Let’s also replace the customers by AI, that way the whole system will really be “AI first” and self-sufficient.
it’s a matter of time (or more likely has already happen) where an AI company ends up having only AI users, it makes money be selling adds to show to the users, which are all AI bots, and then selling those bots as user data.
then said company celebrates that it has no humans involved making a shit ton of profit.
So Twitter?
Afraid to find out what an AI Karen would be like.
So if they’re using a ChatGPT wrapper to teach me languages, why do I need Duolingo? Copilot is free.
This kind of thing is what confuses me as a business model. Take audio books for example, Audible is pivoting to ai voices. Why would people spend $20 on an audio book with an ai voice when they can just spend $1.99 on the eBook and run it through an ai voice program themselves?
Because idle that takes off and becomes a threat to their business model, they will just lobby to make such a thing illegal.
most people have absolutely no idea how to ‘run it through an ai voice program’ … yet
True enough. I suspect that “yet” will come pretty soon though. I’m hoping all of these ‘early AI adopter’ companies fuck themselves out of business. With the tech as it is, most companies pivoting their products to AI on the user-end are just introducing a middle man. Once people catch on to it and realize they can just cut out the middle man, they hopefully won’t last long.
Copilot is free.
Free.
Free with ads.
Freemium with ads.
Free trial with tiered subscription service.
New subscription tiers with reduced ads. Premium package for boosts to service.
Please enter your credit card number and watch the ad to unlock device.
Please drink verification can to continue…
If it’s free you are the product.
This is a fun quote to bandy around but I’d argue when it comes to AI it’s more that we’re in the honeymoon phase. The platforms are building the user bases. Not to say aggressive monetization isn’t just over the horizon.
if the labor cost goes down, the service should become cheaper.
if it worked like that, i’d love to have AI replace humans.
AI isn’t the problem. capitalism is.
Apparently they’ve already been incorporating it and it’s very inaccurate. I’ve decided to stop using them and have switched to LingoDeer and MemRise. Really pleased with how much better they are.
Why not Anki? Ankidroid works well and there are many great community decks for all kinds of languages (and other topics too BTW).
I’m not great with ONLY flashcards so I personally feed my brain a variety. Anki is great from what I’ve heard
I started out with memrise, as it was very accessible and I wanted to start learning Japanese. It was fun but it’s also very limiting. A mixture of Smouldering Durtles, Human Japanese and Ankidroid really accelerated things. And then the ginormous post-covid upswing in my industry came, with less colleagues than before and my brain got fried. Still trying to recover from that with therapy and whatnot. Yeah, I lost a lot of progress that way.
Any who, that was specific to learning Japanese. Wishing you success with your endeavors! Learning other languages is a huge Eye-opener for understanding other cultures better.
Smouldering Durtles, Human Japanese
I have never heard of these! I’m going to check them out bc I am learning Japanese and French. Thank you!
Smouldering Durtles is great for learning kanji, if that’s part of your goal. In all likelihood you won’t want to do that though.
Human Japanese is great for learning grammar!
I’ve tried AnkiDroid but couldn’t really figure out how to use it. I downloaded the Spanish 5000 one which seems cool tho.
I can also recommend Pimsleur. A bit more expensive, but features more traditional style courses, while offering a lot of what Duolingo has. Plus actual topics with grammar, not just random words!
The AI slop is why I quit Duolingo after my 1500+ day streak.
Is there an alternative? I just started using it but the experience is incredibly grating, especially the way they gate your progress behind “lives” that stop you learning unless you can pay.
Yarr, thar be an alternative. Though some might’n be thinking acquiring such booty be illegal.
So they’ve killed themselves before adding Armenian.
Makes sense.
As an Armenian with family murdered by the Turks. What was the point of this?
Trying to help Duolingo add Armenian is something I’ve read about in 2018 or something like that, and it’s still there. They are very firmly not interested.
I was also hoping they would add Afrikaans.
Well that’s some BS. Why the fuck don’t they have Armenian? Are they Turkish run?
I dunno, but there were plenty of volunteers. Eastern Armenian is far from a dead language after all. Especially when comparing to Icelandic or Welsh. Those are awesome languages too, though, alongside Coptic and Assyrian.
If you looking to replace dualingo, check with your local library, they may offer free access to different language learning apps. I was able to get Rosetta Stone for free using my library. And they also have access to Muzzy and Transparent language.
i cancelled my subscription and told them why
Oh no! How will I pretend to learn a language now? Woe is me.
I get the hate for Duolingo, but you can actually learn with it
Duolingo got me enough vocabulary in Spanish to put the simplest sentences together, and then follow more robust lessons. I still think it was a good starting point, but I won’t use it anymore on principle.
Right? My partner has used it for years and is now able to read simple to medium books and watch some movies in the learned language.
My son is going to be sad that we don’t use duo anymore
your local public library (if in US) should offer free language courses online - all you need is a library card
Maybe time to boycott the service (which anyway was not that spectacular)
So is there any Duolingo alternative that teaches Esperanto and Indonesian?
is indonesian that difficult? it has no tenses
Esperanto you can learn on lernu.net
Fuck their greed, I know that the bulk of their users wouldn’t caffè if the CEO started shooting puppies on Main Square, but they can train their AI on Deez
It’s just a tool like anything else. You can’t put the genie back in the lamp. Some jobs go away and new jobs are created. Look at every industrial revolution we’ve had in the past. AI technology is not to the point of replacing mankind.
The difference is that the actual revolutions like that generally use technology that actually works.
This is the kind of guy who’s cool and okay about AI untill it takes their job.
