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I'm sure this helped with their growth, but I really, really hate what Duolingo has become. It used to be a great app for learning a language. I went back to it

I'm sure this helped with their growth, but I really, really hate what Duolingo has become. It used to be a great app for learning a language. I went back to it recently to remember my Spanish for a trip and it's the worst, over-gamified experience I've ever seen. You spend half of the time dismissing dialogs about blue gems or treasure chests.

HomeDeLaPot 4y ago
Yeah, I wonder if the growth is going to last. Another commenter mentioned feeling that questions have gotten easier and there are fewer prompts to write full sentences. Maybe Duolingo is finding the right balance of difficulty, or maybe they're focusing on growth hacking instead of making an effective learning product. If so, users might eventually realize this and decide they'd rather use a different app or learning method. I'm hardly qualified to judge, but on the other hand, as someone who's used Duolingo a bit in the past, the constant gamification features and notifications can feel a bit too manipulative.
- xmprt 4y ago
  It might not necessarily be a focus on growth hacking. It's a hard balance even for actual educators. If you make the learning process too boring or difficult then casual learners won't even get started. The techniques won't get you far but they'll get you far enough to the point that you can start learning on your own once you're more disciplined. I wonder how Khan Academy solves this and if Duolingo can (or even wants to) learn from it.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    I understand this mindset but, with all due respect, I'd also appeal to the pragmatic reality. The entire point of Duolingo is to learn a foreign language. Somebody without an absolute mountain of intrinsic motivation is never going to do this, period. Even when "forced" to. I somehow managed to take 3 years of Spanish in school - and maintained a 4.0 in it. I can count to ten, ask you your name, and say a bunch of bad words. Woot for a smart kid gaming education that wants to be gamed anyhow so they can report happy figures to the government. I pretend to learn, they pretend to teach, and the government pretends to care. We all win! Unless the goal is to actually have people able to communicate in Spanish. I suspect that's a big part of the reason Duolingo can credibly claim that 'x' hours of Duolingo is equivalent to 2 college semesters. Those people in college are disproportionately doing it to fill out a language requirement for graduation, not because they want to. By contrast everybody on Duolingo is there exclusively because they want to be. Rants aside, the point is that it makes much more sense to focus on the users who actively want to learn than trying to lure in those that don't and somehow hoping to convert them. And I think this is the exact path Khan Academy takes, which is why people still rave about Khan Academy while Duolingo, especially in its current state, is something relatively few are going to have especially glowing things to say about.
    - x0x0 4y ago
      My experience: I decided to try a new language on Duo a couple months ago. I unfortunately used the word bubbles because I was too lazy to learn to type Cyrillic. The result was, after 2 months, that I could spell nothing and knew almost no words. With the prompting from the word bubbles, it's far too easy to click on words and think you're learning. They don't even do a good job of providing high-likelihood alternatives in the word bubbles. Is it тут там or теш? Well, when you're "writing" a sentence with word bubbles, there's only one 3-letter word that starts with a T, so that's the one. I finally learned to type Cyrillic and was embarrassed and very annoyed to realize that I actually knew virtually no words once I had to type them out. I think it's exactly as you said: Duolingo pretends to teach, and users pretend to learn.
      - sw104 4y ago
        You've seen the worst side of Duolingo. Duolingo is rubbish for learning most languages, but the Russian and Ukrainian courses are particularly bad. Not only do they not really teach you the Cyrillic language foundation, but they don't teach cases and tenses. The whole course is trial and error until you learn the handful of phrases they added in. I think French and Spanish are the only courses on Duolingo that even give proper teaching, probably because they cover most people (Spanish for US citizens, and match up with US/UK school language curriculums). The rest of the languages have much shorter courses, with less content, no teaching, and poorly structured courses, mispronunciations. My Russian other half forbade me from learning her language with Duolingo.
      - watwut 4y ago
        I started Ukrainian in Duolingo and 4 months later I can sorta kinda understand tweets in Ukrainian. The primary limitation is my vocabulary, I have to compensate by guessing through similarity to other slavic language. I can get gist of meaning from Ukrainian youtube videos. With languages, passive understanding comes first, always. The active one is different and harder skill.
    - watwut 4y ago
      > The entire point of Duolingo is to learn a foreign language. Somebody without an absolute mountain of intrinsic motivation is never going to do this, period This is not true tho. I never ever had intrinsic motivation for languages. I never liked learning them. Even as I knew my future literally depends on me learning good English, I just kept doing bare minimum I could get away with. Fact is, I knew 2 foreign langues very well - I was fluent in both. And now, my kids do not like learning foreign languages. But they have them in school and do duoling. While they dont like classes much, they are actually progressing and one of them is already capable to follow netflix series in English.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  I suspect there's a reason his graph ends 8 months ago. The endless gamification, nagging, and destruction of useful features would have driven me from the site. But because I'm a technically inclined, instead they drove me to sideload an "outdated" version of the app. Amusingly it still uses the same API, so you get all the core features and then some (turns out premium or not is a client side check lol) without any of the increasingly intolerable junk of the new app. But what I have also noted is that the activity of users seems to have fallen off a cliff, which I'd tend to assume is because the number of users has fallen off a cliff. I went from a high activity user to a near zero activity user (Memrize is a much better primary tool for learning languages now IMO) yet my place in the leagues remains nearly unchanged. So either everybody also really started "engaging" with the site much less, or they simply left. If anything Duolingo seems to be a warning about the dangers of pursuing the maximization of metrics at any cost. Work on making a better product and utilize metrics to see how you're doing. Work on mindlessly maximizing those metrics instead and you risk not only destroying your product, but also destroying your ability to measure the damage you're causing.
  - weaksauce 4y ago
    > his graph ends 8 months ago. Personally I have found no joy in duolingo now that they forced a completely linear path in the tracks. I abhor it so much that I am against using it. i had like a 1000 day streak and they took that away from me through a technical issue but that's not even something i really care about... the lack of options in what i choose to and want to learn next is 1000% a worse product ux choice.
