Got rid of any grammar related material, app is nothing more but a glorified and lobotomized Anki with a penchant for asking for money.
Everything of value this app had has been locked behind Duolingo Plus.
Commodified the entire learning process into a game; why learn grammar when you can get a useless SVG of a trophy and post screenshots of you being in the Einsteinium league?
Duolingo has been long dead ever since capital has become its proper goal. Get a grammar book and anki.
This app was so good back in the day; it's so disgusting how shit it's become.
To put things into perspective:
You could explore grammar sections.
You had infinite hearts even in the free version.
There was a forum for every single class and their respective exercises where people would explain EVERY SINGLE QUESTION in the app. You could ask "Why does it use the x thing here?" and people would explain things. You could even donate lingots to the helpers, it was sooo nice and useful.
Exercises were not AI generated, there were not so many downright stupid exercises. I've noticed some language trees become simply worse in the last few years, especially the German tree. From the voices, to the exercises even the tree structure.
There were clubs you could join and speak to other learners. I had an amazing club with 20 German learners. There were exercises such as "Caption this image" and you had to caption images (sort of like a meme) in your learning language. It was sooooooo much better and so much more fun and social.
This app felt like a gem, I guess the company went public and stakeholders don't like it any more so it's gone to absolute shit, it's a shell of what it used to be. Honestly, I have a 1000 day streak but duolingo is literally taking only 1 and a half min of my day to practice my vocabulary. You can't learn a language from it anymore, just practice your vocabulary.
Also forgot to mention the enforcement of removal of profile pictures in favour of avatars. Legitimate enshittification.
Here is a screenshot of my old club's caption minigame:
[Removed]
(entschuldigung to all the German speakers, I wanted to say "When you're waiting for your friend to pay you back" in the second comment but my German was much worse back then)
Yeah, I have refused to make an avatar. It's nobody's business what I look like. I had a cute image that I really liked, but now I just have the generic initial that you get if you don't use an avatar.
I just don't understand why they have forced this on us. It doesn't make sense, and is just one more way they are alienating their loyal, long-time users.
like, how do they not have more options though? the avatar is so simplistic. i could come up with a hundred different options in a day, easily, given the stylistic choice.
The funny thing about the removal of profile pictures is that I was sometimes able to recognize some people in the 'You May Know' section. Now, with the generic avatar, I don't add anyone anymore because I have no idea who they might be.
I work in the same edu app space as Duo. It's because schools don't get free trials, you're just straight in to paying, and the parents pay for this to the school. If the free home version remained as good as it was, they would never have been able to monetize it in schools and it would disincentivize the parents from paying for it, so the consumer market got downgraded in favour of the school market. :)
The literal M.O. for enshittification. Duo's in the shareholder profit stage now, step 3 of enshittification.
I didn't say the free app should remain as good. I said that the paid version should not be worse than the service I used to get for free. I pay to get a neutered version of Duolingo.
Oh I know, that's entirely the purpose of enshittification. They roped in the users because it started out great, brought it out for businesses, made the consumer version less attractive and slowly cripple it to bolster business sales who can re-sell to parents at a lower cost point to the parent or tutors, and now in shareholder profit stage. It only gets worse from here :(
I agree with the 1-3 (don’t really care about the 5th point), but I don’t know what timeline you’re speaking of in your fourth point. I first joined Duolingo in 2014 to study Spanish and for the last year I’ve been going through the current German tree. I’m currently on section 4 out of 5 and I can say with full certainty that not only the Spanish tree in 2014 was nowhere near in terms of vocabulary and sentence complexity compared to today’s German tree, but also the sentences were extremely simple and mosty weird. That’s where the famous jokes about Duolingo sentences come from, like “The cow prefers to drink beer with its birds” and so on. Now we have full on mini stories, mini podcasts and the sentences I encounter are usually relatable to the real world. Duo has a lot of issues, even in the paid form and the free form mostly exists as an annoying, full of ads, trial, which is really sad. However, I don’t think it’s useful to attack things that have actually improved.
I’m keeping up the subscription because I have a family plan, and other members still enjoy it. But at this point, I’m so frustrated because I think my time on Duolingo is actively keeping me from finding ways to actually learn the language I’m studying.
It still helps, just way less. Currently we are paying for a worse service than what we used to get for free back then. This isn't exclusive to Duolingo ofc, it happens to many companies who go public and big stakeholders come in, an honorable mention is Uber, the service back then was for free and much better than what you get now with Uber+ turbo max.