Honestly, at this point I sort of wish there was a new technology that was as advanced and useful and revolutionary as the various hype-waves of the last few years have claimed, be it block chain, hyperloop or now AI. They all share in common that the hype just refuses to die because scammers love them even though their actual use cases are extremely limited.
Have you ever used AI tools? What kinds of things are you expecting it to do? It can do a lot of minor tasks well.
Yeah. Which means, replacing all workers with AI will not work out well. A wrench alone can’t fix your plumbing.
It can definitely replace some jobs with minimal oversight.
Yeah, except that ai is almost 40% wrong, yet it pretends to know everything and sounds very convincing. It will never tell you “i don’t know” or “that’s a bad idea, don’t do that” like a real person or friend would do but instead encourages your with everything. Still, app developers sell ai chat bots as “virtual friends” to insecure people.
Of course any implementation will need oversight, but it can do many things as good or better than a human.
But AI can be inaccurate, which is a problem when trying to teach people things
For sure. You don’t just let it run the show. Nobody is saying there won’t be oversight.
“the genie” lmfao
if i knew you fucking people were going to do another round of pretending AI was real, i would have taken up sky diving in 2012
“you fucking people” wow. So aggressive. Parachute-less skydiving was probably a good idea.
yeah i aggressively dislike people who believe in genies and it makes me want to kms because you never go away, is that a problem?
Too many bots on social media these days. Doesn’t understand simple idioms. I guess I was wrong about AI. It is reallllly stupid doo doo dumb.
Duolingo is a tragedy. They really quickly realized that you don’t make money teaching things - you make it on retention and gamification.
Mango languages is great if your library has a subscription. I believe the US’s foreign service materials are also really good, if you want effective but boring.
I was so upset last year when they got rid of the comment section. There were often helpful explanations for WHY you conjugate the word that way, or how native speakers might use a different word.
Never used it but that sounds like such a neat concept.
Does anyone know of any free language learning apps that have a comment section? (And a user base that utilizes the comment section, of course.)
I don’t know how good this feature was on Duolingo, but there’s a site/app called HiNative that does a really good job at this sort of thing.
that looks cool. Thank you for pointing it out!
Yeah, the comment section was amazing…and then they came out with “max”, where you get “explain my answer” for a premium, powered by a [notoriously fallible] LLM. This is the definition of enshitification.
I’m pretty frustrated they removed dark mode as well, made it very hard to do a lesson before bed.
Duolingo? Mine still has dark mode. Maybe just for subscriptions?
One of the languages I am learning is an endangered native language, and it was super helpful to see knowledgeable people in the comments.
i encountered some people that spoke some MAYAN. would like to learn it, because thier pictographs are interesting.
That’s cool as heck.
That’s honestly enraging!? Such data can be greatly valuable for learners, and the native speakers’ community, and linguistics.
It was an amazing resource. For them just to nuke it completely was very frustrating.
Yeah but fuck learning, there’s money to be made, amirite?
Literally canceled because of that change. Fuck them.
This “AI first” thing was the last straw for me, but ever since I noticed that the comment section was gone there’s been a bad taste in my mouth. I wonder how many of us there are.
Don’t worry, you can upgrade to Duolingo Max for even more money and have the AI explain it. (Seriously.)
Yeah, I saw that. I have the family plan (some people in the house go through a lot of hearts (mistakes)) and still have to see ads for Max.
It’s not gamification that’s the issue. That aspect really held my attention and gave me consistency.
It’s the push to a pay-to-win model that made me quit. They made the challenges harder and harder to complete without using boosts, and to use the boosts you had to use gems. And gems were really hard to get unless you bought them with real money. It doesn’t matter if you have a super subscription (or whatever it’s called), you still had to pay to get the gems.
And the prices for the gems were just as predatory and the disgusting mobile gaming industry. Never should there be an option to spend over $20 for in-game consumables, nevermind over $100. It’s sick.
Tell me more about Mango library subscriptions? How would one determine?
Your local library may have a Mango subscription plan for card holders. You might be able to find it on their website but a librarian would definitely know.
The gameification part was good, it made it easier to keep up the habbit, though I recently got locked out for no apparent reason so apparently they just outright want to fail? Any good free alternatives? (I wasn’t using the paid version)
Here’s a website with those FSI courses I referenced earlier, as well as Peace Corps training materials. This is going to be the boring route. Drill drill drill, but you get good at it.
As a general strategy - on the Omniglot forums a billion years ago there was a method called Listen-Read which I think does wonders for me. You pick a longer book, preferably one you have enjoyed and read already in English. You get a copy of that book in English and your target language, as well as audiobook (let’s go with say, French), then you listen to the audio book in French while reading the book in English, then switch to listening to an English audiobook while reading the French book, then the audiobook in French while reading the French.
Librivox and Project Gutenberg are godsends. I did Candide this way, and part of Les Miserables. This is obviously less immediate fun/dopamine satisfying than Duolingo is, but will teach you to read better than Duolingo will. It’s not great at expressive language - while I can read Proust, my « je voudrais un Diet Coke » was not well received in Paris.
If you have a language in mind I can probably point you in some other directions.
What language(s)? Lots of good free resources.
LanguageTransfer.org looks good but I haven’t tried it myself.
Any good free alternatives?
You won’t like the idea but…
spoiler
pirating a textbook from Libgen/Anna’s Archive
Duolingo was shit for learning, for me at least.
So i left rather quickly, then came back hoping i could pick up some more Italian and noticed they summomed another paid tier. I wonder how many tiers they can summon up until they stop existing.