  - adt2bt 4y ago
    > yet my place in the leagues remains nearly unchanged. So either everybody also really started "engaging" with the site much less, or they simply left. In my experience, Duolingo puts you with other folks who had a similar score to you in the previous league. I at one point was learning Italian aggressively, getting multiple thousands of points a week. I then had a week of vacation where I only did one lesson a day (totaled ~100 points that week) and was demoted. The next week, everyone I was paired with had faaaar fewer points than 'usual'.
- hdhrufjdi 4y ago
  Growth never lasts. It is impossible
kiachnish 4y ago
Agreed. I love Duolingo and owe my second language to the app - I could never have become as fluent as I am without the foundation they provided. Yet the redesign is awful and I haven't been on the app in months as a result.
simlevesque 4y ago
For spanish I really like Lingolia. It's not expensive and well made.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  How Lingolia reignited user growth!
- pelasaco 4y ago
  I don't know Lingolia, but I used Lingoda (https://www.lingoda.com/en/ https://www.lingoda.com/en/) to learn French and was really good.
yieldcrv 4y ago
I travel enough to realize that I didn't actually want to learn a language I wanted to learn how to buy a woman a drink at a locals bar Hence there was no need to crash course duolingo on the flight over, but instead learn a few select things and concepts
- adastra22 4y ago
  That’s basically Pimsleur
mc32 4y ago
The worst is having reminders like "You made Duo sad"... No, no, no! I'm not making it anything. It's okay to say Duo is sad [you haven't practiced] but blaming a user for making It sad? That.. that takes some gall. It's off-putting and a questionable tactic.
- supriyo-biswas 4y ago
  Duolingo uses all the manipulative tricks that a narcissist might use. Yesterday I got a notification using reverse psychology, roughly paraphrasing: Continue your X day streak, or don’t. Encouragement is Duo’s thing.
  - nicky0 4y ago
    I find the character stuff fun. That was from Lily, right? She's the moody teenager character.
  - leshenka 4y ago
    ngl had this one an hour ago
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Anon4Now 4y ago
I had a similar experience. I used it years ago, then I went back to it a little while back and ended up quitting for two reasons: 1. The gamification was too cutesy and annoying. And gamification works on me - I'm currently being held prisoner by my streak on another platform. 2. I didn't feel it was actually teaching me. I was being tested on words that hadn't been introduced. Trial and error is not a fun way to learn.
- nicky0 4y ago
  Duolingo never tests you on new brand words in my experience. Whenever a new word is introduced, it is "clickable" (touchable?) in the sentence to show the definition. Maybe that's just my course though. Sometimes the new words are highlighed, other times (if I spend 20 gems for a "harder" lesson) they are not highlighted but still clickable. The only time words are not clickable is during the legenrday challenges. I guess this is where you are seeing them.
thrdbndndn 4y ago
Personally, I never find Duolingo great for learning language to begin with. I (tried to) use it to learn Asian languages, for what it's worth.
srcreigh 4y ago
I signed up for their premium service a couple months ago. No joke there’s like 3 entire seconds of extra super animation whenever you open the app. It doesn’t make any sense at all.
- dazc 4y ago
  I subscribed last year, I thought a sustained period without ads would help concentrate my mind but gave up after a couple of weeks. I guess that paid off for Duolingo? It seems like they have a cohort of developers who need to justify their existence by adding animation and gamification features at every opportunity. A back to basics approach would be a good move but I doubt it will happen.
vallard 4y ago
Agreed! I have recently started using it again and found if I only do one lesson a day I can close it just as the ad has started. It used to be great and now it’s horrible.
lawrenceyan 4y ago
Anecdotally, the timed challenges are surprisingly difficult in some cases and have been a great learning experience for me.
- hoseja 4y ago
  They are actually impossible, you can't even click that fast. You are supposed to buy the extender or whatever.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    The initial ones are manageable but not if you have to listen to how each word is pronounced. I'm not sure what the maximum level is but I think you're right that it's impossible to solve all of them without the time extender.
    - lawrenceyan 4y ago
      You have to know the words well enough that you don't need to listen and just read directly.
      - hnbad 4y ago
        FWIW I just got max level (it's a non-Latin language so the initial exercises are all repetitions of recognizing certain glyphs and their combinations) and it turns out that there's nothing special about it except you get to repeat it instead of moving on to a higher difficulty. So "it's actually not possible to beat it" is probably more of a calibration issue than a blatant money grab. The only reward is more XP.
aarreedd 4y ago
I don't mean to single out your comment, but it seems like a majority of the comments on hacker news are so negative now.
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  I hated it but I can see way. If people are positive about something there usually isn't much to be said.
  - aledalgrande 4y ago
    Maybe exercising to find positive things and describe them out loud would be a quality of life improvement.
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    Or maybe it’s reflective of the industry we’re in. I see a lot of positive comments when good things come out, for example. Setting aside the usual “do we really need to talk about every rust conversion” comments, nearly every rust article is followed by praising the language. Or when there’s a new software people might enjoy using. Many of the newer startups also get very positive comments.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    I remember Product Hunt is like that, you are highly encouraged to only leave positive comments, so much that now I don't even read them or even visit the site because I know no constructive criticism will even be said, it's just all praise for every little thing.
- mouse_ 4y ago
  I think that discontent is good for software and hardware.
  - jeron 4y ago
    maybe discontent is good for a product within a company, but if your end user has lots of complaints and is not having a great experience, that's not a good thing at all
Kortaggio 4y ago