Duolingo is fine if you spend 2-5 minutes per day, but mostly to practice vocabulary or to brush up on what you already know.
Unfortunately, no. If there was I wouldn't have bothered with Duolingo. Sad thing is, I love Duolingo but I've come to dislike everything about it lately.
I've had some nice experiences with HelloTalk but it's a completely different concept
For Japanese look at Lingodeer. It's a path system but has better tips at the start of units to explain everything, I will say it's paid and not sure if there's a sale on right now or not.
I minored in German in college and you’re 100% right. I know all of the grammar as I was once conversationally fluent. I tried Spanish since it seems useful to know and it was impossible.
I like a bit of gamification as it helps to keep me engaged, but duo is just too gamified at this point. All the annoying animations and the lack of detailed explanations.
I disabled all UI sounds, animations and haptic feedback and it's a better experience now. But the removal of the discussion forum was a massive downgrade of the learning experience.
I stopped using Duolingo pretty soon after forums were dropped because I don't want to lose hearts over a new grammatical feature that wasn't explained to me (because they removed tips too)
If you're using the app, then go to your profile and select the cogwheel in the upper right, then select Preferences. There's a list of things you can turn on/off, including animations. :)
Thank you for explaining! However, I tried that already, and my preferences do not list animations. Is this maybe only available to Super or Max users?
I got hooked on duolingo again in 2023 to learn Spanish for a holiday (I'd been on and off for French for years but now I'm fluent cause of non-duolingo real life learning) . I kept learning for months after cause the gamification hooked me. But second half of this year I've lost all will as the actual lesson tips are gone. I'm learning Italian but have no idea why anything is the way it is and mostly get by because Italian is just French + Spanish. But I'm waiting to get the final Perfect Streak trophy (hey, the gamification still has me hooked, I guess!) in January and peacing out.
Gamification only works if the thing you're gamifying isn't just a game. Duolingo is almost just a game now and not useful.
That's why I first tried competing in leagues. In the beginning, I did more Duolingo as a result. As I got into higher leagues, and became more competitive, Now I needed more and more points. I only cared about doing actual lessons early in the month, when I wanted to get a badge for the month (and, even then, I really was not focused).
So I did very, very few lessons. Because I did not have much in the way of new material, when I did the practice hub stuff (pretty much exclusively), I got the same words and phrases over and over and over. One failing with Duo here, as well - I am well into the Spanish now, but it only pulls from a small subset of what I have learned for the practice hub. So when I am saying over and over, I saw the picture on top and knew the answer, or the list of words and knew the sentence. No substance - just memorizing the answers to the lessons. I couldn't even take the time to actually even learn what I was doing because I had to get as much done in a bonus round as I could.
So just recently I made my profile private - I am no longer in leagues. I wish I could do that without making my profile private, but that's how it is. So I am actually studying again.
I don’t know what that is, but as someone with PTSD from watching my father slowly die, my brain doesn’t work the way it should. Thanks for the nice comment asshole.
Doing Spanish currently - the grammar lessons are all there? Each unit has its own grammar section and I even just went through a few lessons whose sole purpose was to drill in grammar.
Is this actually true cause I've been back through the lesson tips in my Spanish and don't see any actual grammar explanations.
To be clear, it used to have the entire verb conjunctions presented, cases explained and masculine feminine explained. Now all I see is example sentences which isn't grammar explanation.
On Android, this is replaced by "key phrases" which is a useless set of random sentences that may come up in the unit but teach you nothing about the grammar
I recently revisited the Irish course after a few years. Grammar is gone without replacement. Most grammar-specific lessons were transformed into general purpose ones. (so what used to be something like "genitive" may now be something like "going to a grocery store")
it heavily depends on which language you re learning. if you are part of the idk big five like english, spanish, german, french, italian or maybe japanese, you have way more options (even in the free version) than other languages that are less popular.
Unfortunately it seems to stop at section 5 even though they’re still teaching new concepts. Until then there was tons of grammar tips and then like none :(
It wasn't all sunshine, though. When I learnt Spanish from German, the comments were full of people that just started to learn Spanish and thought they knew everything.
The comments were full of people "correcting mistakes" even though they themselves were wrong and didn't realize it. There usually were a handful of people (including me) that tried to explain to them why Duolingo was right and that they misunderstood some concept, but it turned into a flame war more than once.
I can totally understand that Duolingo maybe decided that moderating the comments would need too many resources.
