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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 mynameisash on Monday January 08, 2024 @06:04PM (#38919683)
When I started learning French (probably 8 years ago), I started with Duolingo. Pairing Duolingo with some other tools/methods, I made good progress, and before long, I outgrew it.

Last year, I decided I'd start working on Japanese, so I did the same thing I did before: hit Duolingo hard, listen to audiobooks to build up my phoneme recognition, etc. I was shocked at how slow progress was - not because I wasn't putting in the effort but because it had me redoing over and over and over again the same damn words and phrases. Gohan, mizu, sushi, gohan, gohan, mizu, gohan, sushi.

I was a proponent of the site/app for quite a while - even after I outgrew it - because I legitimately believed it helped me. Now that I've seen what it's become, I can't recommend it to anyone unless you strictly do it for entertainment value with no expectation of useful education.

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Re:Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Cr... by bugglebeetle on Monday January 08, 2024 @06:06PM (#38919710)
Yeah, I mean it’s almost like they’re incentivized to slow your progress so you stay subscribed every month or something…
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Re:Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Cr... by mynameisash on Monday January 08, 2024 @06:13PM (#38919797)
That's another thing: the 'enshittification' is in full-force with really terrible ads plus the not-bad-but-annoying Super Duolingo ads. I could probably deal with that if the platform was good, but as I mentioned, it's just not providing any education value (to me, at least; YMMV).
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Re:Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Cr... by gs17 on Monday January 08, 2024 @09:40PM (#38921591)
At the same time though, it's really easy to set your account as a classroom account and get most of the paid features.
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Re:Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Cr... by gs17 on Monday January 08, 2024 @09:51PM (#38921655)
It really needs something like Anki has where you can say "I know the word for rice confidently, don't ask me for a long time" with the space between repetitions extending based on your feedback.
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Re:Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Cr... by tehbeard on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @03:20AM (#38923663)
Some months back, one of the updates "reset/readjusted" my progress.

And it feels like that was the nexus point between it feeling like progress, and feeling like learning by rote. Even after getting past where i was pre-reset, it still was slow, rote memorization.

I got to 150 days, and the news about layoffs and AI was enough to have me reevaluate it and realise it has just become a pattern matching dopamine box.

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