For me, the main reason for Duolingo's drastic decline in quality is not solely due to gamification but due to their learning algorithm no longer being effective. I was one of the early beta users and joined Duolingo in June 2012 before it was publicly available, and was a huge fan in the early days. At one point I had a streak of 1,000+ consecutive days, and even applied to work there.[0] Back then, Duolingo used the SRS algorithm[1] and it was very helpful in keeping me on track with my learning. The original business model was to make money from community translations.[2] I think they soon discovered that this market wasn’t nearly big enough to sustain Duolingo as a going concern, so they pivoted to an advertising-based business model. However, the software supporting the original “translations” business model is still in place, so the way they teach you new words is prompting you with sentence pairs to translate. For example, they’ll give you an English sentence and ask you to translate it into Spanish. I find this isn’t an effective way to learn a new language because you’re not learning to think in your target language, you’re learning how to match words between your native language and the target language, which is not the same thing. Sentence matching is unnatural and requires neural pathways that are never used by native speakers; native speakers don’t think in English and then translate into Spanish when speaking. To be able to fluently speak the language, I found that a “call and response” model is the best way to learn. For example, given a question that a real person would ask (“What do you like about your job?”), you have to creatively formulate a natural answer (“I have a lot of intellectual freedom”) without any “guardrails” of a scripted English sentence provided by the app. “Call and response” more accurately models how people actually speak in real conversations—you take turns talking like a normal human being. It is also more difficult and requires effortful assimilation of concepts instead of just words. To learn, you must make mistakes, so the most effective learning techniques are also the most frustrating. Coming up with novel responses forces you to fully engage in the dialogue, which efficiently helps you to lay down neural pathways that you will use in a real conversation. Duolingo is optimized for ad revenue, so they can’t give you difficult challenges because you’ll just give up. Instead, they must spoon-feed you 1:1 sentence translations or “fill in the blank” type challenges because this rewards you with a dopamine rush from their slot-machine-like “ding!” sounds and green checkmarks that pop up when you successfully fill in the blanks. Instead of encouraging you to make mistakes, Duolingo will penalize you by forcing you to redo entire lessons (instead of targeting practice towards your weaker words), sweep mistakes under the rug, or making you pay money for gems. While the paid version removes the ads, it doesn't remove the algorithm that serves lessons optimized for ad-interrupted learning. Duolingo touts their effectiveness study[3] as evidence that its methods are scientifically supported with a claim that “an average of 34 hours of Duolingo are equivalent to a full university semester of language education”. However, this study was conducted in 2012 under Duolingo’s old SRS algorithm before they changed their teaching model to matching-based problem sets, got rid of their call and response questions, and implemented hearts, gems, and lingots that penalize mistakes, so I don't think this evidence applies to the current app anymore. Unfortunately, due to these changes I now disrecommend Duolingo for folks wanting to learn a new language, even though it was a pivotal and cherished part of my language learning journey back in the day. [0] https://billmei.net/blog/silicon-valley-job-search#duolingo https://billmei.net/blog/silicon-valley-job-search#duolingo [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition [2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-expands-internationally-in-partnership-with-duoling https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-expands-inte... [3] https://s3.amazonaws.com/duolingo-papers/other/vesselinov-grego.duolingo12.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/duolingo-papers/other/vesselinov-gr...
jfan001 4y ago
They've done a great job at making it an addictive experience. I'm committed to keeping my streak even though I'm not making nearly as much progress as I expected on my actual Spanish.
tasubotadas 4y ago
Also, they've messed up the learning algo so now you get to learn about what's a room and a dog after learning German for 5 years. Amazing progress.
- dymk 4y ago
  Nobody ever got fluent by using Duolingo. It gives a false sense of progress by being so gamified. The first thing I tell people is to ditch it if they’re serious about learning a second language, and go pay $20/month for Pimsleur.
  - rtpg 4y ago
    I think the higher level advice is to always be doing at least 2 things for language learning. You get nice combos from the synergy, gives you more opportunities to recall info outside of the app/class, and just is generally more motivating.
    - dymk 4y ago
      Agreed, with the caveat that having one of those two sources be Duolingo is a waste. Pair Pimsleur with a grammar book and vocab cards, or an hour a week of italki, and you'd be using your time much better.
pelasaco 4y ago
that was exactly my thought.. while reading the article "bla bla bla" I was like "ok, the application became annoying"
oska 4y ago
I really, really hate what Duolingo has become. Agree > It used to be a great app for learning a language. Disagree. I was a very early user and big participant in the forums and in providing error correction on the courses. I watched it start to degrade and was emotionally invested in that decline for a while. But I walked away completely and now, looking back, I think I was always wasting my time on the site. I don't think it was ever a 'great app' and I think it was always the wrong approach to language learning. It's a way of sucking in ppl who have a desire to learn a language and to fool themselves that they are actually working productively towards that goal by using duolingo when instead, they're essentially procrastinating.
- Version467 4y ago
  Completely agree. Duolingos user interface and gamification might have become more annoying, but the real problem is that this approach to language learning is incredibly inefficient at best and probably does not work at all. It just feels productive. In reality, going from duolingo to reading anything more complex than a childrens book and holding a conversation more complex than ordering a coffee is only marginally easier than just trying to learn that directly. It allows you to postpone the difficult parts of learning a language indefinitely while making it feel like steady progress. And our brains absolutely love that.
  - zoltrix303 4y ago
    I'm genuinely curious, is there other ressources you would recommend to use? I've been learning Japanese for 2-3 months on Duolingo, and I do feel I'm getting more and more comfortable with the characters. I will start taking lessons with a teacher in April when i move there, but I wanted to arrive with some base.
    - ivank 4y ago
      https://cijapanese.com/ https://cijapanese.com/ Comprehensible Japanese
    - sw104 4y ago
rullelito 4y ago
The trend of making more money on the users you can abuse by penalising more quality sensitive users is horrible.
mns 4y ago
I was a Plus user until last autumn and after their new updates where they gamified everything, forced you to follow a single way of learning and made you to pay even over the normal subscription that was already quite expensive (was paying per month, 11.99), countless A/B tests where a features were added and removed every week, had different features and flows in the browser, iPhone or iPad decided to quit (3 different experiences). The whole platform is no longer about language learning, it's just streaks and leagues (which in order to disable you need to disable the whole friends feature). They managed to make everything so frustrating by basically punishing you for mistakes and forcing you to unlock and purchase lives (even if you are a Plus user) that by the end, for me it was one of the most frustrating experiences that I had while trying to learn a new language.
