#duolingo course

[tolkienreader1996]

I’m taking German on duolingo and my mum is taking Latin and sometimes we speak sentences that we learn to each other which leads to some funny moments.

Me: “hast du einen Mahn?” (Do you have a husband)

Mum: “Minime sum femina.” (No I’m a woman)

[allinllachuteruteru]

Duolingo is NOT what it used to be.

“Duolingo is ‘sunsetting the development of the Welsh course’ (and many others)”.

I’ve used Duolingo since 2013. It used to be about genuinely learning languages and preserving endangered ones. It used to have a vibrant community and forum where users were listened to. It used to have volunteers that dedicated countless hours and even years to making the best courses they could while also trying to explain extremely nuanced and complex grammar in simple terms.

In the past two years it feels like Von Ahn let the money talk instead of focusing on the original goal.

No one truly had a humongous problem with the subscription tier for SuperDuolingo. We understood it: if you can afford to pay, help keep Duolingo free for those who couldn’t.

It started when the company went public. Volunteers were leaving courses they created because they warned of differing longterm goals compared to Duolingo’s as a company; not long after it was announced that the incubator (how volunteers were able to make courses in the first place) would be shut down. A year goes by and the forums—the voice of the users and the way people were able to share tips and explanations—is discontinued. A year or two later, Duolingo gets a completely new makeover—the Tree is gone and you don’t control what lesson you start with. With the disappearance of the Tree, all grammar notes and explanations for courses not in the Big 8 (consisting of the courses made before the incubator like Spanish/French/German/etc. and of the most popular courses like Japanese/Korean/Chinese/etc.) are removed with it. Were you learning Vietnamese and have no idea how honorifics work without the grammar notes? Shit outta luck bud. Were you learning Polish and have absolutely no clue how one of the declensions newly thrown at you functions? Suck it up. In a Reddit AMA, Von Ahn claims that the new design resulted in more users utilizing the app/site. How he claims that statistic? By counting how many people log into their Duolingo account, as if an entire app renovation wouldn’t cause an uptick in numbers to even see what the fuck just happened to the courses.

Von Ahn announces next in a Reddit AMA that no more language courses will be added from what there already is available. His reasoning? No one uses the unpopular language courses — along with how Duolingo will now be doing upkeep with the courses already in place. And here I am, currently looking on the Duolingo website how there are 1.8 million active learners for Irish, 284 thousand active learners for Navajo, and even 934 thousand active learners for fucking High Valyrian. But yea, no one uses them. Not like the entire Navajo Nation population is 399k members or anything, or like 1.8 million people isn’t 36% of the entire population of Ireland or anything.

And now this. What happened to the upkeep of current courses? Oh, Von Ahn only meant the popular ones that already have infinite resources. Got it. Duolingo used to be a serious foundational resource for languages with little resources while also adding the relief of gamification.

It pisses me off. It really does. This was not what Duolingo started out as. And yea, maybe I shouldn’t get invested in a dingy little app. But as someone who spent most of her adolescence immersed in language learning to the point where it was literally keeping me alive at one point, to the point where languages felt like my only friend as a tween, and to the point where friendships on the Duolingo forums with likeminded individuals my age and other enthusiasts who even sent me books in other languages for free because they wanted people to learn it, the evolution of Duolingo hits a bitter nerve within me.

~End rant.

[karmagotme]

It's been announced that DuoLingo will stop updating Welsh courses. They've always championed endangered languages in the past but articles say they want to focus more on popular languages like Spanish and French. The following is a link to a petition to get the First Minister of Wales to work with the DuoLingo CEO and get them to save the course.

As someone who is learning Welsh, it's devastating news. Yes, there is still Say Something in Welsh and other methods, but DuoLingo is also extremely helpfull, especially for anyone who may not be able to afford all of the later courses in SSIW.

So please, signage would be most appreciated.

EDIT: Please don't think you have to live in Wales to sign this! I signed and I live in Australia. Share this with your language-learning friends around the world!

[sheliesshattered]

[possessable]

[danikoshi-doodles]

Going back to my roots (IbisPaint finger drawings)

Protip if you don't have pen pressure mess with the Speed - Thickness setting of your brush absolute life saver. Medibang get onto this 🤩

[sneez]

victor kain chronic pain nation rise up (credit to @transdankovsky for this idea :-D)

/ id: two digital drawings. the first image shows victor kain and daniil dankovsky sitting together; daniil is taking victor’s pulse. inside a speech bubble above victor’s head is a screenshot of a question from the duolingo russian course, in which the sentence ‘я – хороший пациент, у меня всегда всë болит’ is translated as ‘i am a good patient, i always have pain everywhere’. the second image shows daniil looking politely horrified. end id. /

[salvadorbonaparte]

Can we talk about how two of the big name language learning sites (Duolingo and Memrise) have both simultaneously lost in quality and are trying to completely change their own thing so much that they're nearly unusable now

[tolkienreader1996]

Just got to fifty days on my German lessons.

If anyone wants to chat with me in German please feel free I don’t have the opportunity to talk with any German speakers where I live

[alice-makes-things]

Withnail & I (1987)

[hesgomorrah]

how to let my duolingo followers (all two of them) know that i have not started korean lessons for k-pop reasons (i have started them for much more embarrassing reasons)

[allinllachuteruteru]

I didn't realize how much my Duolingo rant would strike a similar nerve with so many people... it's honestly inspiring me to make some language resource master posts of my own to share with everyone? I saw in the tags people definitely wanting Welsh resources and one call for Japanese.

Can yall either reply to or reblog this with the language that you're desperately needing resources for? I'll try my best to put together a list here (similar to my Quechua masterpost).

[baejax-the-great]

Odysseus definitely has a fake driver's license because he couldn't be bothered to stand in line at the Greek DMV

[desruc]

I mean wouldn't it be funny if people changed their names en masse on duolingo to "no to ai"? or something similar? :D

[docbrownstudies]

just a reminder that learning doesn't stop when you graduate or you leave school. you can keep teaching yourself new things. you can read textbooks or borrow books from the library. you can watch tons of free videos on youtube and learn a new skill or educate yourself on a topic you've always been interested in. you can still take pretty notes. you can still learn a new language. learning doesn't have to end once you leave the classroom.

[jakuwais]

Translate this sentence:

かっこいいべんごしとやさしいいしゃ

A cool lawyer and a nice doctor

✅ Nicely done!