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When I started learning French (probably 8 years ago), I started with Duolingo. Pairing Duolingo with some other tools/methods, I made good progress, and before

When I started learning French (probably 8 years ago), I started with Duolingo. Pairing Duolingo with some other tools/methods, I made good progress, and before long, I outgrew it. Last year, I decided I'd start working on Japanese, so I did the same thing I did before: hit Duolingo hard, listen to audiobooks to build up my phoneme recognition, etc. I was shocked at how slow progress was - not because I wasn't putting in the effort but because it had me redoing over and over and over again the same damn words and phrases. Gohan, mizu, sushi, gohan, gohan, mizu, gohan, sushi. I was a proponent of the site/app for quite a while - even after I outgrew it - because I legitimately believed it helped me. Now that I've seen what it's become, I can't recommend it to anyone unless you strictly do it for entertainment value with no expectation of useful education.

bugglebeetle 3y ago
Yeah, I mean it’s almost like they’re incentivized to slow your progress so you stay subscribed every month or something…
- mynameisash 3y ago
  That's another thing: the 'enshittification' is in full-force with really terrible ads plus the not-bad-but-annoying Super Duolingo ads. I could probably deal with that if the platform was good, but as I mentioned, it's just not providing any education value (to me, at least; YMMV).
- gs17 3y ago
  At the same time though, it's really easy to set your account as a classroom account and get most of the paid features.
gs17 3y ago
It really needs something like Anki has where you can say "I know the word for rice confidently, don't ask me for a long time" with the space between repetitions extending based on your feedback.
tehbeard 3y ago
Some months back, one of the updates "reset/readjusted" my progress. And it feels like that was the nexus point between it feeling like progress, and feeling like learning by rote. Even after getting past where i was pre-reset, it still was slow, rote memorization. I got to 150 days, and the news about layoffs and AI was enough to have me reevaluate it and realise it has just become a pattern matching dopamine box.

bugglebeetle 3y ago

Yeah, I mean it’s almost like they’re incentivized to slow your progress so you stay subscribed every month or something…

mynameisash 3y ago
That's another thing: the 'enshittification' is in full-force with really terrible ads plus the not-bad-but-annoying Super Duolingo ads. I could probably deal with that if the platform was good, but as I mentioned, it's just not providing any education value (to me, at least; YMMV).
gs17 3y ago
At the same time though, it's really easy to set your account as a classroom account and get most of the paid features.

gs17 3y ago

It really needs something like Anki has where you can say "I know the word for rice confidently, don't ask me for a long time" with the space between repetitions extending based on your feedback.

tehbeard 3y ago

Some months back, one of the updates "reset/readjusted" my progress. And it feels like that was the nexus point between it feeling like progress, and feeling like learning by rote. Even after getting past where i was pre-reset, it still was slow, rote memorization. I got to 150 days, and the news about layoffs and AI was enough to have me reevaluate it and realise it has just become a pattern matching dopamine box.