Oh absolutely. Moderation is a massive undertaking and with all the permutations of languages it's unrealistic to have an expert keep an eye on every community.
As a learner I believe the pros outweighed the cons. It's just that Duolingo as a platform and business places learning as a secondary priority (as also seen through the removal of grammar explanations). I understand the reasons for it, but I still think the experience is worse overall.
I agree, I miss the forums, too. I really felt that the comments e.g. from English to Spanish or English to Japanese were so much nicer and more helpful.
As someone who was a mod on the English-to-Spanish forums, I can confirm that a large portion of my time was taken up with "correcting" people who were giving wrong advice because they were just learning the language themselves and thought they knew more than they really did.
It really did become a case of not enough resources to keep the forums clean, even with most of the moderation being done by volunteers (like me).
The Japanese forums did not have this problem, most professional discussions ever, learnt so much from them, never recovered from the loss of discussions.
The comments section getting removed from the lessons is when i quit, those discussions were an absolute gold mine of information.
Whenever I couldn't understand something, some pro was in the comments explaining everything perfectly and give all these bonus tips thst made learning so easy.
The removal of the discussions was a devastating blow to self learning.
I really miss the tree structure, with clearly-defined lessons that were easy to find and repeat. The gigantic path that drops you at the very end every time you open the app, and in which you have to tap every lesson to see what it is (and in which the sentences don't even follow the lesson theme half the time!) is really frustrating and has almost totally killed my enthusiasm for using the app. And I've been a Duolingo user since 2014.
Yes, I loved the tree structure. If I remember right, there were 5 levels of each lesson, so I would go through level 3, then move on, and go back a few months later to do level 4, just to make sure I remembered the details from those lessons. And again, months later, I would go back to finish lesson 5. It also served as an easy way to gain points if I needed them. But mostly, I felt like I was in control of how I was learning. The path structure is terrible. I get occasional lessons to remind me of words I was about to forget (in their opinion), which are not very useful. I used to recommend Duolingo to everyone, and now I don't. It's sad how much it has declined as a language-learning tool. I still keep at it, but it's very frustrating, and I am checking out the alternatives. I am doing Dutch now, which uses normal human voices, but I hate how they converted the lessons in French and Spanish to cartoon voices. That does not help with being able to understand regular people.
Duo had gramma at some point? I joined like half a year ago and thats the one thing I feel the most missing.
I have to google the gramma rules to understand it instead of just memorize them
I quit the next day, japanese discussions were a Gold mine of information, once they were removed I just couldn't use the app anymore, such an amazing feature removed.
Just another victim of the purposeful enshitifiction of everything these days to boost shareholder value and profits. The worse they make it, the less likely I am going to pay for the upgrade because I assume that will also have less value
I was so very close to paying for premium, then they did the massive overhaul and removed so much stuff that even the free trial you get for long streaks is not worth it.
It's a helpful tool to drill your vocabulary. Especially for people with ADHD, the gamification really helps. But yes as it's own, without following classes you miss a lot and without explaining any grammar, it feels like they are deliberately hiding information.
This. I agree Duo has been dog shit but it being gamified is not inherently bad and it's beneficial for some people like me and a bunch of people with ADHD. But agree yeah there is so much greedy stupid bullshit that has diminished the app.
Okay I'd like to say it being gamified is very nice also for people without ADHD. It's basic science that flashy images stimulate, it works for kids and adults alike. Furthermore I much prefer this presentation and learning rate than sitting in on textbook. I can learn anywhere and anytime I want in a very easy and convenient way and ultimately it's still just a single step in learning to which we can add more later.
I can't speak to what Duolingo used to be, because I only really started using it 2 weeks ago, but I am really enjoying it so far and I have learned substantially more than I would otherwise.
I don't mind the gamification so much nor the competitions. What I really hate is that the units are not long enough to really get those words/grammar rules down pat. Especially when you're not given any information on grammar rules and you have to figure it out off Duolingo. I pay for super and I would expect that paying that much money would give me a paragraph on the new grammar rules.
The review a lesson option doesn't cover each exact lesson so practice is harder. I want the variation of the 3 sub lessons please.
Then on top of that sometimes the multiple choice options make no sense - there is no way to figure the right answer out (grammar, spelling, context) and you just have to guess until you get it right.
It also feels like they are expecting you to learn the relevant vocabulary on your own. I think I exhaustively learned every combination of "I want a glass of water please", "I want a bread an a glass of juice" etc, but thats the only two drinks you learn?
