Duolingo courses are no longer created by volunteers. They stopped the volunteer program in 2021 [1], right around the time they increased monetization efforts. They offered part-time jobs and a $4 million reward fund to previous volunteers when closing the program, which I thought was pretty kind.

[1] https://blog.duolingo.com/ending-honoring-our-volunteer-cont...

Ah thank you, I haven't kept in touch with Duolingo's progression in a few years. While now I see it as more ethical that Duolingo charges for content that they are paying to produce, I still feel like it's slower progression than if everybody could contribute (and those most adept at the language would probably just focus on reviewing PRs)

Disclaimer: I work for Duolingo, all opinions are my own and not those of my employer, etc.

Part of the reason that content is slower to produce now is just that the standards are much higher. Internally we draw a distinction between the old volunteer-contributed content and the new content which is aligned to CEFR guidelines for how languages should actually be taught. Aligning content like this is not only more expensive but also requires more coordination and oversight from domain experts compared to previous methods.

Thanks for the additional context.

I love HN for little nuggets of explanation like this.

Anecdotally, I am having a much better time with Duolingo since the last time I tried around 2018 - the changes to be properly made courses in line with CEFR is actually resulting in better learning.

Interesting. I thought part of the duo lingo magic was that it didn’t follow the beaten path for language acquisition.

What made you as a company change your mind?

Pretty sure it's to sell proficiency certificates, i.e. https://englishtest.duolingo.com/applicants Established institutions are more likely to accept Duolingo as equivalent to traditional language education if they follow the same standards.

Thank you for the insider insight, HN is a great community space.

I just started the Japanese course recently and was trying to figure out why a bunch of the criticism I read of Duolingo's course seemed irrelevant or inapplicable. I guess this pivot explains why to some degree.

When the Japanese course first came out it was of low quality, very short with kanji not being taught and even being mispronounced. It seems to have improved over time. I especially like the Stories feature.

Some random comments on Duolingo:

I honestly don't see the point of following CEFR for an app like Duolingo.

Professional and GOOD teachers, that love to teach and did that for several years, know how to teach a language. THey don't need to follow something such as CEFR to know if they do well and what is interesting to teach and in which order.

I find it more important to make interesting lectures which do not follow a standardized curriculum. When someone is learning a language in this way will naturally go toward a CEFR based courses if needed afterward, with a big head start and only when he feels ready.

Also, not allowing to see 'already seen' vocabulary is a very strange move for an app, I guess it's for preventing having the vocab in a app like anki which makes duolingo less useful, but still, even if I don't use such app, having to screenshot all the time to have my vocab is a total pain.

Finally, the app doesn't seem to understand which words/sentences you already know and master and clearly do not need to see for the 400time instead of new vocabulary. Even having maximum points all the time and very fast will usually result in the same vocab shown again and again. It seems like an almost basic statistical problem, so I don't get why it's not fixed.

Also, some vocab is very strange, for example using 'es tut mir leid' in German to just say 'I'm sorry' feels like the content is automatically generated instead of having a linguist or even a German behind.

I'm sure a million people have asked. But whats the reason for no firefox support with microphones? Is it a Duo thing or Firefox? I hate having to have Chrome installed on my desktop just to use a single website.

CEFR or not CERF, Duolingo is clearly designed to be addictive but not effective, because if it were effective people would stop using it.

Duolingo's goals are not the same as mine, and the best thing it does by far is to pretend (and make me believe) that I am learning a language.

More like Duolingo’s decline. They brought their mobile transaction money grubbing “hearts” system to the browser version punishing people for making mistakes (which is the opposite of how you learn a language). But of course you can pay to refill your hearts early!

I don't have time to dive into the source code right now, but how did you implement the types of questions?

I had the idea (I'm not saying it's original, it's just what I thought at the time) of course lessons consisting of a series of questions, and each question is defined as a JSON object.

There are built-in question-templates like multiple choice, free-form answer, or just true/false.

If a course needs something really specific, then it can implement a custom renderer for that new template type, so that a course isn't held back by the upstream project. If it's a template that might be useful for more people, then it can be integrated into the core project.

There's a dashboard where users can manage questions for each course. It's pretty basic right now:

- You can add multiple question. - Each question can have some content, one image and multiple options users can select. - Each option can have a title, an image and a feedback displayed to users when they select/confirm that option.

I want to add an option to import/export JSON. It's actually on the roadmap for v1:

- https://github.com/zoonk/uneebee/issues/41 - https://github.com/zoonk/uneebee/issues/40

In the future, I also want to implement some kind of plugin system because certain subjects require a different learning style. But I'm not sure yet how this would work. I need to think about it.

> In the future, I also want to implement some kind of plugin system because certain subjects require a different learning style. But I'm not sure yet how this would work. I need to think about it.

Right. People say that HelloChinese is better for Chinese because some of the question types are drawing Hanzi, so I think this is a perfect use case for a plugin system where a course could add a plugin for Hanzi/Kanji drawing and not be slowed down by the core developers.

Duolingo introduced drawing Hanzi a couple of months ago. Worth checking out their approach if you haven't seen it.

> There's a dashboard where users can manage questions for each course. It's pretty basic right now:

I think that while this might be useful for teachers, it might be more sustainable if courses were stored in a version controllable medium to facilitate multiple collaborators.

> it might be more sustainable if courses were stored in a version controllable medium to facilitate multiple collaborators

My initial thought was to actually use GitHub to store the content. Either on Markdown or JSON - to have some version control. I like how Exercism [1] does it. But I thought it would be hard for teachers - unfamiliar with Git - to update lessons.

Then, I thought about implementing a version control system for the project but I felt I was overcomplicating things for an MVP. But I like the idea of having some kind of version control to improve collaboration.

[1] https://exercism.org/

Right, I think that there should be an editor that can open a project folder (consisting of json files and assets like images or sound clips) that teachers can use and share with each other (because they understand copying a folder and naming it v2 then emailing it to a colleague), but that folder could also be uploaded as a repo to github for more organized projects.

You could also have a cloud service to store the project files, and then the teachers can just login to the editor and click save to upload their latest copy of the course.

Really appreciate introducing Spoonfed Chinese to me! I was looking for a good Anki deck about a year ago and couldn’t find anything good, this looks perfect for me.

Wow I’m really glad to have helped! Yeah it’s a nice deck and only $3 on gumroad (or at least that was the price when I bought it)