crazy how fast they ruined the reputation of this company. just a couple months ago, duo mascot and Duolingo streaks were cool and fun. they had a good thing going. but now it’s just another shit tech company again. they lost all the good will in like a month.

FTFY: Pretends to walk back his statements. Fools no one.

People are unfair with this “CEO”. Its statement helped me move on from duolingo, which has seen significant decline in quality while never going beyond “a moderately bad way to start learning”, toward better, more developed, more cared for, cheaper, solutions.

So, thanks for that.

How do these people become CEOs they’re as thick as several short planks nailed together.

Firstly every single company that has tried to replace its employees with AI has always ended up having issues. Secondly even if that wasn’t the case, people are not going to be happy about it so it’s not something you should brag publicly about.

If you’re going to replace all of your employees with AI just do it quietly, that way if it fails it’s not a public failure, and if it succeeds (it won’t) then you talk about it.

Bragging about replacing your employees publicly over and over before actually being able to do so might cause an employee crisis

Duolingo is one of those fad apps that are overrated but are exquisitely trash once you force yourself to use them just to say “Hey, I have learned a language!”. Honestly, it was pretty funny seeing Duolingo comment on videos on all that despite it feeling forced, replacing it with AI just signifies Duolingo’s slow and painful demise

If anyone wants to practice their Japanese or have questions, they can message me.

Tl;Dr: skip the apps unless they’re part of a bigger in-person course. Prefer reputable sources like pimsleur and mango languages. If you have no rush, get graded readers and watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, etc.

Ok, so here are my two cents on learning languages and the whole category of learning apps. They are all flawed on some major way or another. But mostly it is about pacing learning progress.

Teaching absolute beginners is easy. They know nothing, thus anything you show them will be progress. The actual difficulty when learning a language is finding appropriate material for your level of understanding, such that you understand most of it, but still find new things to learn. This is known as comprehensible input. The difficulty of most apps is that they are not capable of detecting then adapting study content accordingly to the student’s progress. So they typically go way too slow, or sometimes too fast. Leaving the student frustrated and halting learning.

Jumping with some nonzero knowledge into any app is also torture. It’s known as the valley of despair. The beginner content is too boring and dull, now that you know a bit, but the intermediate level is way too much of a gap for you yet.

My advice is to skip language learning apps. The “motivation via gamification hypothesis” is flawed and lacks nuance and understanding of behavioral science. People don’t stop studying out of a lack of tokens, gems, streaks or achievement badges. It’s because the content itself is uninteresting and bores them. Sure, the celebration and streaks work at first, but they usually lose effect by something known as reinforcement depreciation. The same stimulus shown too much or too frequently stops being gratifying. The biggest reward for learning a language is actually using it.

A method that is known to work is to find graded readers. Watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, social media, in the target language (avoid the language learning influencers) listen to native influencers speaking about topics you care about. Books work, in-person courses work, learning apps are good to start you up form absolute zero. But most learning happens on what you do in your everyday life. Using the language is the most effective way of becoming good at the language. Everything else is just excuses for using it.

What I’d wonder is why it’s such massive expensive for Duolingo to hire 2 or 3 people to cover a language anyway. Presumably most of the work is contractual - hire somebody competent to produce a course, get somebody to say the lines, refine the course based on feed back and that’s mostly it.

I deleted the app the second he said this. Get fucked, AI.

I mean, it is too late. Canceled my sub, won’t be coming back.

boring, broken garbage content. monthly subscription fee. get the fuck out of here

I love this headline so, so much

Where is the discussion for replacing CEOs with AI? Seems like predicting market trends based off of historical data and managing corporate resources would be just the sort of thing that AI would be good at. Plus it would cost way less and not require massive bonuses nor ownership of the company.