Duolingo is very much on the Enshittification path, seems like they fired a number of translators and have the rest just proofreading AI.
For the interested, here’s the place where you can request your personal data and delete your account
You must log in or register to comment.
I just said to someone yesterday on Mastodon that it seems as though they’re not using humans any more, because WTF is this shit?
Interesting, I usually question my English skills if something like this happens!
It’s because a good translation is not (always) literal.
In the German version it says taglich in hamburg. In English you would indeed put an adverb (like daily) at the end. It works the other way around but it’s not really what a native English speaker would say.
Not true at all. OP’s construction is perfectly valid english.
Absolutely this. I’d have argued that ‘every day’ is a more idiomatic translation than ‘daily’, and what native speakers would say, but that’s irrelevant. English tends to emphasise the end of sentences as the most important part, so all these translations are correct depending on the nuance that you intend:
- Daily in Hamburg, many ships arrive (as opposed to eg. cars, or few ships)
- Daily, many ships arrive in Hamburg / Many ships arrive daily in Hamburg (as opposed to eg. Bremen)
- Many ships arrive in Hamburg daily (as opposed to eg. weekly)
Wouldn’t question any of those constructions as a native speaker. In fact, original responders’ example was why I gave up on Duolingo myself originally, some years ago. Translating ‘future tense’ sentences from Spanish into English or back again is always going to be a matter of opinion, since English doesn’t have the verb conjugations that Spanish does. Guessing the ‘sanctified answer’ is tedious, when a lot of the time it’s not even the most natural form of a sentence.
Isn’t English able to disambiguate by using helper words like “will” or “would”?
What tenses can’t be translated completely?
That’s almost exactly the problem. English uses helper words exclusively for future tense, and indeed, helper words like ‘to’ to form an infinitive. ‘Will’ is the helper word to show that something is a fact, that it is definite - grammatically, it is indicative. (The sun will rise tomorrow.) ‘Would’ is the helper word to show that something is an opinion, or dependent on something else - grammatically, it is subjunctive. (If you push that, it would fall; if it was cheaper, I would buy it.)
Spanish has both helper words for future tense (conjugations of ‘ir’, analogous to ‘going to’, often used in speech) and straight-up conjugations for future tense (doesn’t exist in English; often used in writing). It also conjugates verbs differently if they’re indicative, subjunctive, or imperative (asking or telling someone to do something). This is how Spanish manages to have fifty-odd ways to conjugate every verb, which is very confusing to English speakers who make do with three ways and helper words.
Translating a ‘future tense sentence’ for Duolingo requires you to have psychic powers about whether something is fact or opinion, which helper words are wanted, and so on, and it usually comes down to guessing between multiple ‘correct’ answers, which Duo will reject all but one of.
Yeah, this is frustrating.
I can handle absurd sentences like “The dog is cooking the dinner”, and actually finds them beneficial because it prevents me from guessing the whole sentence.
But this is a sign that not enough human efforts are poured into create permutation of the answers.
I actually see a learning purpose in those ridicilous sentences.
I’ll far more likely remember the cat that works at the small hospital than if Juan does it.
I think a lot about writing a story about some sort of Enshittification Avenger. So when a reasonably good service decides to enshittify, the avenger breaks into their board’s house and beats the living shit out of them.
I wasn’t quite sure what to think about this, so I’ve asked my local LLM. Seems it is fine.
Holy shit it’s on the money
It generally doesn’t have a high opinion of translators (note that the emojis here are inserted as path markers to help with prompt debugging - but everyting else is from the LLM):
…soon to come to your favorite corporation’s C suite’s Windows 11 desktop’s Copilot assistant for empowering the synergies of staying relevant in a high stakes market environment.
lmao what’s wrong with your llama
I noticed that they stopped giving free streak freezes two weeks ago. I have a 1200 day streak and my premium sub renews this month but I might just switch to another platform.
What other platform is available?
