- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmygrad.ml
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmygrad.ml
- technology@beehaw.org
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if the labor cost goes down, the service should become cheaper.
if it worked like that, i’d love to have AI replace humans.
AI isn’t the problem. capitalism is.
The AI slop is why I quit Duolingo after my 1500+ day streak.
Is there an alternative? I just started using it but the experience is incredibly grating, especially the way they gate your progress behind “lives” that stop you learning unless you can pay.
Yarr, thar be an alternative. Though some might’n be thinking acquiring such booty be illegal.
If you decide to cancel your subscription and delete your account, they give a warning when deleting that says you need to cancel your subscription SEPARATELY. Just a heads up for anyone thinking of leaving like I did.
I have found Duolingo much, much less useful for language learning than Language Transfer. The latter actually helps you learn to think in another language rather than memorize things (which is still useful, but not nearly as much).
Short if total immersion, I have found nothing better than LT.
Thanks, I will check it out:)
From the first look: is this just audio or also written practices?
Just audio. But it is presented in a way that helps you to learn, rather than just remember. If you give it a try, I promise that you will be shocked at how you can retain the knowledge.
It isn’t enough on its own, however. You need to reinforce the lessons by speaking to people, reading, and/or TV and movies.
Dreaming Spanish, if you are trying to learn Spanish. I seriously think it is the future of language learning, bar none.
Holy crap that website needs some serious work, on mobile at least
Thanks! I’ll have to check this out
The problem I have with finding an alternative is that most just offer some five to ten largest languages. Want to learn Spanish, French, Russian, or Chinese? There are hundreds of both free and paid services available. Want to learn Hungarian, Irish, or Finnish? It’s Duolingo and a scant handful of sites specific to that language.
Duolingo uninstalled
uninstalls Duolingo
leaves 1-star app review
So if they’re using a ChatGPT wrapper to teach me languages, why do I need Duolingo? Copilot is free.
If it’s free you are the product.
This kind of thing is what confuses me as a business model. Take audio books for example, Audible is pivoting to ai voices. Why would people spend $20 on an audio book with an ai voice when they can just spend $1.99 on the eBook and run it through an ai voice program themselves?
most people have absolutely no idea how to ‘run it through an ai voice program’ … yet
True enough. I suspect that “yet” will come pretty soon though. I’m hoping all of these ‘early AI adopter’ companies fuck themselves out of business. With the tech as it is, most companies pivoting their products to AI on the user-end are just introducing a middle man. Once people catch on to it and realize they can just cut out the middle man, they hopefully won’t last long.
Copilot is free.
Free.
Free with ads.
Freemium with ads.
Free trial with tiered subscription service.
New subscription tiers with reduced ads. Premium package for boosts to service.
Please enter your credit card number and watch the ad to unlock device.
Please drink verification can to continue…
i cancelled my subscription and told them why
Duolingo is a tragedy. They really quickly realized that you don’t make money teaching things - you make it on retention and gamification.
Mango languages is great if your library has a subscription. I believe the US’s foreign service materials are also really good, if you want effective but boring.
The gameification part was good, it made it easier to keep up the habbit, though I recently got locked out for no apparent reason so apparently they just outright want to fail? Any good free alternatives? (I wasn’t using the paid version)
Any good free alternatives?
You won’t like the idea but…
spoiler
pirating a textbook from Libgen/Anna’s Archive
Here’s a website with those FSI courses I referenced earlier, as well as Peace Corps training materials. This is going to be the boring route. Drill drill drill, but you get good at it.
As a general strategy - on the Omniglot forums a billion years ago there was a method called Listen-Read which I think does wonders for me. You pick a longer book, preferably one you have enjoyed and read already in English. You get a copy of that book in English and your target language, as well as audiobook (let’s go with say, French), then you listen to the audio book in French while reading the book in English, then switch to listening to an English audiobook while reading the French book, then the audiobook in French while reading the French.
Librivox and Project Gutenberg are godsends. I did Candide this way, and part of Les Miserables. This is obviously less immediate fun/dopamine satisfying than Duolingo is, but will teach you to read better than Duolingo will. It’s not great at expressive language - while I can read Proust, my « je voudrais un Diet Coke » was not well received in Paris.
If you have a language in mind I can probably point you in some other directions.
What language(s)? Lots of good free resources.
I was so upset last year when they got rid of the comment section. There were often helpful explanations for WHY you conjugate the word that way, or how native speakers might use a different word.
I don’t know how good this feature was on Duolingo, but there’s a site/app called HiNative that does a really good job at this sort of thing.
that looks cool. Thank you for pointing it out!
Never used it but that sounds like such a neat concept.
Does anyone know of any free language learning apps that have a comment section? (And a user base that utilizes the comment section, of course.)
