Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) due to AI and people are more willing to make the jump here are just some alternative apps and what languages they have:
"I just want an...
In my experience Duolingo is still pretty fantastic, as long as you unlock premium with the ReVanced patcher (the app is basically unusable otherwise). There really isn’t another option anywhere close to Duolingo’s effectiveness for the major languages on the platform.
I use a cracked DuoLingo but I don’t think I would ever call it fantastic. Even without their paywall restrictions it’s still quite annoying with how the lessons are laid out. I’ll be practicing a certain lesson, getting perfect scores, and go try to ‘Legendary’ that lesson, then start seeing words I hadn’t seen in that lesson and sometimes ever. I’ve been using it mildly for several years now and have watched the quality drop tremendously.
With that said, I still think it is one of the easiest ways to immediately jump into a new language because it’s everywhere.
Also, I submit reports every time I get a sentence about feeding ducks bread because they really love to say that, and people really should not be doing that.
Oh yeah the new progression system is horrible. I liked the less linear one before way better. I could work on several lessons at the same time and level them up. I would usually get 1-4 and then level the up all by 1 level and continie cycling through them until they were all at max. Now with the new system I have barely progressed at all because the app itself dictates which lesson I can do and which I cannot. So I mainly do speaking practice with a cracked app. The problem you described with legendary just happened to me yesterday with a regular 3 exercise lesson. I did 2 of them and then the next day I did the last one to finish it and half the exercises used words that were either not in the previous 2 lessons or ones I don’t even remember learning. I also remember they reordered some stuff when they changed the progression system and suddenly some things I already did were locked as if I had not learned that yet and some the other way around so I struggled a bit when I had to know words I had not yet learned. There really are a myriad of problems with duolingo. I sadly will stick to it because I have not found a better alternative for learning Norwegian.
Duolingo is valued at over a billion dollars by investors. The path is bad for some disabled people, and the reason they can’t maintain both systems simultaneously is that their code is poorly architectured and they can’t afford to fix it because of investor pressure. Their venture capital business model isn’t sustainable. https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/duolingo-is-a-dutch-tulip-that-hates-disabled-people-b9c7fa6e98d1
I think you should check out Language Transfer . Not as many languages as DuoLingo, and some of them are only introductory courses, but completely free and – more important – far, far better. I’m a native English speaker, and I have learned French, German, Sesotho, and Japanese, but LT’s Spanish program was the most effective I’ve ever done.
Could not agree more with this. Duolingo is not “fantastic” ever. If you actually want to learn and use a language Duolingo actively works against that goal by teaching you useless vocab, not explaining anything and in some cases teaching you things that are just flatout wrong.
Duolingo is only great if you want to pretend you are learning a language. Yes I am salty because I wasted a year and a half of doing their shit daily before I realised that it was not helping me in the slightest and has actually made things harder for me in the long run as I now have to unlearn some of the trash it has taught me.
Conversely listening to language transfer was like an aha moment. It actually helps teach you the language in a useful, usable way and doesn’t just try and get you memorise bullshit phrases and random vocab.
In my experience Duolingo is still pretty fantastic, as long as you unlock premium with the ReVanced patcher (the app is basically unusable otherwise). There really isn’t another option anywhere close to Duolingo’s effectiveness for the major languages on the platform.
I use a cracked DuoLingo but I don’t think I would ever call it fantastic. Even without their paywall restrictions it’s still quite annoying with how the lessons are laid out. I’ll be practicing a certain lesson, getting perfect scores, and go try to ‘Legendary’ that lesson, then start seeing words I hadn’t seen in that lesson and sometimes ever. I’ve been using it mildly for several years now and have watched the quality drop tremendously.
With that said, I still think it is one of the easiest ways to immediately jump into a new language because it’s everywhere.
Also, I submit reports every time I get a sentence about feeding ducks bread because they really love to say that, and people really should not be doing that.
Oh yeah the new progression system is horrible. I liked the less linear one before way better. I could work on several lessons at the same time and level them up. I would usually get 1-4 and then level the up all by 1 level and continie cycling through them until they were all at max. Now with the new system I have barely progressed at all because the app itself dictates which lesson I can do and which I cannot. So I mainly do speaking practice with a cracked app. The problem you described with legendary just happened to me yesterday with a regular 3 exercise lesson. I did 2 of them and then the next day I did the last one to finish it and half the exercises used words that were either not in the previous 2 lessons or ones I don’t even remember learning. I also remember they reordered some stuff when they changed the progression system and suddenly some things I already did were locked as if I had not learned that yet and some the other way around so I struggled a bit when I had to know words I had not yet learned. There really are a myriad of problems with duolingo. I sadly will stick to it because I have not found a better alternative for learning Norwegian.
Duolingo is valued at over a billion dollars by investors. The path is bad for some disabled people, and the reason they can’t maintain both systems simultaneously is that their code is poorly architectured and they can’t afford to fix it because of investor pressure. Their venture capital business model isn’t sustainable. https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/duolingo-is-a-dutch-tulip-that-hates-disabled-people-b9c7fa6e98d1
I think you should check out Language Transfer . Not as many languages as DuoLingo, and some of them are only introductory courses, but completely free and – more important – far, far better. I’m a native English speaker, and I have learned French, German, Sesotho, and Japanese, but LT’s Spanish program was the most effective I’ve ever done.
Could not agree more with this. Duolingo is not “fantastic” ever. If you actually want to learn and use a language Duolingo actively works against that goal by teaching you useless vocab, not explaining anything and in some cases teaching you things that are just flatout wrong.
Duolingo is only great if you want to pretend you are learning a language. Yes I am salty because I wasted a year and a half of doing their shit daily before I realised that it was not helping me in the slightest and has actually made things harder for me in the long run as I now have to unlearn some of the trash it has taught me.
Conversely listening to language transfer was like an aha moment. It actually helps teach you the language in a useful, usable way and doesn’t just try and get you memorise bullshit phrases and random vocab.
Tldr: Fuck Duolingo, language transfer is king!