I know they sometimes get a bad rap (especially recently with the lay offs https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/10/duolingo-ai-layoffs/), but it’s still a nice app to use to get started with a language
I have been going through Japanese lessons for 258 days (counting today). My goal is at least a full year. Got less than 100 days to go!
I can just about do what I set out to accomplish: Understand anime without subtitles. 😎
I know they sometimes get a bad rap
In terms of their language learning, they proudly make the decision that any time they have to choose between making the app fun and making it better at teaching, they choose fun.
Which sounds bad at first, until you realise…people who aren’t enjoying what they do are more likely to quit. And people who have quit aren’t learning the language at all. Quite a clever bit of thought there, really.
It’s hard to find a big tech company that hasn’t been laying off like crazy lately. I just hit 200 days yesterday learning French.
Félicitations !
That’s crazy. Can’t imagine to stick to a routine for 5 years consistently.
Very impressive indeed
I couldn’t imagine myself doing it either tbh, but I started learning on Duolingo as a personal challenge: to prove to myself that I can still learn something new every day and allay my irrational fear that I’m getting too old to improve at anything.
And it worked. That fear is gone now, but the streak goes on. Not letting it go cause I’m that stubborn.
Would you say you’re fluent in a language as a result of this?
I think so? But it’s not like I spent more than 5 minutes a day practicing in the past 3 years or so. My sessions certainly go down depending on how busy I get.
Also fun fact: I had to practice German during my wedding. Didn’t go well with the wife but now she gets it. Hehe
2200+ fire streak since I joined 10 years ago (multiple languages). Lost the streak a few times before. I’m not fluent but maintaining it helps me to improve a bit every day.
Impressive, which languages are you learning?
Thanks. A few of them but main focus is Spanish. What about you?
I’m learning Spanish too! We should create a community to practice ha ha
Good idea. That’s what I’m missing about Duolingo tbh. Let’s start it. Maybe we should make a discord or alternative?
I was more thinking about a Lemmy community, I asked about a Spanish instance a few days ago on [email protected], seems like there isn’t any at the moment.
I have been thinking about it for a while, I’ll keep you posted about the potential options
What’s wrong with this community if you want to keep it on Lemmy? I think it would fragment the community unnecessarily
We are not talking about the same thing, I was thinking more about a Spanish-specific community, where we could practice in that language :)
To my knowledge, there is none active so far, (https://lemmy.ml/c/espanol and https://lemmy.ml/c/spain being quite dead), there is one recent message on [email protected], but I’m not a fan of having all communities on LW
0, I quit
Before I killed it, I had 443, and easily could have kept going if I had desired
The layoffs and AI thing are only a partial reason for me leaving The whole volunteer shutdown when that happened, hiding 4 of their courses, and some other minor bad decisions made me stop Not to mention, Duolingo is very slow at times and doesn’t teach any grammar unless you happen to be learning one of the 3 top languages
Makes sense. Are you aware of any open source alternative?
Librelingo is the only thing I’ve seen close to what Duolingo tries to be, but sadly it seems under-developed and doesn’t offer anything other than very beginner Spanish so far
