From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.
There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.
All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.
Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.
#duolingo #languagelearning #enshittification #capitalism
I’ve been having better luck with Babbel lately since it actually teaches ya stuff rather than throwing vocabulary at ya. I’ve learned more grammar in 2 weeks of Babbel than an entire 10 months learning Dutch on duo
I likes busuu a lot, felt a lot like old Duolingo, but with more relevant lessons. Duo can introduce potentially unhelpful vocabulary and grammar very early on, and now with the crown system every lesson just feels like pedantic repetition, busuu is fun, properly leveled, and has native speakers, with the Chinese course at least.
I’d be curious to hear which language you try and how it turns out for you since I’ve only done Chinese so far.
Never heard of busuu before, but tried it now and am enjoying it a lot. Thank you!
It’s also worth giving a shout-out to LibreLingo, which aims to be an open source version of Duolingo. For now it’s only Spanish though, and as I’m not interested in learning Spanish at the moment I haven’t gotten any real use out of it.
And the product now is traaaash.
I used to use duolingo to learn every language whenever I visited a country, and I can’t use it at all anymore.
As someone who is a current user and unaware of superior options but is curious, what would you recommend?
I’ve been having better luck with Babbel lately since it actually teaches ya stuff rather than throwing vocabulary at ya. I’ve learned more grammar in 2 weeks of Babbel than an entire 10 months learning Dutch on duo
I likes busuu a lot, felt a lot like old Duolingo, but with more relevant lessons. Duo can introduce potentially unhelpful vocabulary and grammar very early on, and now with the crown system every lesson just feels like pedantic repetition, busuu is fun, properly leveled, and has native speakers, with the Chinese course at least.
I’d be curious to hear which language you try and how it turns out for you since I’ve only done Chinese so far.
Never heard of busuu before, but tried it now and am enjoying it a lot. Thank you!
It’s also worth giving a shout-out to LibreLingo, which aims to be an open source version of Duolingo. For now it’s only Spanish though, and as I’m not interested in learning Spanish at the moment I haven’t gotten any real use out of it.
Oh awesome, I appreciate the rec, I’ll check it out. Thanks!