What are some good alternatives to Duolingo with fewer dark patterns? (And don't suggest traditional methods, I am very much not against them, I am just curious about apps and such.)
Forgive the digression, but this reminds me of a general gripe: I wish there were more/better introductions and tutorials and other learning materials geared toward people knowledgeable in another human or computer language, the educational equivalent of P frames in temporal video compression. Rather than feeding you examples piece by piece and making you build up the mental model tediously, brain dump the mental model on you and let you fill in the specifics as you go. Easy Arabic Grammar by Jane Wightwick or Basic Polish by Dana Bielec are decent examples of what I wish were more prevalent.
As someone who has used Duolingo for multiple languages (German, French, Swedish) for about a decade (2012-2020) I am here to say that Babbel is vastly superior to Duolingo in terms of quality.
Duolingo is just rote memorization of their vocabulary. Despite investing years into "studying" the above languages in Duolingo, I didn't feel I was actually useful in these languages (I studied before relocating to the respective countries).
Babbel on the other hand, is very much like a digital version of the language textbooks you will find everywhere for levels A1/A2/B1/B2. The Babbel lessons involve listening comprehension, speaking (though their voice recognition is... poor), reading, writing, and they make a huge effort to teach you conjugation and grammar rules. There are also no ads or annoying animations.
Babbel does cost money, but it's far less than Duolingo's paid tier, and I personally find Babbel much more effective at actually teaching me the language as opposed to Duolingo having me memorize random vocabulary.
Babbel allows you to set learning goals (though max target is 9 per week) and daily reminders, but they don't have streaks nor do they get up in your face about it.
I will never go back to Duolingo after having used Babbel.
There are also many similar gripes among STEM tutorials. Why can't this physics/chemistry/economics book assume I know vector calculus/differential equations?
You should never be in a scenario where you're using Duolingo without learning anything new unless it's intentional or you've mastered the entire selection of lessons they offer.
I did use Duolingo a bit when starting out, but I felt like I didn't really remember any of the words introduced there, just learnt how to hit the buttons as fast as I could. (And oh gods those annoying animations). Pimsleur on the other hand is amazing when starting out. Then a combination of podcasts, simple stories and Anki.
I've also heard good things about italki, seems like a marketplace for 1-on-1 language tutoring online.
He also surrounds the verbs in mock clozes, so you get hammered with context. You can also do it without doing anything else; the Romance verb situation can be isolated from the rest of the language completely. At least for Spanish you'll eventually need to know what common subjunctive triggers are, that they'd rather use the present tense (with context) than the future or past more often than you'd think, and other stuff that's an order of magnitude simpler to remember than those damned verbs. If you need to know irregular vosotros conjugations in subjunctive future, you've already got them in your head.
http://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/w_ultimate_spanish_conjugat...
But of course, when you're doing that, you're pressuring yourself to get through as many lessons as possible, not to engage well with the material. You don't want to stop and read the discussions about a particular translation. And (since I'm studying Chinese), you often have a choice between attempting to speak Chinese, typing Chinese using pinyin, or clicking on the character blocks. The first two are almost certainly better practice; but the last is a lot faster and more predictable.
And of course, now when I'm out of that rhythm, I'm totally not motivated to study, since I'm getting half the points I would otherwise be getting. If I'd been rewarded (not competitively, but just personally) simply for spending time in the platform, I'd probably be spending it more effectively.
I'm rather pissed if the daily reminder comes to late. If I don't want to practice daily anymore, I'll simply switch off notifications or uninstall the app.
https://dev.languagereactor.com/phrasepump (this is the dev site, will go to prod in a couple of weeks)
The interface needs work to be usable on mobile, but I guess you know that.
I'm not sure whether the TTS you're using is really good enough to be usable for learning a language. I tried it in German and noticed quite a few TTS bugs, like pronouncing "Tu" as if it were an acronym "TU" instead of the verb "Do", as well as switching to an English pronunciation next to English names (pronouncing "Hallo Roger" more like "Hello Roger").
Tatoeba also has many recordings in quite a few languages (e.g. German https://tatoeba.org/en/audio/index/deu ) You should try using them if possible. For download instructions, see https://tatoeba.org/en/downloads
Edit: typo
I started working on some of my own tooling to help with this. For example, one tool took a list of sentences and translations and ran them through Google TTS to get recording to use in Anki. After working on this tooling for a while, I decided to move away from Anki and just build an app.
Right now, we're working on building out a beginner Thai course focused on reading because educational material in that area is severely lacking. We're also working on a series of graded readers.
Soon we'll be launching quick-study feature that allows you to curate lists of words and phrases that you want to learn. You will be able to select from anything you've already learned, draw from our existing library of 129,000 words and phrases or input new content. Once you've created or lists you can use the quick-study that will create a custom lesson for you based on how familiar with the content you are.
Not launched or even in beta yet, but the site is public. The info is listed in my profile and you can contact me from the site if you'd like to get in touch.