- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
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This is a nice post but I would also like to see a comprehensive list of languages available on each suggested platform. They did that for some of them.
I remember trying duolingo and it sucked it was so artficial and felt like all translations and pronounciations where done by AI even i knew some of the things where wrong.
I have been using babbel and i prefer it to duolingo. It is less gamified but it is a more structured approach to learning a language.
No mention of LUTE? Weird.
Never heard of it but following your link, it looks like this fork seems to be the most appropriate fork.
I read through the article, and while I don’t use Duolingo, I’m not sure if the tulip analogy works one to one with your depression of Duolingo.
The point of the tulip crash was that there was perceived value that was completely detached from the actual value. The most common modern reference points that people point to are the meme stocks (GME and the like) and NFTs/crypto. People were buying, selling, and trading on hype.
The corporate pressure to wring money out of the users is just the “duty to shareholders” that every corporation pushes all year round. Rent seeking is frustrating, but it’s nothing unique to Duolingo. Choosing to deprecate a section of their code, even if The Tree has benefits, is likely a long-term cost-saving measure. It’s quite possible that they looked at a graph and said “We can continue to sink man-hours into maintaining the tree and adding to it when new lessons come along, or we can utilize those resources elsewhere in a way that has a more perceivable effect.” It sucks, but as a business they need to look at averages and totals alongside their associated costs. If the choice was between maintaining The Tree but requiring some layoffs of their staff, and dropping The Tree and keeping staff, I think dropping The Tree is better for the company. And the other alternative would be to rake in less profit, which just won’t be done.
I use Alif Bee for Arabic. It’s good and is certified by Pearson (the textbook people).
In my experience Duolingo is still pretty fantastic, as long as you unlock premium with the ReVanced patcher (the app is basically unusable otherwise). There really isn’t another option anywhere close to Duolingo’s effectiveness for the major languages on the platform.
I think you should check out Language Transfer . Not as many languages as DuoLingo, and some of them are only introductory courses, but completely free and – more important – far, far better. I’m a native English speaker, and I have learned French, German, Sesotho, and Japanese, but LT’s Spanish program was the most effective I’ve ever done.
Could not agree more with this. Duolingo is not “fantastic” ever. If you actually want to learn and use a language Duolingo actively works against that goal by teaching you useless vocab, not explaining anything and in some cases teaching you things that are just flatout wrong.
Duolingo is only great if you want to pretend you are learning a language. Yes I am salty because I wasted a year and a half of doing their shit daily before I realised that it was not helping me in the slightest and has actually made things harder for me in the long run as I now have to unlearn some of the trash it has taught me.
Conversely listening to language transfer was like an aha moment. It actually helps teach you the language in a useful, usable way and doesn’t just try and get you memorise bullshit phrases and random vocab.
Tldr: Fuck Duolingo, language transfer is king!
I’d say combining Pimsleur with Tandem & Anki would be an extremely effective method.
Only Tandem’s got Sanskrit, though…
( & I’m not a people-person, being autistic )
So, I’ll try again, someday…
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