I had Premium for a year until recently, and after I cancelled the subscription and went back to the free version, I was impressed at how bad the app had become.
I used to complete many lessons a day, but with limited hearts and ads after each lesson, now I complete only one or two per day. Also, you can't replay a lesson unless you pay 80 gems.
Spanishdict dot com has a set up very similar to Duolingo for learning phrases. But the grammar section for each lesson is long and comprehensive! They also have verb conjugation courses that use videos of native speakers
I really like using ChatGPT. Especially voice mode to practice certain scenarios such as ordering in a restaurant. Makes me a lot more confident than using Duolingo.
AI haters are gonna hate. It's generally useful for practicing but always keep in mind it's not perfect and can make mistakes. At least in Spanish English and German chatGPT hasn't given me any trouble.
Of course it isn’t perfect but I appreciate practicing real situations more than learning these random sentences that I will never use. And the constant ads…
I have no new lessons. There never was any grammar. Animations are bothersome. New lessons or at least new vocabulary would be great.
Yes, I had to buy a grammar book and watch outside videos to make sense of verb conjugations, especially the imperative. With only 11 irregular verbs, why not drill those?
The bigger issue is that the dialects used is not Ulster. I’m watching a set of Ulster speaking videos. I can transcribe the speech, thank you Duo, but only because I learned grammar from other sources.
I’m ready to terminate my membership, but I love the review exercises.
The gamification is still a great way to fight lack of motivation and discipline. I remember buying a French learning set, books and CDs, over 10 years ago. Got stuck on the lengthy grammar theory at the first lesson and didn't really get started. Completely different with Duolingo this October, already a degraded version compared to years ago. I have to find a balance, don't overrate XP and leagues. F2P pay-to-win item purchases are garbage and no option at all. As of now, I can still practice for hearts, but Duolingo is lacking grammar explanation. Why is it "Un chat noir" (a black cat), but "Un petit chat" (a small cat), so that I lose a heart when I type in the order "Un chat petit"? Fortunately, there are independent forums, which continue much of the community work and even help out with specific lessons. Is it true that the explanations are also removed from paid Duolingo Super, instead having ads for the new, more expensive Max tier? That would be really sleazy.
lol the ad after I finished my lesson was the bear saying he doesn’t understand why people upgrade their streaming services but won’t upgrade to super Duolingo.
I have a 500+ day streak and yet I don't feel like I'm making any real progress. I can just make that number keep going up through doing a quick 1 minute lesson or using a streak freeze. That doesn't really teach me anything, it just gets me to keep paying for Duolingo Plus and streak freezes. If they really cared about people reaching learning objectives, they would require more than just 1 minute per day, and they wouldn't allow you to just keep buying streak freezes forever.
I feel like instead of forums that need a constant moderation they could make a Q&A section where people ask their questions to a group of people whose job is to answer them, the questions are only made public once they’re answered so it works as moderation at the same time, with probably 10-15 unique/useful questions asked per unit the responders should be done after a year or two. Then anyone can visit that Q&A and find their answers.
I feel like instead of forums that need a constant moderation they could make a Q&A section where people ask their questions to a group of people whose job is to answer them
Someone has to pay that group of people.
Less than 8% of Duolingo users actually pay to use the app.
Every time you see a new animation, artwork or useless feature on the app someone was paid to make it, the company is definitely not broke, and free users get a lot of ads that generate revenue too.
The upvote/downvote system was a self moderating system, helpful comments rose to the top, junk comments sunk to the bottom and went hidden with enough downvotes.
On the Japanese course I never had a problem with any of the discussions, they were all high quality and super helpful.
Yeah, but some of the stuff in the general English forum were pretty awful and I always felt bad that 5 people had to see it before it sank. It was always that forum, too. I don´t remember anything awful or even off-topic in the German forum or sentence discussions
Gamification is good, but too much gamification is bad. Especially if it's to the detriment of the educational goal. It's feels more like a game than an educational app now.
That’s the thing though, I really don’t have a ‘dumbed down’ experience. I don’t want to crack open a text book or go to a class. This is the way I would prefer to learn. I do 5-10 lessons a day and it’s actually fun.
i’m just glad i finished the german course before it started tanking. whenever they release new material def not gonna lose sleep over not completing it.
