A place to post ridiculous posts from linkedIn.com
(Full transparency.. a mod for this sub happens to work there.. but that doesn't influence his moderation or laughter at a lot of posts.)
Honestly I was thinking of removing duo before this. It's just glorified flash cards making you memorize words associations instead of getting into how thimgs work. I still haven't gotten the rules of how verb conjugation works in Italian. Just gonna read the books I got.
Anyone had any luck getting refunded?
Are there any viable non-AI alternatives to Duolingo?
Probably not. Translation and language is perfect for AI to work on. People here may hate it, but no business in that market can afford hundreds of employees when the competition uses AI.
I was using Khan Academy when they went to AI. Suddenly my answers were being marked as incorrect, even though they matched the "correct" answer presented. Or they were marked incorrect becuase I used pi, when it said I could answer in terms of pi.
I'm expecting the same to happen here.
Anyon have luck getting a refund for a year subscription?
Sure they'll produce all the content they need.
But then they'll need even more resources to shift through the hallucinations.
Can anyone suggest a comparable alternative to Duolingo?
Neat. Here's how you can delete your account: https://www.duolingo.com/help/delete-my-account-and-data
For the first time ever, teaching as well as the best human tutors is within our reach.
No it fucking isn't. The video calls are awful and don't do anything to help you learn why what you said is wrong. Lilly just acts confused and ignores what you said. And in their normal explanations it just assumes why you didn't know something, gives an answer for what it guessed, and doesn't do anything else. The old explanations were much better than the new garbage they offer.
Opened the comments because I got stuck at this line for a bit. When I got to this part my brain added in commas and it took me a little because even though "teaching, as well as the best human tutors, is within our reach" doesn't really make sense, it still seems less nonsensical than without the commas.
Humans-last
Glad I finished my first Dutch unit just to get the basics and am deleting the app today. It feels like a real condemnation of the state of modern AI that I don't trust a large language model with languages.
He's not wrong though. I haven't read the whole post, but the fundamental change in teaching, i.e., having access to the world's knowledge in an individualized offering at a fraction of the cost for similar access before the LLM breakthrough is real.
I'm working on Spanish now with it and I have to admit it's significantly improved from the last time I used it a few years back. Fewer nonsense sentences to translate like "My bear loves your house", which was frustrating and felt so useless. There's way more listening and speaking modules, they are generally decent at speech to text, and the language pronunciation sounds more realistic with multiple very different voices.
However, I never know why I got a question wrong, and can't do anything to rectify that other than report that the AI made a mistake, which helps with their model training, but does absolutely squat for my learning. Even the more gamified exercises are just fancy tests, where you are expected to 'learn' by getting things wrong, seeing the correct answer and regurgitating it. The community forums and explanations are gone, and each module has maybe one or two example sentences that typically don't even cover the full range of content in the module.
My husband and I have a family plan, and he is a much more dedicated user than me, but I would never pay for duolingo on my own.
Just calling it out: The nonsense/goofy sentences were used because it was found by studies to be more effective for learning/recall.
That wasn't a flaw, just a poorly/not at all broadcasted feature.
I have found that Language Transfer is a far superior way to learn languages (including Spanish), and it's free (although I make a monthly donation)!
It is available as YouTube videos, SoundCloud MP3s, or on a very simple but effective app.
https://www.languagetransfer.org/
I think you mean this, your link is broken. I love them too and recommend them all the time (it's mostly a one guy effort actually, it's super impressive).
Thanks, I fixed it.
And yes, I agree that he is amazing. One guy teaching courses in Spanish, Italian, Greek, Arabic, French, German, Turkish, and Swahili!
I left after seeing a lot of useful community suggestions completely ignored for a long time. A few months later they finally closed the community making clear they won't hear anyone. I won't bother trying to get anything from them.
Good luck with that, I'll watch the outcome with great interest.
I haven't used the app for a while, but I still have it installed. The delete account button doesn't work, and neither does the feedback button. Cool.
I’m wondering which of these 2 options is true for the chief techbro who came up with this:
They believe in infinite growth. They think LLMs are going to get reliable fast. LLMs have probably played a direct role in convincing them of that