From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.
There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.
All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.
Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.
#duolingo #languagelearning #enshittification #capitalism
Yeah, I did a good three-quarters of the French course too. I distinctly remember the lessons about plays and stage work being an absolute bastard, not that I’d ever use it in my line of work.
I’ve started watching a bit more French media with the French equivalent of “received pronunciation” - such as watching the FR edition of Euronews or France24, plus watching kids shows like Hey Duggee or Paw Patrol is unusually handy, though it does give you some funny looks if you don’t already have kids!
Unfortunately, there’s no substitute for immersion - even on a short break to Paris, my confidence in using the language shot up from being able to just about converse in the language - but more importantly, getting utterly stuck and failing at something where you have to think a bit faster and get your point across anyway.
Yeah, I did a good three-quarters of the French course too. I distinctly remember the lessons about plays and stage work being an absolute bastard, not that I’d ever use it in my line of work.
I’ve started watching a bit more French media with the French equivalent of “received pronunciation” - such as watching the FR edition of Euronews or France24, plus watching kids shows like Hey Duggee or Paw Patrol is unusually handy, though it does give you some funny looks if you don’t already have kids!
Unfortunately, there’s no substitute for immersion - even on a short break to Paris, my confidence in using the language shot up from being able to just about converse in the language - but more importantly, getting utterly stuck and failing at something where you have to think a bit faster and get your point across anyway.
I should get back into it really.