this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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  • Following backlash to statements that Duolingo will be AI-first, threatening jobs in the process, CEO Luis von Ahn has tried to walk back his statement.
  • Unfortunately, the CEO doesn’t walk back any of the key points he originally outlined, choosing instead to try, and fail to placate the maddening crowd.
  • Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in the firm’s users.
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

boring, broken garbage content. monthly subscription fee. get the fuck out of here

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago

Bragging about replacing your employees publicly over and over before actually being able to do so might cause an employee crisis

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If anyone wants to practice their Japanese or have questions, they can message me.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

主よ、如何なさいましたか。

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I love this headline so, so much

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I want every headline to end with "..., fails"

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago

Just say AI bad use is cancer for human kind. Good use can help humans to do their task with less effort. So its all depend on usage.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (2 children)

AI is social cancer

It's a lie told by marketing companies that have gaslit artists into automating their creativity and gaslit governments into automating fascism

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Tl;Dr: skip the apps unless they're part of a bigger in-person course. Prefer reputable sources like pimsleur and mango languages. If you have no rush, get graded readers and watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, etc.

Ok, so here are my two cents on learning languages and the whole category of learning apps. They are all flawed on some major way or another. But mostly it is about pacing learning progress.

Teaching absolute beginners is easy. They know nothing, thus anything you show them will be progress. The actual difficulty when learning a language is finding appropriate material for your level of understanding, such that you understand most of it, but still find new things to learn. This is known as comprehensible input. The difficulty of most apps is that they are not capable of detecting then adapting study content accordingly to the student's progress. So they typically go way too slow, or sometimes too fast. Leaving the student frustrated and halting learning.

Jumping with some nonzero knowledge into any app is also torture. It's known as the valley of despair. The beginner content is too boring and dull, now that you know a bit, but the intermediate level is way too much of a gap for you yet.

My advice is to skip language learning apps. The "motivation via gamification hypothesis" is flawed and lacks nuance and understanding of behavioral science. People don't stop studying out of a lack of tokens, gems, streaks or achievement badges. It's because the content itself is uninteresting and bores them. Sure, the celebration and streaks work at first, but they usually lose effect by something known as reinforcement depreciation. The same stimulus shown too much or too frequently stops being gratifying. The biggest reward for learning a language is actually using it.

A method that is known to work is to find graded readers. Watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, social media, in the target language (avoid the language learning influencers) listen to native influencers speaking about topics you care about. Books work, in-person courses work, learning apps are good to start you up form absolute zero. But most learning happens on what you do in your everyday life. Using the language is the most effective way of becoming good at the language. Everything else is just excuses for using it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

exactly. I also don't appreciate the app changing the icon to guilt trip me back into their odd choice of/irrelevant vocabulary that I am supposed to learn

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I deleted the app the second he said this. Get fucked, AI.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago

Make sure you also start the account deletion process.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

The missing comma in the second bullet point changes the meaning of the sentence.

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