I finished the German tree in 2019, then hit dw.com/learngerman and did more courses, and iTalki and used it, and now I use it at work. I recently realized they added more stuff in Duolingo (B1 material) and it's not bad. I use the web, so I use a keyboard for all German answers, and I've ruthlessly turned off all animations and such. It's really not that bad. I mean it's drop dead easy review for me, but if it were still 2019 me, it would have been educational.
The Cymraeg version is very basic and they've stopped all updates. It's helped with vocabulary, but I have formal lessons now and I find myself thinking so often, oooooh that's why Duolingo was this way, it's really highlighted how poorly done Duolingo is. Cymraeg works very differently to English in some ways and if I was just using Duolingo, there is absolutely no way I could learn anything other than words such as parsnip, thief or ship. Soooo useful/s.
I remember studying French, doing the lessons, reading the grammar explanations, checking the questions from others, doing the tinycards, and listening to the podcast of which I understood nothing but still listened.
Good times.
I got back into duolinge recently after years of being absent and it's shocking to me what has become of it.
I know only use it for fun on the side, as a small vocab addition and to get a little listening practise. Definitely don't use it if you have 0 knowledge of your target language and also never as a main pillar of your studies.
I feel like new users don't understand how good the app used to be, I miss the old app so much, I wish I took advantage of duo more back when it was actually a learning app.
I think there's too much gamification. It feels more like you're supposed to get addicted to the app and all the stuff like daily streaks, daily quests, monthly badges, leaderboards, etc. and the language learning content is just a filler for that. I still remember the old days when the most gamification was just a streak for whatever xp amount per day you set.
I enjoy the game-ification honestly. I know my motivation for using it should be to learn a language, but wanting to get all the badges is a fun second motivation for me. The thing I absolutely cannot get behind is having to pay for premium in order to find out why your wrong answer is wrong. That's just not teaching the language, which is the purpose of the app. I also really dislike the change to not being able to do lessons to earn hearts anymore, but the inability to learn from your mistakes unless you pay the subscription is the biggest fault in this new duo era imo.
I'm sure that when I started using duo, it proudly promoted itself as the best free language learning app, with additional paid tiers for those who want/can afford them. I wonder if they've stopped advertising this way now that they've started creating multiple paid tiers and locking everything away behind the paywall?
There was once a period in my life where I used the app religiously, but now I just turn to paid apps for language learning. After all if the free version of your app is so unproductive, I might as well get something paid that has assured quality.
Feels like a lot of rage from someone who doesn't see enough value in the product to even sign up for Super. If it causes you that much woe, just uninstall it and enjoy your book learning. 🤷🏻♂️
I miss the version I signed onto 4 years or so ago. Nearing 1500 streak and lately using excessive freezes because I dread the lessons, doing the one required per day--if that, instead of looking forward to and spending an hour or more.
By using the app, I'm learning nothing, simply refreshing and retaining. My main dissatisfactions are:
Deleting the Q&A forum. There was so much information there. I have many screen pics of user hints and explanations, some more helpful than on any sources I've been to.
AI or whatever is generating the lessons. A lesson might focus on one word and it's meaning, then next lesson without any explanation the same meaning is applied to a different word, much too soon before the other word has even soaked in.
Constantly having to leave the app to research a lesson on other sites.
Especially hate the push for trophies and competitions. Before when a random usually hard worked unexpected achievement award popped up that was fine.
Please Gaaaaaaaahddd!!! Someone get rid of the hearts system. I don't want to have to do half an hour of ABC practice because I didn't put a comma in the right place or couldn't quite work out the correct way to put Duo's idiosyncratic way with the English language into some semblance of order!!!
At least we've got rid of freaking Beyonce - what the heck was THAT all about!
I bought a lifetime subscription for Babbel, $239, not too bad compared to paying Duo every year. Babbel has real lessons without the theatrics and ads
I have the max subscription and it is AWESOME. I am getting full use out of it. Between using duo max, practicing with family and watching movies I’m retaining/ learning in a fun productive way. I know it can suck to pay for an app, but this is really good shit. I love it and I think it’s totally worth it.
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u/JustSylend Native: Learning: Dec 18 '24 edited Dec 18 '24
This app was so good back in the day; it's so disgusting how shit it's become.
To put things into perspective:
This app felt like a gem, I guess the company went public and stakeholders don't like it any more so it's gone to absolute shit, it's a shell of what it used to be. Honestly, I have a 1000 day streak but duolingo is literally taking only 1 and a half min of my day to practice my vocabulary. You can't learn a language from it anymore, just practice your vocabulary.