How badly they want to show me ads, it’s impressive. Desperate ain’t sexy guys
I had a streak in the triple digits, just un-installed it. I’ll be damned if I’m going to use that AI slop anymore.
Man I love to see that abusive Owl grovel. I also did this, good on you OP, may they see a consequence for threatening something good for the sake of greed. Eventually nothing is enough for the managers and they burn the whole thing down because of their personal addiction. This harms lives. We need to jail CEOs abusing power this way, that’s the actual remedy.
we should give the owl a robot body and let it fly around the boardroom, doing whatever occurs to it from one moment to the next
Anyone have a good Duolingo alternative?
At this point I’m thinking I’ll just take a trip to Tenerife to continue learning Spanish.
Other apps aren’t good at gamification I hear - and that was the only thing that kept me using it till a while ago. I have ADHD. The leveling up, streaks, etc, is what kept me going when the novelty of learning yet another foreign language wore off - I already had to learn two in school and I only ever really use one of them, you can guess which one.
Sounds like a good plan, I’d seriously consider a Canarian accent if I could pick mine!
It’s closer to me than Latin America and gets less hot than mainland Spain. That’s why it sounds so awesome to me
Quit your current life and move to a country where they speak the language you want to learn. Get a menial job in a small town, find new friends, and learn what love is. Then you’ll know what it truly means to speak a language.
This is the language equivalent of the “I have a small issue with this software.” - “Have you tried switching your OS to Linux and using a FOSS alternative?” conversation lol
Lol it’s almost even more extreme and has a common trope I love. “Hey I got this spam text…”
“Burn all your devices. Remove yourself from the grid. Scrub your identity. Purchase a single burner phone. Root it and install Graphene. Yes it’s hard. Google it. Wait, don’t google it. Search for it elsewhere. Amass money somehow without using technology. Cut off your family ties. You need to move to another country. You will need a work visa to move to most countries. But to get that you will need an accepted job in advance. And to have that you will probably need to access technology. Instead, buy a fake passport, because very few countries will just let you ‘move somewhere’ with a ‘menial job.’ Once you get there, develop passive income streams and quit your job. After you have been a landlord for two years you will finally know what it’s like to claim that being a landlord is a real job because you need to talk to tenants and file paperwork natively for an hour or two a week.”
I lost it at “root it and install Graphene.” GrapheneOS does not work with rooted devices, and rooting is considered a security risk by the Graphene dev team haha.
Or when Scout explains his date plan to Spy.
Spy: you have a dinner date for 7. What time do you arrive? Scout: 7… AM. Case the restaurant, run background checks on the staff. Can the cook be trusted? If not I’ve gotta kill him. Dispose of the body, replace him with my own guy no later than 4:30.
Anyone know how to afford moving costs?
Crime
Sound advice!
Lingodeer for more languages
Renshuu for Japanese
I switched to using CBC’s Mauril from Duolingo, and it’s been good for me. However, it’s only available to Canadian residents (or VPN users) and it’s only for French. So it worked for me but obviously that covers a small subset of Duolingo users.
Busuu is a lot like Duolingo but you also get to trade corrections with real people learning your native language
Yes I love Busuu! I switched about a years ago and I feel like it’s actually been teaching me Dutch instead of just brute force vocabulary memorization.
My only complaint is that it’s really aggressive about asking for you to subscribe. I just close the popups and I haven’t ran into anything that I cant do.
HelloChinese if you want to learn that
Mango Languages is available for free through many libraries and has an app.
They’re pathetic but not in a way I like.
Why leave the app installed if you’re done using it?
Knowing how prone they are to this kind of crap, I wanted to wait and see what it’d say when my streak ran out, I wasn’t disappointed
If you use the duolingo widget you can watch duo drop down a depressive spiral until they eventually die alone in the desert. It’s my favorite part of the app.
I uninstalled the app years ago and still see this in the play store.
Damn! The more I read I about it, the creepier it gets! The fuck is wrong with them.
Alot. Which is a shame because the app used to be decent a little over a decade ago. I remember using it back in highschool before the gamification and, without paying, it would let you access community forums, review lessons, and a lot of other features now locked behind a paywall or gone entirely.
I still remember when the heart system was first introduced and getting pissed that i had to essentially get everything right to keep moving forward in the lesson or pay to refill my hearts. I uninstalled when it became 3 wrong answers and youre done for the day without payment.
I actually started using Duolingo recently and the hearts system has you either pay, start your free trial for its subscriotion, or you watch an ad, even then though, that’s just shitty.