Anecdotally, a friend who’s pretty handy at languages uses more Memrise than Duolingo now. Similar sort of setup, but with a different style of delivery - more visual cues and a better repetition approach.
I just tried it out and I like it a lot better than duolingo.
Duolingo is super gamified and you can’t keep practicing after you made a few mistakes. I just practiced for an hour with memrise and it was nice. There’s also video exercises in the app, and you can also practice chatting (with an AI probably?). I hope it holds up.
I would love to compare babbel too, but Arabic is not available there.
They also use AI.
in my experience, Memrise teaches you useful phrases much faster, while Duolingo drills you about horses eating blue apples and turtles wearing yellow hats.
To be fair, as a Duolingo hater myself, I do see the logic in teaching wacky phrases. It at least gives me the impression that it makes it easier to improvise sentences based on the grammar you’ve learnt by drilling “the bear should eat some cheese when it rains” or whatever.
I’ve found Babble to be okay
Do you mean Babbel? Hadn’t heard of it, will keep it in mind
Yup, that’s the one
The duolingo format was never popular with polyglots. The game format makes it easy to feel like you did something which is a great thing, but the is the only pro people who have learned multiple languages find with it.
There is a lot of debate about what the best way to start is, but all agree that you need to interact with the real language in real world type settings (watching a movie in the language with subtitles is real world, though you need to make an effort to listen not just read!) They also agree that time is important, you need to study at least an hour every day to make progress.
You definetely do not need to study an hour every day to make progress.Otherwise everyone learning a second or third language in school would be entirely fucked. For me personally the gamification has helped a lot with learning the basic concepts and words of a language.
If you want to get to the level of a native speaker of course no app can do that and i guess somewhere around B1/B2 you need to use the language in a real setting like you said.
Back in the day, I found Rosetta Stone to be a decent approach, it’s the only reason I still know how to say “the kid is under the plane” in Arabic, without barely knowing any Arabic (it was in the first free demo lessons). The context turned a bit dark after 9/11, though…
CDs are often available at libraries too!
Free streak freeze? As in an option to stop an arbitrary counter that does nothing from being reset?
Humans are so massively susceptible to gamification. It’s nice for providing motivation, but it ends up being like an addiction the way companies leverage it.
I don’t gamble, but if I did I would bet that the AI is going to teach a lot of mistakes and maybe even be the cause of someone saying something wrong, like an insult instead of a greeting or something.
Sayonara, Duolingo.
As a writer on the internet with no power to stop these companies from scraping my work, you now want to teach me using someone else’s stolen words and teach someone English using mine. Go fuck yourself.
The circle of life continues, and literacy goes down. AI cannot proofread, it merely says “these letters usually go with these”. AI screws up, people get taught shit language, they use it, it gets used as training data, rinse and repeat.
Absolutely the large language models are over glorified word predictors that get it wrong. I’d go so far as to say, they get it wrong nearly all the time.
The Extinction level meteor can’t come soon enough.
Time to pack it in and give some other microorganism a shot at the evolutionary big-leagues. Maybe they’ll do better.
I’ve seen quality drops of Duolingo, ever since their … IPO, sadly.
Anyway, here’s some ways you can milk the rest of the Duolingo before completely abandoning it.
- Use the web version, and type in all the answers if it’s possible. Selecting words are good for introducing new words (and reminder in case you forgot), but by typing it on your own, it’s faster to commit into memory.
- Use classroom mode to get unlimited hearts, create your own classroom and invite yourself in. I assume that Duolnigo will probably eventually stop this loophole
- Use search engine to search for the sentences you’re unsure of. No, don’t use machine translation, but search on the internet, and see if the sentence ever being used by the sites (news, academic, or personal homepage) using the target language.
I sadly still don’t know what other comparable free alternatives to Duolingo. Anki is great, but it’s largely flashcard for words, not sentences (unless you want to create your own deck). The others require subscription fee.
