How badly they want to show me ads, it’s impressive. Desperate ain’t sexy guys
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.
Duolingo is a toxic ex.
never used Duolingo, but i think i can relate now, i had a toxic girlfriend that would talk to me in Portuguese, i don’t speak that language
never used Duolingo
i don’t speak that language
I believe I may have a solution
i am trying not to go back to abusive relationships
Portuguese isn’t that bad
“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.
I believe you can get a users longest streak from the public API end point. IIRC it’s something like
duolingo.com/users/{username}but it’s been a few years
Yeah but at least the interests of the user and duolingo are somewhat aligned in this case
Come to think of it, an application threatening, shaming, and guilt tripping you into coming back might not be the healthiest thing ever.
DuoLingo replicates all the same patterns as an abusive relationship.
Fuck. I dunno what to do with this
Edit: just cancelled my subscription to super Duolingo. Fuck them
I’ve been using the free version with ad blockers (and browser only) for years. No annoying notifications, no ads, no tracking of user data via an app, and I simply press back on the occasional Super promotion page. The only thing I miss is the discussion page for every lesson/question.
I stopped using duolingo a couple years ago because I noticed I was just doing the bare minimum to maintain my streak instead of actually learning something new.
that actually helped me remember that my target language exists, it was good for me to at least have a brush with some learning on the days that i just didn’t feel like doing much.
what was the final nail on the coffin for me was duolingo neutering the japanese course, they delayed introducing kanji so hard i was seeing the most basic basics like 母, 父, 語, even 何 in hiragana, which made the course deeply counterproductive as reading japanese in hiragana only, when you know the kanji already slows you down considerably. consider: ははははなをもっています vs 母は花を持っています, both mean “my mum has a flower” but one of them has a string of は you need to decipher the meaning of first before you can understand the sentence, the other’s meaning can be understood instantly
That’s a shame. Duolingo was never great for learning kana, so I guess they thought to use it more in lessons, but they should’ve just improved the dedicated kana lessons instead. I had learned kana before using duolingo so it was a smooth transition to take on sentences introducing more and more kanji. It sucks that they’re just making things worse since there were some nice things about the app before.
Wife’s streak is at 1,618 days across multiple categories. Almost 4.5 years. I imagine it’s like smoking at this point.
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
Same, it was sad but I’m not gonna use the all anymore due to that decision.
There’s a great video from WSJ with their exec team that talks about how those notifications are hugely beneficial both to their users, and to their revenue. Even if you pay for the full thing like I do you still get those notifications. They aren’t “desperate” they’re targeted specifically to get people to come back and keep learning. They also don’t care about showing you ads as much since their majority of money comes from paying users. If anything the ads are to just get you to pay for the app.
Why the fuck is it still installed
Exactly why I stopped so using it so quickly.
No mas
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.
Yeah that’s fucking awful. Ugh
Has anyone actually learned any language with duo lingo ?
I learned probably 90% of my Spanish through Duolingo. My reading is good enough that I can usually follow along with Spanish news articles and Spanish spoken at a moderate pace. (So almost none of it, haha) I have hearing comprehension problems with English as well though, so that’s not Duolingo’s fault.
I’m definitely not fluent, but it’s not like I wouldn’t know what to do if someone handed me a form in Spanish, either.
Overall it’s just the repetition that matters. I don’t think I would know any less Spanish if I’d spent 20-30 minutes every day for the past 2+ years using a different app to learn.
Thanks. That’s quite a good result I think. Did you practice outside the app (I mean at the beginning) ? How long would you say it takes to be able to read a newspaper article without too much difficulty?
This is just for the English speaker learning Spanish Duolingo course, which I’m told is one of the best ones, so it may not apply to other courses. But IMO it was easier to pick up the majority of the beginner vocabulary in Duolingo (they’ve got the drill aspect of language learning down pat) and then spread out to other sources. I especially needed outside help with grammar because (at least when I was doing the early parts) Duolingo didn’t explain grammar very much, so there was a bit of ramming my head against a brick wall.
How long an article takes me to read depends on how many colloquial phrases it has that Duolingo hasn’t introduced me to, if uncommon words or jargon are used, etc. The dictionary app I use is pretty good and includes slang, so when I do run into unknowns it only takes a few seconds to look it up. But overall I’d say I read maybe 1/2 to 2/3 the speed I read English, depending on all the above factors. It does fatigue me a lot faster than reading English, but I think that’s a normal thing for second languages you’re still learning.
Edit: oh oops I misunderstood your last question, it took me maybe a year to start on news articles and maybe another 6 months to get comfortable with them. Totally YMMV depending on how much and how seriously you study, this wasn’t anything like full time study for me.
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.
