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
Prolly better apps out there (I’m naturally weary of anything like this that’s advertised so heavily by sponsored YouTube channels), but so far I’m quite enjoying Babbel. I wish it had the option for like a kinda soft competitive thing like Duolingo had. Trying to work enough to stay at least in my current bracket, and rewarding the player for doing lessons in the morning and before bed, absolutely helped my autistic ADHD ass with sticking to the routine. Gotta maintain that streak, right?
I did look at that and I wanted to try it out, but they don’t even have a free trial, which is unfortunate. Part of the reason I used duolingo was because I am hoping to get the basics for free so I can see if I’m actually learning.
Prolly better apps out there (I’m naturally weary of anything like this that’s advertised so heavily by sponsored YouTube channels), but so far I’m quite enjoying Babbel. I wish it had the option for like a kinda soft competitive thing like Duolingo had. Trying to work enough to stay at least in my current bracket, and rewarding the player for doing lessons in the morning and before bed, absolutely helped my autistic ADHD ass with sticking to the routine. Gotta maintain that streak, right?
I resist app addiction in all forms except Duo. Amen to that.
I did look at that and I wanted to try it out, but they don’t even have a free trial, which is unfortunate. Part of the reason I used duolingo was because I am hoping to get the basics for free so I can see if I’m actually learning.