Other methods? Search for pdf of language grammar files, there are a lot out there. Some are godawful to read, especially those ‘Comprehensive Grammar Guide’ books. Some are amazing, e.g. Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese.
To add to the list of resources:
Todaku Books offer leveled difficulty, so even if you are starting out with Japanese there is something for you to read. The books are Creative Commons licensed, so don’t pay for them if you don’t want to.
Duolingo, the app to work on something every day for years and be no more skilled in that ability than if you did nothing. Now fewer people will have useless jobs which is a problem since in many ways it’s difficult to survive working a useful job.
Duolingo isn’t a good resource for learning a language, it’s focus is user retention
Innovative Language and Lingodeer are better
My experience is that duolingo is a good component of language learning but is bad as a whole package. I have that, a flash card app, daily word games, and a YouTube channel for a children’s TV network in my language. None of them individually would teach me the language, but collectively they reinforce each other and fill in many gaps. Alas, neither innovative language nor lingodeer have the language I want at the moment.
What are the flash card and word game apps?
I use DuoCards for flash cards. The word games are FOCLACH (basically wordle in Irish), litreach (guess words from people saying them in 3 Irish dialects) and seafóid (basically Waffle in Irish). The games are all browser based apps so not in app stores, but DuoCards is.
ETA while DuoCards has built in flash cards, I usually make my own based on the words I learn from all the other sources, and get the translation and grammar details from teanglann.ie, tearma.ie, or nualeargais.ie
I’ve learned more with Duolingo than any other resource to be fair.
But, retention means repetition, so you learn more, right? Not trying to defend Duolingo but I’ve been enjoying it for the last 3 years or so. Almost got 1000 day streak and my Spanish is getting better.
It is fair to say it helps people stick with it but it ends up avoiding harder facets and puts more focus on memorizing rather than learning
Well, proper language learning is more about memorization than understanding. People learn language as a child through repetition, and the understanding comes later.
it’s not really memorization, children don’t learn languages by sitting there desperately burning every word into their memory, they hear it repeated over and over and the brain just passively soaks it up and eventually starts making sense of it.
And i’m pretty sure this is why people who learn to speak languages in school are generally terrible at them, it’s shoved down their throat and the brain is given no time to process understanding the language before trying to speak it.
I’ve found that my ability to speak languages i learnt in school has become significantly better a couple years after the fact, presumably from my brain having had time to process the information.Just because people learn that way as a child, that doesn’t mean that it’s the best way to learn.
Duolingo isn’t a good resource for learning a language, it’s focus is user retention
These two statements contradict each other. To learn a language you must practice it every day, week after week, month after month. It’s an appropriate application of addictive game mechanics, because our motivation doesn’t last long: 1-3 months for most people.
Duolingo might not be the best place to learn some languages (e.g. German), but it can be a very helpful tool for everyday practice. And stuff like streaks, leagues, and other things are rather helpful.
An advent calendar has user retention but it’s hardly a tool for learning languages
Mate, just learn how to admit when you’re wrong. That’s a useful skill in life.
Does that not disprove your claim that user retention and learning contradict?
People, there is an opensource alternative just waiting for your contributions https://librelingo.app/
As far as I LOVE this kind of thing, people really should stop using Libre something for their versions. Sounds weird
Why? It’s just Spanish for “free”. And it’s become pretty much of a standard to represent FOSS.
Any languages besides Spanish planned?
Basque AFAIK, but it’s one dude. He’s working on making it possible to contribute language courses without his help or much technical knowledge.
Basically, a lot of the core code is done, what’s missing is a nice UI for learning and language course editor, because at the moment it’s just a bunch of files.
duolingo is a textbook example of a nice small startup, with great ideas that is then completely overtaken my MBAs who run it into the ground as soon as there is enough of a client base to Sell. you fucking fucks all suck.
