A week after declaring that AI would eventually replace contract workers at the language-learning app, Duolingo’s CEO said the company was “continuing to hire” and would support its existing workers in getting up to speed on the technology.
It follows buzzy startup Klarna in backing off an AI-first promise.
Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO, took to LinkedIn on Thursday to walk back a previous stance pushing AI use over human employees.
Duolingo is absolute shit for the basic sentence structure and rules because nothing is explained. Especially if learning a language with a different script like cyrilic or arabic or chinese writting.
I had some issues with norwegian because certain rules were not really clear and also not explained. They also removed the comments part where people could discuss the sentences and such.
Once you know the basics duolingo actually becomes usable as a vocabulary expansion and maybe listening and speaking exercises.
Yea, i used to occasionally use it to test myself, about once a month.
Once I learnt the basics from the teacher and learnt 1K high frequency words on my own from a anki deck, I found I could read books and understand podcasts meant for learners. This never happened when I was using duolingo. When I used Duolingo, I would try every few week to read some native stuff and I never saw much improvement compared to the improvement I saw immediately after some lesson with a teacher.
After that I ditched duolingo and avoid other similar type of apps. I think apps that focus on high frequency vocab, like speakly (paid), clozemaster(paid) or even 1k or 5k ANKI deck are probably better, they are also using normal sentences.
I am still a beginner but now I focus more on consuming the language. I also see no harm using duolingo as a way to test yourself every now and then since its free.