drorco 4y ago
From the article: > ...This was a problem for a startup with investors anxious to see fast monetization growth. Seems as if Duolingo had been more conservative with its fundraising, it wouldn't have needed to resort to actions that might take it further away its goal of teaching a language? Do you really need almost $200M to build a business like Duolingo?
dgudkov 4y ago
>I really, really hate what Duolingo has become. And here is the main driving cause of the change as stated by the author: "By mid-2018, daily active users (DAU) were growing at a single-digit rate year-over-year, which was troubling, given the explosive growth the company had seen in the past. This was a problem for a startup with investors anxious to see fast monetization growth."
comfypotato 4y ago
There’s a lot of negativity towards Duolingo in this post, and this is the top comment, so I might as well choose here to defend it. Nobody has proffered a better alternative. There’s just a lot of complaining. It’s pretty clearly implied by the nature of the complaints that Duolingo is one of, if not the, best way to develop a foundation for a new language. Being able to slowly develop correct pronunciation and the skills to read a new alphabet is nice. It feels effortless with Duolingo. Moving past basic grammar will take additional work outside of the app, but I would posit that it’s the early stages that are more likely to stop someone from learning a language. That’s where Duolingo excels. Language learning is extremely difficult, especially later in life, and Duolingo makes the most intimidating parts easy. Personally I’m looking forward to language-learning conversationalists based on ChatGPT for conversation practice.
- watwut 4y ago
  I agree. Plus, I grew to actually like the path. I spend less time strategizing over what should I do next or feeling torn between reparation and progress. Turned out that the only reason I wanted the tree was that I could strategize over 2x bonus better ... which has zero to do with learning too. I found myself more engaged after change to path.
- vintermann 4y ago
  Have you tried it? Obviously it won't be as structured as proper teaching, but I suspect that cajoling it into being a helpful language practice partner should be possible even as it is today. It's language skills are crazy impressive. I've found there's no reason to not interact with it in my native language, it speaks and understands it just as well as English - and that was definitively not the case with earlier incarnations of GPT that I have tried.
  - comfypotato 4y ago
    I meant a version that had text to speech and speech to text incorporated so that you could actually talk to it. I hadn’t considered textual conversations. That’s a good idea. Personally I’m learning a couple of languages with foreign alphabets, so I’m really still in the stages of just learning the alphabets. (And Duolingo makes it possible by being casual and convenient.)
gruturo 4y ago
I'm a user with an almost 3000 day streak, but I mostly share your view in that I hate what it turned into - the constant dismissing of dialogs and the amount of ads are horrible. I updated the iOS app by mistake a few months ago - I was still using a 2 year old client which had maybe 25% of the badness of the new one. The completely linear path was a big annoyance, many options are harder to access, horrible all around. With that said.... They keep me using it daily for almost 3000 consecutive days so must be doing something right: - Awful as it may be, it's the least bad option I found - although I haven't looked at alternatives too recently. - The leagues system is actually fun and engaging, and it's having me rack up easily 400-500 points per week to avoid dropping in a lower league (or 600-800 if I end up in a very competitive group of people). Before that, I'd rarely go over 100. I found the push notifications extremely irritating, especially the inability to deselect all of them except for the daily lesson reminder, there are quite a few nags always active - by design I'm sure. So my only alternative was to take away its notification permissions entirely from the iOS privacy settings, now I have to endure further in-app prompts inviting to enable them back. I think this will be what finally pushes me to leave the app entirely, especially if my search is fruitful - or maybe I'll revert to an old/cracked app given that most of the crap is local as I've read in the thread.
- helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  Is that 3000 days on a single language, or multiple? How good at the language/languages have you become?
  - gruturo 4y ago
    90% on a single language (German), and I'm comfortably beyond the "pizza order level" level of fluency, but probably still below a B1. Trouble is, I meanwhile live in Germany and wouldn't be able to assign an exact figure to how much of my fluency is thanks to Duolingo, and how much is due to being exposed to the language in my daily life (comparatively little actually, as my job is in English, but far from zero).
    - helsinkiandrew 4y ago
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
It's really damning that nowhere in that post does it mention improving the learning experience. Gamification, league boards, notifications etc. - but nothing about improving the service so users learn the languages better. I spent 6 months or so doing the Finnish language (to completion) on Duolingo, and although it was good for practicing Finnish verb conjugations - the lack of a decent grammar tutorial means that you have to learn that elsewhere, which all start from scratch. A decent set of books (Suomen Mestari in my case) and Anki are far more powerful for learning.
pwpw 4y ago
Personally, I never found Duolingo to be a great app for learning a language. By far the best combo I’ve ever found is following along with Language Transfer [0] lessons and reviewing flash cards using Anki. Adding in-person classes to the mix greatly boosts that. I’ve learned more Greek in 2 years now with that combo as an adult than I did in a decade learning Spanish as a child by only taking classes. The only thing more effective was living in a city that only spoke the language I was learning after I had achieved a certain level of proficiency. Duolingo made me feel like I was learning a language and having fun while doing it, but every time I looked back on using it, I observed I really wasn’t learning very effectively with it. It’s far too robotic and impractical in my experience. [0] https://www.languagetransfer.org/ https://www.languagetransfer.org/
- lock-the-spock 4y ago
  Thank you for this recommendation. A programme that actually makes all materials available for free and only lives on donations really must be trusting itself. It sounds in style similar to the Michel Thomas method.
rchaud 4y ago
That's "enshittification" for you. All apps start off good, because they actually have to deliver value to the end-user. Once there are enough end-users, it's time for investors to take some (if not all) of that value. Suddenly you'll need a larger base of users, on the app for longer amounts of time. It's not enough for them to learn, they also have to start buying things in the app. Every B2C mobile app faces this exact dead end.

