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Comment by 542458 | Hacker News Reader

Hunh. It feels weird to say "Language learning apps are always ugly, clunky" and "Apps only ever support the major languages, leaving minority languages in the dust" when those are a few things that Duolingo actually does fairly well. Don't get me wrong, Duolingo has a LOT of flaws and I'm excited to hear you're building an alternative to it, just the pitch feels like it's based on a time when Rosetta was the name to beat.

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That’s a fair point. It was originally “Those that work are always…” but I lost that preface in some refactoring.

I think it’s quite obvious though why Duolingo doesnt disprove any of my points. There was and is still no pleasant, multilingual, effective language learning app on the market. For the most part, you can choose one of those (and no, I do not consider Duolingo “multilingual” in the sense most polyglots need :) )

Absolutely. One thing you absolutely can’t say about Duolingo is that it’s ugly. Not very clunky either.

I personally find it quite ugly and clunky. I feel like the interface is optimized for children, and the number of ads you have to tap through to get even a modicum of knowledge is quite clunky. The last time I used it I spent over 20 hours to partially learn almost 4 letters of the Arabic alphabet — I’d call that pretty clunky.

Objectively they have a good team, but I do not think it’s above crticism in either regard.

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