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Comment by Sanzig | Hacker News Reader

Duolingo is really only useful at the A1/A2 levels anyway. Once you reach B1, you're pretty much past the point where the vocab and grammar basics from Duolingo is useful and you need to move on to other activities (watching TV in your target language, having conversations with native speakers, reading books in your target language, etc).

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Early on, the Duolingo stated goals was to teach language to the point where it's learners could ultimately start translating documents. They were going to sell cheap mechanical turk style translation services. (Think captcha style translation)

Unfortunately as they got popular automated translation services got good enough that nobody was going to pay for a slightly better and slower translation enmass.

Once that happened, that's when it seemed like they dumped their goals of teaching language and instead focused on dark pattern money extraction.

I started using DL in 2019 and it was then still very much a respectable language-learning app for semi-casual users up to CEFR A1/A2/B1/B2 standard, with good user-contributed community forums (they killed those 3/2022, so they could milk them with AI to resell as an add-on - for me that act was the jump-the-shark telltale). Don't know about the goal of translating documents but that's something they'd want to pivot away from to get beyond a tiny niche audience. Some gamification and user evangeliation is good and necessary (users should be able to turn it off). If nothing else, DL's antipattern whenever they eventually crash will show limits on how far it can be pushed in the name of $$$ growth hacking. Meanwhile, bona-fide langage learners are jumping ship off DL. (Analogously, what is the point when Zynga/FB games Candy Crush/FarmVille/MafiaWars stopped being cool? or Pokemon Go? Ingress?) How much of the stickiness is from the thing being inherently hooked, vs the social competition agaonst your friends?

Even at those levels there doesn't seem to be any reason why you wouldn't be better off putting your time into Dreaming Spanish https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ or Muzzy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzy_in_Gondoland , just to name some famously approachable beginner material.

To be a bit cynical about it: the typical DuoLingo player has probably been misled to some extent about its effectiveness, yes, but also many of them don't particularly want to learn a new language. I suspect that they're happy to be able to play a popular mobile game that everyone else is also playing without the stigma of being a "Candy Crush addict" and "timewaster". "I'm learning a language!" is the welcome figleaf. https://youtu.be/F3SzNuEGmwQ?t=243

I disagree. In Spanish, learning the subjunctive is essential and that’s part of B2, and I think Duolingo did a good job of teaching it. If you can’t understand “Que te vaya bien” even completing a purchase at a store would be a bit difficult.

> Once you reach B1, you're pretty much past the point where the vocab and grammar basics from Duolingo is useful

It drives me nuts that Duolingo's Japanese course does not explain grammar nor does it introduce new grammars fast enough. It's super boring to see です and ます most of the time, with occasional new grammar points thrown in. It's also strange that Duolingo introduces honorifics without context. This is super confusing. Who in the world would decipher a long string of characters out of a few really bland sentences?

Which would be perfectly fine. A1/A2 require plenty of time to master. I know the internet is filled with people going “i learned A2 in one week” but that doesnt mean that its really internalized.

It seems like with sufficient funds, Khan Academy could offer this experience (language learning) without the enshittification Duolingo demonstrated. Think how Evernote faded away, but for different reasons.

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