HomeDeLaPot 4y ago

Yeah, I wonder if the growth is going to last. Another commenter mentioned feeling that questions have gotten easier and there are fewer prompts to write full sentences. Maybe Duolingo is finding the right balance of difficulty, or maybe they're focusing on growth hacking instead of making an effective learning product. If so, users might eventually realize this and decide they'd rather use a different app or learning method. I'm hardly qualified to judge, but on the other hand, as someone who's used Duolingo a bit in the past, the constant gamification features and notifications can feel a bit too manipulative.

xmprt 4y ago
It might not necessarily be a focus on growth hacking. It's a hard balance even for actual educators. If you make the learning process too boring or difficult then casual learners won't even get started. The techniques won't get you far but they'll get you far enough to the point that you can start learning on your own once you're more disciplined. I wonder how Khan Academy solves this and if Duolingo can (or even wants to) learn from it.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  I understand this mindset but, with all due respect, I'd also appeal to the pragmatic reality. The entire point of Duolingo is to learn a foreign language. Somebody without an absolute mountain of intrinsic motivation is never going to do this, period. Even when "forced" to. I somehow managed to take 3 years of Spanish in school - and maintained a 4.0 in it. I can count to ten, ask you your name, and say a bunch of bad words. Woot for a smart kid gaming education that wants to be gamed anyhow so they can report happy figures to the government. I pretend to learn, they pretend to teach, and the government pretends to care. We all win! Unless the goal is to actually have people able to communicate in Spanish. I suspect that's a big part of the reason Duolingo can credibly claim that 'x' hours of Duolingo is equivalent to 2 college semesters. Those people in college are disproportionately doing it to fill out a language requirement for graduation, not because they want to. By contrast everybody on Duolingo is there exclusively because they want to be. Rants aside, the point is that it makes much more sense to focus on the users who actively want to learn than trying to lure in those that don't and somehow hoping to convert them. And I think this is the exact path Khan Academy takes, which is why people still rave about Khan Academy while Duolingo, especially in its current state, is something relatively few are going to have especially glowing things to say about.
  - x0x0 4y ago
    My experience: I decided to try a new language on Duo a couple months ago. I unfortunately used the word bubbles because I was too lazy to learn to type Cyrillic. The result was, after 2 months, that I could spell nothing and knew almost no words. With the prompting from the word bubbles, it's far too easy to click on words and think you're learning. They don't even do a good job of providing high-likelihood alternatives in the word bubbles. Is it тут там or теш? Well, when you're "writing" a sentence with word bubbles, there's only one 3-letter word that starts with a T, so that's the one. I finally learned to type Cyrillic and was embarrassed and very annoyed to realize that I actually knew virtually no words once I had to type them out. I think it's exactly as you said: Duolingo pretends to teach, and users pretend to learn.
    - sw104 4y ago
      You've seen the worst side of Duolingo. Duolingo is rubbish for learning most languages, but the Russian and Ukrainian courses are particularly bad. Not only do they not really teach you the Cyrillic language foundation, but they don't teach cases and tenses. The whole course is trial and error until you learn the handful of phrases they added in. I think French and Spanish are the only courses on Duolingo that even give proper teaching, probably because they cover most people (Spanish for US citizens, and match up with US/UK school language curriculums). The rest of the languages have much shorter courses, with less content, no teaching, and poorly structured courses, mispronunciations. My Russian other half forbade me from learning her language with Duolingo.
    - watwut 4y ago
      I started Ukrainian in Duolingo and 4 months later I can sorta kinda understand tweets in Ukrainian. The primary limitation is my vocabulary, I have to compensate by guessing through similarity to other slavic language. I can get gist of meaning from Ukrainian youtube videos. With languages, passive understanding comes first, always. The active one is different and harder skill.
  - watwut 4y ago
    > The entire point of Duolingo is to learn a foreign language. Somebody without an absolute mountain of intrinsic motivation is never going to do this, period This is not true tho. I never ever had intrinsic motivation for languages. I never liked learning them. Even as I knew my future literally depends on me learning good English, I just kept doing bare minimum I could get away with. Fact is, I knew 2 foreign langues very well - I was fluent in both. And now, my kids do not like learning foreign languages. But they have them in school and do duoling. While they dont like classes much, they are actually progressing and one of them is already capable to follow netflix series in English.
somenameforme 4y ago
I suspect there's a reason his graph ends 8 months ago. The endless gamification, nagging, and destruction of useful features would have driven me from the site. But because I'm a technically inclined, instead they drove me to sideload an "outdated" version of the app. Amusingly it still uses the same API, so you get all the core features and then some (turns out premium or not is a client side check lol) without any of the increasingly intolerable junk of the new app. But what I have also noted is that the activity of users seems to have fallen off a cliff, which I'd tend to assume is because the number of users has fallen off a cliff. I went from a high activity user to a near zero activity user (Memrize is a much better primary tool for learning languages now IMO) yet my place in the leagues remains nearly unchanged. So either everybody also really started "engaging" with the site much less, or they simply left. If anything Duolingo seems to be a warning about the dangers of pursuing the maximization of metrics at any cost. Work on making a better product and utilize metrics to see how you're doing. Work on mindlessly maximizing those metrics instead and you risk not only destroying your product, but also destroying your ability to measure the damage you're causing.
- weaksauce 4y ago
  > his graph ends 8 months ago. Personally I have found no joy in duolingo now that they forced a completely linear path in the tracks. I abhor it so much that I am against using it. i had like a 1000 day streak and they took that away from me through a technical issue but that's not even something i really care about... the lack of options in what i choose to and want to learn next is 1000% a worse product ux choice.
- adt2bt 4y ago
  > yet my place in the leagues remains nearly unchanged. So either everybody also really started "engaging" with the site much less, or they simply left. In my experience, Duolingo puts you with other folks who had a similar score to you in the previous league. I at one point was learning Italian aggressively, getting multiple thousands of points a week. I then had a week of vacation where I only did one lesson a day (totaled ~100 points that week) and was demoted. The next week, everyone I was paired with had faaaar fewer points than 'usual'.
hdhrufjdi 4y ago
Growth never lasts. It is impossible

kiachnish 4y ago

Agreed. I love Duolingo and owe my second language to the app - I could never have become as fluent as I am without the foundation they provided. Yet the redesign is awful and I haven't been on the app in months as a result.