Similar to Memrise, which was really fun when you could make your own mems using imagesearch and customise everything… And now is a rubbish duolingo clone.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
The popular language-learning app Duolingo cut 10 percent of its contracted translators last month amid a push to integrate generative AI into its services, multiple outlets have reported.
It’s another alarming turn in an increasingly AI-laden labor market in which company leaders continue to implement automated technology wherever they can — often, as in this case, at the cost of human jobs.
According to Bloomberg, the firings were doled out just a few weeks after Duolingo bragged in a November letter to shareholders that the company was harnessing AI to produce “new content dramatically faster.”
Duolingo also reportedly uses AI to generate some of the voices heard in various in-app language scripts and to prompt AI-generated feedback to users.
To make matters even more depressing: in a late December Reddit thread, a site user claiming to be one of the fired Duolingo translators alleged that their former team’s remaining contractors are now tasked with simply checking AI-generated text for errors.
Trusting translation AI — meanwhile pushing remaining contractors to fact-check presumably high numbers of those “dramatically faster” content outputs — may well come at the cost of such nuance, potentially flattening the learning process and rendering language robotic.
Saved 52% of original text.
Disappointing, but not surprising. I know I’m not going to “learn” a language with Duolingo, but it’s been nice recognizing a few words and phrases when I hear them. But I don’t really trust that a bunch of overworked and underpaid contractors are going to catch every error using AI is going to introduce. At least there are already alternatives in this thread for me to look through.
The article seems to indicate they are using to reduce the amount of work that have to do in writing prompts, but still have translators review what the AI spits out. I think that’s different to SuperDuo which I believe is mean’t to use AI to be more conversational.
This is going to be a wild year for the white-collar bubble. Always remember that corporate wants “good enough for cheap” not “best in class.”
Yeah I’m not surprised or angry about it, isn’t this basically what has always happened? Like at some point we had elevator operators, some company automated the elevator and now there are basically zero elevator operators.
This is just happening all the time, like when I was a kid every gas station had people working at the station. Nowdays most stations around me are completely without workers, it’s all self checkout (like supermarkets, McDonalds, etc).
You are right but the problem here is it’s happening all at once on several fields. It’s not just elevator operators, it’s anyone doing basic design tasks, writing, translating, voice narrating, and basic programming. And that’s a lot of jobs.
Yet, unemployment in most of the western world is very low. That could change, of course. We’ll likely need universal basic income down the road. Or at least some very enhanced unemployment benefits.
It’s only been one year. I’d like to see how this topic aged in 2026. AI is developing at an unprecedented speed for a socioeconomic phenomenon of its calibre.
Edit: And yes we might need some kind of government support. What scares me is, where do you get the money to support such a large population?
where do you get the money to support such a large population?
AI supporters would tell you that productivity improvements made with AI tech will make that possible.
If you honestly believe this, I have a bridge in London to sell you.
My career was as a copyeditor, and we were the canaries in the coal mine when it came to learning about “good enough.” First came the buyouts of anyone with any longevity, then the annual layoffs started (and continued for nearly 10 years) until editing was completely excised from the role and anyone remaining was just a pair of hands moving rectangles for several papers on any given night. Cancellations were less than we’d cost.
Thing is, there was a fairly long exit ramp for those of us smart enough to see the endgame (I was not among them, believing there’d always be sufficient demand for rigorously vetted and edited news to keep papers afloat).
This time around, we’re not even 14 months out from the public release of ChatGPT, and having used just the free model, its abilities do raise the question “why do we have someone doing this?” for a number of fields I’ve worked in. Layoffs are happening without warning caused by something not even on most people’s radars mid-2022, and there’s no way it slows down from here.
Couldn’t agree more, you make a point with the timeline. It’s changing too fast. And it’s not only ChatGPT but also image generation tools such as Midjourney. There are AI for 3D models too now, which I believe will be of industry standard quality in a year or two.
AI is a phenomenon of a similar weight as the Industrial Revolution, but its much faster development means a lot of people can’t keep up or change careers
