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Domo ama Gato Mr. Roboto Domo Domo I am also irked

Also the guy who designed the owl is a horrid christian nationalist, source he went to my highschool. fuck you greg you stupid rich preppy bitch

Wow I wasn't aware of that backstory! In my experience the app simply feels like a video game with an educational flavor.

I knew there was a trick

My Dad recently sent me a reinvite but when I looked it up in Google Play, it was the diseased owl face and I didn't install.

It's most likely structured so that people far enough into the language to be intermediate or higher all get the same article and then Duolingo simply amalgamates the median translation from everyone in order to filter outliers

Is fucking everything a scam these days? Christ.

I assumed something scummy and this STILL surpassed my expectations

Also I tried to learn Korean through Duolingo and it didn't teach me half of Hangul (the Korean alphabet) (like, they hadnt added it in?) for months, which made learning it REAL TOUGH let me tell you!

Yeah at the time it was definitely framed that way (the slate article I linked covered Duolingo in a positive tone), but duolingo being pedagogically unsound combined with the profit motive makes a benign interpretation much harder to justify

Wonderful!!! Thanks a lot!!!!

It makes so much sense.... I couldn't understand why their Japanese sucked so much compared to the other ones

Honestly, that explains a lot

That would explain why the app is so pushy

This whole world needs a reset. lol

Yep. I tried to learn Spanish and French and it was not great. I barely retained anything and it was just not very good at teaching a language.

gamification is a plague on humanity

the only way one learns language is through comprehensible input. everything you do in classes is just bootstrapping. Duolingo is a particularly ineffective form of bootstrapping. (In their attempts to create magical constructs, AI cultists called this "the bitter lesson.")

Classes tend to just spread the material too thin, but it's pedagogically sound. Any non-scam course will teach you the grammar, structure, basic cultural concepts and such. But to acquire a language you need a lot more input than what any class will give you 95% of the learning is out the classroom

no wonder why i stopped using it