simlevesque 4y ago

For spanish I really like Lingolia. It's not expensive and well made.

themodelplumber 4y ago
How Lingolia reignited user growth!
pelasaco 4y ago
I don't know Lingolia, but I used Lingoda (https://www.lingoda.com/en/ https://www.lingoda.com/en/) to learn French and was really good.

yieldcrv 4y ago

I travel enough to realize that I didn't actually want to learn a language I wanted to learn how to buy a woman a drink at a locals bar Hence there was no need to crash course duolingo on the flight over, but instead learn a few select things and concepts

adastra22 4y ago
That’s basically Pimsleur

mc32 4y ago

The worst is having reminders like "You made Duo sad"... No, no, no! I'm not making it anything. It's okay to say Duo is sad [you haven't practiced] but blaming a user for making It sad? That.. that takes some gall. It's off-putting and a questionable tactic.

supriyo-biswas 4y ago
Duolingo uses all the manipulative tricks that a narcissist might use. Yesterday I got a notification using reverse psychology, roughly paraphrasing: Continue your X day streak, or don’t. Encouragement is Duo’s thing.
- nicky0 4y ago
  I find the character stuff fun. That was from Lily, right? She's the moody teenager character.
- leshenka 4y ago
  ngl had this one an hour ago
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Anon4Now 4y ago

I had a similar experience. I used it years ago, then I went back to it a little while back and ended up quitting for two reasons: 1. The gamification was too cutesy and annoying. And gamification works on me - I'm currently being held prisoner by my streak on another platform. 2. I didn't feel it was actually teaching me. I was being tested on words that hadn't been introduced. Trial and error is not a fun way to learn.

nicky0 4y ago
Duolingo never tests you on new brand words in my experience. Whenever a new word is introduced, it is "clickable" (touchable?) in the sentence to show the definition. Maybe that's just my course though. Sometimes the new words are highlighed, other times (if I spend 20 gems for a "harder" lesson) they are not highlighted but still clickable. The only time words are not clickable is during the legenrday challenges. I guess this is where you are seeing them.

thrdbndndn 4y ago

Personally, I never find Duolingo great for learning language to begin with. I (tried to) use it to learn Asian languages, for what it's worth.

srcreigh 4y ago

I signed up for their premium service a couple months ago. No joke there’s like 3 entire seconds of extra super animation whenever you open the app. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

dazc 4y ago
I subscribed last year, I thought a sustained period without ads would help concentrate my mind but gave up after a couple of weeks. I guess that paid off for Duolingo? It seems like they have a cohort of developers who need to justify their existence by adding animation and gamification features at every opportunity. A back to basics approach would be a good move but I doubt it will happen.

vallard 4y ago

Agreed! I have recently started using it again and found if I only do one lesson a day I can close it just as the ad has started. It used to be great and now it’s horrible.

lawrenceyan 4y ago

Anecdotally, the timed challenges are surprisingly difficult in some cases and have been a great learning experience for me.

hoseja 4y ago
They are actually impossible, you can't even click that fast. You are supposed to buy the extender or whatever.
- hnbad 4y ago
  The initial ones are manageable but not if you have to listen to how each word is pronounced. I'm not sure what the maximum level is but I think you're right that it's impossible to solve all of them without the time extender.
  - lawrenceyan 4y ago
    You have to know the words well enough that you don't need to listen and just read directly.
    - hnbad 4y ago
      FWIW I just got max level (it's a non-Latin language so the initial exercises are all repetitions of recognizing certain glyphs and their combinations) and it turns out that there's nothing special about it except you get to repeat it instead of moving on to a higher difficulty. So "it's actually not possible to beat it" is probably more of a calibration issue than a blatant money grab. The only reward is more XP.

aarreedd 4y ago

I don't mean to single out your comment, but it seems like a majority of the comments on hacker news are so negative now.

thrdbndndn 4y ago
I hated it but I can see way. If people are positive about something there usually isn't much to be said.
- aledalgrande 4y ago
  Maybe exercising to find positive things and describe them out loud would be a quality of life improvement.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  Or maybe it’s reflective of the industry we’re in. I see a lot of positive comments when good things come out, for example. Setting aside the usual “do we really need to talk about every rust conversion” comments, nearly every rust article is followed by praising the language. Or when there’s a new software people might enjoy using. Many of the newer startups also get very positive comments.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  I remember Product Hunt is like that, you are highly encouraged to only leave positive comments, so much that now I don't even read them or even visit the site because I know no constructive criticism will even be said, it's just all praise for every little thing.
mouse_ 4y ago
I think that discontent is good for software and hardware.
- jeron 4y ago
  maybe discontent is good for a product within a company, but if your end user has lots of complaints and is not having a great experience, that's not a good thing at all