Duolingo is not about learning a language. It’s about giving you the illusion of learning a language.
As long as I learn to ask where the bathroom is before I get there I’ll bet ok.
Look fuck the company but Duolingo absolutely can help learn a language
Stfu duolingo
“Streaks” are shitty dark patterns IMO.
I wish the whole streak paradigm was time weighted. Like I got over a 1 year streak on my Apple watch over Covid. That’s basically never going to happen again. I wish there was some kind of “this is your longest streak in the past <time period>” or something. It all just feels so all or nothing.
people calling every engagement tactic a dark pattern these days is giving me teenagers using therapy speak in wrong ways vibes
Yeah but at least the interests of the user and duolingo are somewhat aligned in this case
I liked it because it was a learning app and I have a tendency to fall off. But paying real money to restore my streak? Hell nah
Same, it was sad but I’m not gonna use the all anymore due to that decision.
6 lessons? ew.
What is duo doing that’s bad with AI?
Generating excercises. Not only is it a way to cut staffing, but now you don’t know if the thing you just learned is a real word or phrase or if AI hallucinated it up.
The word “hallucinating” for AI spewing falsehoods should be replaced by “bullshitting”. Because, in all seriousness, that’s what it is - as has been convincingly argued in “ChatGPT is bullshit”
Yeah that’s fucking awful. Ugh
I remember a while back, I was too busy for a little while to use Duo and came back to the widget trying to guilt trip me into using it. Because I missed like half a week. It’s so toxic and honestly isn’t even that useful for learning. So I uninstalled that shit immediately.
I can ask for an apple in so many languages.
Wife’s streak is at 1,618 days across multiple categories. Almost 4.5 years. I imagine it’s like smoking at this point.
What is the actual point of a streak?
A sense of pride and accomplishment?
Gamification including social aspects if you’re a regular app user.
Abusive ex if you aren’t a regular user.
The only way it could get worse is if they put a slot machine or roulette wheel in to give you prizes.
I fucking hate the gamification they did to Khan Academy. Just give me the knowledge map back.
Personally, my interest in language learning comes and goes. Doing the minimum to maintain a streak prevents me from forgetting too much before my interest returns.
At one point it was gamification to tie the reward center of your brain into continuing to train using the app. Now it seems that it’s half that or half https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern to get you to pay to keep that reward system going.
To make you addicted so you keep coming back
Having heard very mixed things about Duolingo’s actual usefulness, does your wife speak or write well in any of the languages she’s used the app to learn?
Not at all
My friend learn japanese and able to speak fluently after using the app. Though she does have japanese customer from time to time that she can test it with some of them.
Does she actually speak the language she’s learning?
Not even a little
Donde, está, la biblioteca. Me llamo T-Bone La araña discoteca. Discoteca, muñeca, La biblioteca Está en bigotes grandes, el perro, manteca. Manteca, bigotes, gigante, pequeño, la cabeza es nieve, cerveza es bueno. Buenos dias, me gusta papas frías, los bigotes de la cabra Es Cameron Diaz.
El tren de la Magdela al a una
Why the fuck is it still installed
Soon you can switch to Lingonaut and take your duolingo streak with you: https://lingonaut.app/
Define soon. Their progress per language is around 10%, with the highest completion percentage being Czech at 20%.
There’s no way it’ll have the language I’m learning any time soon lol. Duolingo is literally it besides traveling there and talking to locals
Does anyone use Babel? Is it any good?
I used Babel for a bit. The quality seems good. There’s little to no gamification, it feels like a digital version of a classic language learning textbook. They offer around 12-13 languages up to level B2. If you decide to purchase a lifetime subscription, it’s on sale every couple of months for 130-180 USD.
Babel is my Duolingo replacement. The lessons are better, not AI, with more actual teaching than Duolingo. I’m learning things Duolingo glazed over or didn’t fully explain most lessons. Definitely recommend. Keep and eye on stack social too, I got my lifetime subscription to all languages for $140.
My wife is fluent in the language I’m learning and noted my improvement in 2 weeks of using babel. Granted I’m still an A1 but that’s a complement I’ll gladly accept.
Rosetta? What language are you learning?
It’s a modern language with a country that speaks it as a primary language, but it’s not as widely learned so I don’t want to doxx myself. Duolingo is the only one that has more than a beginner’s level in this language. Beyond that I have to actually talk to people, like with italki. That’s going to be hard because I don’t even like talking on the language learning discord lol. I need to know it for my future plans, but that isn’t overcoming my introverted desire to not talk to people.
