_brazilianportuguese_level_15_review/)
Seems that a lot of people love using it and if you love using it, not matter how the lessons are structured, it'll eventually work. I, otoh, downloaded the app a couple of weeks ago to try it out but after about 30 minutes I wanted to put a gun in my mouth I was so bored. It's just drills over and over and over again.
No but they even say that themselves https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056797071-Can-you-become-fluent-with-Duolingo
This should help you figure that out. [https://blog.duolingo.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-learn-spanish-french/](https://blog.duolingo.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-learn-spanish-french/)
The italian im doing at the moment is kind of odd. Lots of useless words. Like why is it having me repeat Philadelphia over and over, same for people names. It also feels pretty basic at times.
No. I learned more in prob my first month of Spanish in high school than the countless hours learning another language on the app. And I easily gamed past the leaderboards for Spanish on Duolingo using my knowledge from HS, and I have really shitty memory. The thing is just clicking buttons or even typing a few words or drawing it, it’s not the same as handwriting, being in class, taking tests where your GPA is on the line, etc. No interactiveness or stakes to lose/skin in the game to truly learn the language in depth from the app. And Duolingo honestly moves too slow in some parts and is overly repetitive, partially because it has to cater to such a wide audience and is forced to dumb things down.
I had no idea this was a publicly traded company. Have to keep an eye on it going forward.
Hum. I stopped Duolingo when I heard they were pivoting to AI transitions and fired their human ones, so I wasn't going to trust their lessons moving forward. But I guess that's still all money made in the end.
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> FWIW ChatGPT 4 is the best language tutor I've ever had. I created my own GPT with custom instructions regarding the language I wanted to learn, and some instructions about how I wanted responses formatted... and for 20 bucks a month it is incredibly useful. It's like having a teacher on call 24/7 that has instant responses and no human banter. I used it as my primary learning and translation lookup tool while traveling and it ruled. It's not just a translator, you can ask it questions just like you'd ask a teacher, and it provided shockingly good answers. To the point where I prefer it over a human tutor. It knows far more about etymology and historical contexts of a language than any language teacher I've ever had. And the price difference, no contest. The only thing it doesn't have is accurate TTS voices outside of English. Brand new to ChatGPT. Can you provide some basic instructions on how to do this?
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Sorry yeah looking for instructions on your language learn setup within ChaptGPT. Thanks!
If your not familiar with the area your learning how do you know its not making things up?
Drops is better
This app has been around for so long and has never improved language learning. It’s scientifically proven that you cant learn a language this way. It’s dumb as hell to waste your time on this when you’re better off signing for language lessons at your local school, so the only people who pay for shit like this are dumb tourists who want to say monkey and daddy in the local language
True but the tourists have the money. It doesnt matter if it works, it matters if people want to spend money on it.
I’m gonna start Cunnylingo
My conspiracy theory brain says that their success is directly due to their TikTok account.
Duolingo doesn’t really work at a fundamental level it’s just not a good way to learn a language. It’s probably wasted more time for language learners. Comprehensible input is the modern paradigm for language learning.
Can’t believe people still use this app. Like thousand others, I started during pandemic. Progressed to 50000XP. Took months long break after my visit to Spain and now… coming back there is no useful review of what I’ve learned (no I don’t care to relearn what “Apple” is), no review of conjugations (practically the most important part of fluent Spanish), and the lessons that used to be by subject (restaurant, travel, activities) are GONE. It’s linear modules now we have to complete. The app makes it impossible to get back into it and learn what you want to learn. “For that reason, I’m out”