Kortaggio 4y ago

For me, the main reason for Duolingo's drastic decline in quality is not solely due to gamification but due to their learning algorithm no longer being effective. I was one of the early beta users and joined Duolingo in June 2012 before it was publicly available, and was a huge fan in the early days. At one point I had a streak of 1,000+ consecutive days, and even applied to work there.[0] Back then, Duolingo used the SRS algorithm[1] and it was very helpful in keeping me on track with my learning. The original business model was to make money from community translations.[2] I think they soon discovered that this market wasn’t nearly big enough to sustain Duolingo as a going concern, so they pivoted to an advertising-based business model. However, the software supporting the original “translations” business model is still in place, so the way they teach you new words is prompting you with sentence pairs to translate. For example, they’ll give you an English sentence and ask you to translate it into Spanish. I find this isn’t an effective way to learn a new language because you’re not learning to think in your target language, you’re learning how to match words between your native language and the target language, which is not the same thing. Sentence matching is unnatural and requires neural pathways that are never used by native speakers; native speakers don’t think in English and then translate into Spanish when speaking. To be able to fluently speak the language, I found that a “call and response” model is the best way to learn. For example, given a question that a real person would ask (“What do you like about your job?”), you have to creatively formulate a natural answer (“I have a lot of intellectual freedom”) without any “guardrails” of a scripted English sentence provided by the app. “Call and response” more accurately models how people actually speak in real conversations—you take turns talking like a normal human being. It is also more difficult and requires effortful assimilation of concepts instead of just words. To learn, you must make mistakes, so the most effective learning techniques are also the most frustrating. Coming up with novel responses forces you to fully engage in the dialogue, which efficiently helps you to lay down neural pathways that you will use in a real conversation. Duolingo is optimized for ad revenue, so they can’t give you difficult challenges because you’ll just give up. Instead, they must spoon-feed you 1:1 sentence translations or “fill in the blank” type challenges because this rewards you with a dopamine rush from their slot-machine-like “ding!” sounds and green checkmarks that pop up when you successfully fill in the blanks. Instead of encouraging you to make mistakes, Duolingo will penalize you by forcing you to redo entire lessons (instead of targeting practice towards your weaker words), sweep mistakes under the rug, or making you pay money for gems. While the paid version removes the ads, it doesn't remove the algorithm that serves lessons optimized for ad-interrupted learning. Duolingo touts their effectiveness study[3] as evidence that its methods are scientifically supported with a claim that “an average of 34 hours of Duolingo are equivalent to a full university semester of language education”. However, this study was conducted in 2012 under Duolingo’s old SRS algorithm before they changed their teaching model to matching-based problem sets, got rid of their call and response questions, and implemented hearts, gems, and lingots that penalize mistakes, so I don't think this evidence applies to the current app anymore. Unfortunately, due to these changes I now disrecommend Duolingo for folks wanting to learn a new language, even though it was a pivotal and cherished part of my language learning journey back in the day. [0] https://billmei.net/blog/silicon-valley-job-search#duolingo https://billmei.net/blog/silicon-valley-job-search#duolingo [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition [2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-expands-internationally-in-partnership-with-duoling https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpress/buzzfeed-expands-inte... [3] https://s3.amazonaws.com/duolingo-papers/other/vesselinov-grego.duolingo12.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/duolingo-papers/other/vesselinov-gr...

jfan001 4y ago

They've done a great job at making it an addictive experience. I'm committed to keeping my streak even though I'm not making nearly as much progress as I expected on my actual Spanish.

tasubotadas 4y ago

Also, they've messed up the learning algo so now you get to learn about what's a room and a dog after learning German for 5 years. Amazing progress.

dymk 4y ago
Nobody ever got fluent by using Duolingo. It gives a false sense of progress by being so gamified. The first thing I tell people is to ditch it if they’re serious about learning a second language, and go pay $20/month for Pimsleur.
- rtpg 4y ago
  I think the higher level advice is to always be doing at least 2 things for language learning. You get nice combos from the synergy, gives you more opportunities to recall info outside of the app/class, and just is generally more motivating.
  - dymk 4y ago
    Agreed, with the caveat that having one of those two sources be Duolingo is a waste. Pair Pimsleur with a grammar book and vocab cards, or an hour a week of italki, and you'd be using your time much better.

pelasaco 4y ago

that was exactly my thought.. while reading the article "bla bla bla" I was like "ok, the application became annoying"

oska 4y ago

I really, really hate what Duolingo has become. Agree > It used to be a great app for learning a language. Disagree. I was a very early user and big participant in the forums and in providing error correction on the courses. I watched it start to degrade and was emotionally invested in that decline for a while. But I walked away completely and now, looking back, I think I was always wasting my time on the site. I don't think it was ever a 'great app' and I think it was always the wrong approach to language learning. It's a way of sucking in ppl who have a desire to learn a language and to fool themselves that they are actually working productively towards that goal by using duolingo when instead, they're essentially procrastinating.

Version467 4y ago
Completely agree. Duolingos user interface and gamification might have become more annoying, but the real problem is that this approach to language learning is incredibly inefficient at best and probably does not work at all. It just feels productive. In reality, going from duolingo to reading anything more complex than a childrens book and holding a conversation more complex than ordering a coffee is only marginally easier than just trying to learn that directly. It allows you to postpone the difficult parts of learning a language indefinitely while making it feel like steady progress. And our brains absolutely love that.
- zoltrix303 4y ago
  I'm genuinely curious, is there other ressources you would recommend to use? I've been learning Japanese for 2-3 months on Duolingo, and I do feel I'm getting more and more comfortable with the characters. I will start taking lessons with a teacher in April when i move there, but I wanted to arrive with some base.
  - ivank 4y ago
    https://cijapanese.com/ https://cijapanese.com/ Comprehensible Japanese
  - sw104 4y ago

rullelito 4y ago

The trend of making more money on the users you can abuse by penalising more quality sensitive users is horrible.

mns 4y ago

I was a Plus user until last autumn and after their new updates where they gamified everything, forced you to follow a single way of learning and made you to pay even over the normal subscription that was already quite expensive (was paying per month, 11.99), countless A/B tests where a features were added and removed every week, had different features and flows in the browser, iPhone or iPad decided to quit (3 different experiences). The whole platform is no longer about language learning, it's just streaks and leagues (which in order to disable you need to disable the whole friends feature). They managed to make everything so frustrating by basically punishing you for mistakes and forcing you to unlock and purchase lives (even if you are a Plus user) that by the end, for me it was one of the most frustrating experiences that I had while trying to learn a new language.

