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A comment on Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Create App Content. Parent comment

Re:Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Cr... by lgessler on Monday January 08, 2024 @05:23PM (#38919141)
IMO this is a misunderstanding of the product.

This might be a cynical take, but I think that for most users of Duolingo, it functions more as a game than as a tool which produces substantial gains in language knowledge. I'm a computational linguist, and whenever on hearing this people ask me what I think about Duolingo, I like to say it's language-flavored entertainment.

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Re:Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Cr... by Aeolun on Monday January 08, 2024 @08:45PM (#38921164)
So what do you think one should use if not Duolingo?
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Re:Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Cr... by lgessler on Monday January 08, 2024 @09:55PM (#38921681)
The gold standard is immersion, everyone agrees on that. Most people can't have that, so a mix of language instruction, conversation with native speakers, and exposure to appropriately challenging texts with memorization tools like Duolingo or Anki as a _supplement_ is the next best thing.
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Re:Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Cr... by demondemidi on Monday January 08, 2024 @05:30PM (#38919219)
_____-flavored entertainment pretty much describes everything our culture consumes over TCP/IP.
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Re:Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Cr... by bavarianbob on Monday January 08, 2024 @05:39PM (#38919354)
Is it necessary to specify TCP/IP? Is it not also applicable to books? Reading piles of pulp fiction is subtly different than language-flavored entertainment.
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