Yeah, the comment section was amazing…and then they came out with “max”, where you get “explain my answer” for a premium, powered by a [notoriously fallible] LLM. This is the definition of enshitification.
Literally canceled because of that change. Fuck them.
This “AI first” thing was the last straw for me, but ever since I noticed that the comment section was gone there’s been a bad taste in my mouth. I wonder how many of us there are.
I’m pretty frustrated they removed dark mode as well, made it very hard to do a lesson before bed.
Duolingo? Mine still has dark mode. Maybe just for subscriptions?
One of the languages I am learning is an endangered native language, and it was super helpful to see knowledgeable people in the comments.
That’s honestly enraging!? Such data can be greatly valuable for learners, and the native speakers’ community, and linguistics.
It was an amazing resource. For them just to nuke it completely was very frustrating.
Yeah but fuck learning, there’s money to be made, amirite?
i encountered some people that spoke some MAYAN. would like to learn it, because thier pictographs are interesting.
That’s cool as heck.
Don’t worry, you can upgrade to Duolingo Max for even more money and have the AI explain it. (Seriously.)
Yeah, I saw that. I have the family plan (some people in the house go through a lot of hearts (mistakes)) and still have to see ads for Max.
Tell me more about Mango library subscriptions? How would one determine?
Your local library may have a Mango subscription plan for card holders. You might be able to find it on their website but a librarian would definitely know.
Duolingo was shit for learning, for me at least.
So i left rather quickly, then came back hoping i could pick up some more Italian and noticed they summomed another paid tier. I wonder how many tiers they can summon up until they stop existing.
It’s not gamification that’s the issue. That aspect really held my attention and gave me consistency.
It’s the push to a pay-to-win model that made me quit. They made the challenges harder and harder to complete without using boosts, and to use the boosts you had to use gems. And gems were really hard to get unless you bought them with real money. It doesn’t matter if you have a super subscription (or whatever it’s called), you still had to pay to get the gems.
And the prices for the gems were just as predatory and the disgusting mobile gaming industry. Never should there be an option to spend over $20 for in-game consumables, nevermind over $100. It’s sick.
So they’ve killed themselves before adding Armenian.
Makes sense.
Removed by mod
Trying to help Duolingo add Armenian is something I’ve read about in 2018 or something like that, and it’s still there. They are very firmly not interested.
Removed by mod
I dunno, but there were plenty of volunteers. Eastern Armenian is far from a dead language after all. Especially when comparing to Icelandic or Welsh. Those are awesome languages too, though, alongside Coptic and Assyrian.
There are at least some Duolingo courses that use AI voices exclusively and they are shit.
On the one hand, having an AI to talk to sounds like something that could be good. Getting a real person to talk to every user would be impossible. I just don’t think the technology is going to meet expectations any time soon.
They do this in the French course. Half the time it still can’t understand what I’m saying. Maybe that’s on me, but still. C’est la vie.
“Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees”
Except for the contract employees. Fuck those people.
In 2012, we bet on mobile. […] That decision helped us win the 2013 iPhone App of the Year and unlocked the organic word-of-mouth growth that followed. Betting on mobile made all the difference. We’re making a similar call now, and this time the platform shift is AI.
I think this is some sort of fallacy, not sure which tho. Maybe a hasty generalization? “We bet on mobile twelve years ago and won, so if we bet on AI now we’ll also win.”
"past performance is not indicative of future results¨
Except for the contract employees. Fuck those people.
I mean technically the contractors are not employees
Yeah, like, I think this is a bad move for Duolingo as a company, since their code quality will rapidly go downhill with the current state of AI generated code.
But also, if you are a contract employee, you should be prepared to be let go at any moment. That’s sort of the whole point of being a contract employee - you are only employed for the contract. It isn’t unethical in anyway for a company to not rehire employees who knew up front that they might not be rehired.
Technically my shit is edible, technically.
It’s okay. We can all play that game. I’ve replaced my use of Duolingo with AI.
Pro tip: have as your “system prompt” in your LLM of choice “at the end of every query, include me a short Swedish relates to my prompt”. No need for Duolingo.
At least AI can give you actual grammar lessons
Fuck their greed, I know that the bulk of their users wouldn’t caffè if the CEO started shooting puppies on Main Square, but they can train their AI on Deez
Let’s also replace the customers by AI, that way the whole system will really be “AI first” and self-sufficient.
it’s a matter of time (or more likely has already happen) where an AI company ends up having only AI users, it makes money be selling adds to show to the users, which are all AI bots, and then selling those bots as user data.
then said company celebrates that it has no humans involved making a shit ton of profit.
So Twitter?
Afraid to find out what an AI Karen would be like.