drorco 4y ago

From the article: > ...This was a problem for a startup with investors anxious to see fast monetization growth. Seems as if Duolingo had been more conservative with its fundraising, it wouldn't have needed to resort to actions that might take it further away its goal of teaching a language? Do you really need almost $200M to build a business like Duolingo?

dgudkov 4y ago

>I really, really hate what Duolingo has become. And here is the main driving cause of the change as stated by the author: "By mid-2018, daily active users (DAU) were growing at a single-digit rate year-over-year, which was troubling, given the explosive growth the company had seen in the past. This was a problem for a startup with investors anxious to see fast monetization growth."

comfypotato 4y ago

There’s a lot of negativity towards Duolingo in this post, and this is the top comment, so I might as well choose here to defend it. Nobody has proffered a better alternative. There’s just a lot of complaining. It’s pretty clearly implied by the nature of the complaints that Duolingo is one of, if not the, best way to develop a foundation for a new language. Being able to slowly develop correct pronunciation and the skills to read a new alphabet is nice. It feels effortless with Duolingo. Moving past basic grammar will take additional work outside of the app, but I would posit that it’s the early stages that are more likely to stop someone from learning a language. That’s where Duolingo excels. Language learning is extremely difficult, especially later in life, and Duolingo makes the most intimidating parts easy. Personally I’m looking forward to language-learning conversationalists based on ChatGPT for conversation practice.

watwut 4y ago
I agree. Plus, I grew to actually like the path. I spend less time strategizing over what should I do next or feeling torn between reparation and progress. Turned out that the only reason I wanted the tree was that I could strategize over 2x bonus better ... which has zero to do with learning too. I found myself more engaged after change to path.
vintermann 4y ago
Have you tried it? Obviously it won't be as structured as proper teaching, but I suspect that cajoling it into being a helpful language practice partner should be possible even as it is today. It's language skills are crazy impressive. I've found there's no reason to not interact with it in my native language, it speaks and understands it just as well as English - and that was definitively not the case with earlier incarnations of GPT that I have tried.
- comfypotato 4y ago
  I meant a version that had text to speech and speech to text incorporated so that you could actually talk to it. I hadn’t considered textual conversations. That’s a good idea. Personally I’m learning a couple of languages with foreign alphabets, so I’m really still in the stages of just learning the alphabets. (And Duolingo makes it possible by being casual and convenient.)

gruturo 4y ago

I'm a user with an almost 3000 day streak, but I mostly share your view in that I hate what it turned into - the constant dismissing of dialogs and the amount of ads are horrible. I updated the iOS app by mistake a few months ago - I was still using a 2 year old client which had maybe 25% of the badness of the new one. The completely linear path was a big annoyance, many options are harder to access, horrible all around. With that said.... They keep me using it daily for almost 3000 consecutive days so must be doing something right: - Awful as it may be, it's the least bad option I found - although I haven't looked at alternatives too recently. - The leagues system is actually fun and engaging, and it's having me rack up easily 400-500 points per week to avoid dropping in a lower league (or 600-800 if I end up in a very competitive group of people). Before that, I'd rarely go over 100. I found the push notifications extremely irritating, especially the inability to deselect all of them except for the daily lesson reminder, there are quite a few nags always active - by design I'm sure. So my only alternative was to take away its notification permissions entirely from the iOS privacy settings, now I have to endure further in-app prompts inviting to enable them back. I think this will be what finally pushes me to leave the app entirely, especially if my search is fruitful - or maybe I'll revert to an old/cracked app given that most of the crap is local as I've read in the thread.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago
Is that 3000 days on a single language, or multiple? How good at the language/languages have you become?
- gruturo 4y ago
  90% on a single language (German), and I'm comfortably beyond the "pizza order level" level of fluency, but probably still below a B1. Trouble is, I meanwhile live in Germany and wouldn't be able to assign an exact figure to how much of my fluency is thanks to Duolingo, and how much is due to being exposed to the language in my daily life (comparatively little actually, as my job is in English, but far from zero).
  - helsinkiandrew 4y ago

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

It's really damning that nowhere in that post does it mention improving the learning experience. Gamification, league boards, notifications etc. - but nothing about improving the service so users learn the languages better. I spent 6 months or so doing the Finnish language (to completion) on Duolingo, and although it was good for practicing Finnish verb conjugations - the lack of a decent grammar tutorial means that you have to learn that elsewhere, which all start from scratch. A decent set of books (Suomen Mestari in my case) and Anki are far more powerful for learning.

pwpw 4y ago

Personally, I never found Duolingo to be a great app for learning a language. By far the best combo I’ve ever found is following along with Language Transfer [0] lessons and reviewing flash cards using Anki. Adding in-person classes to the mix greatly boosts that. I’ve learned more Greek in 2 years now with that combo as an adult than I did in a decade learning Spanish as a child by only taking classes. The only thing more effective was living in a city that only spoke the language I was learning after I had achieved a certain level of proficiency. Duolingo made me feel like I was learning a language and having fun while doing it, but every time I looked back on using it, I observed I really wasn’t learning very effectively with it. It’s far too robotic and impractical in my experience. [0] https://www.languagetransfer.org/ https://www.languagetransfer.org/

lock-the-spock 4y ago
Thank you for this recommendation. A programme that actually makes all materials available for free and only lives on donations really must be trusting itself. It sounds in style similar to the Michel Thomas method.

rchaud 4y ago

That's "enshittification" for you. All apps start off good, because they actually have to deliver value to the end-user. Once there are enough end-users, it's time for investors to take some (if not all) of that value. Suddenly you'll need a larger base of users, on the app for longer amounts of time. It's not enough for them to learn, they also have to start buying things in the app. Every B2C mobile app faces this exact dead end.