Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Create App Content

Like many things, circumstances will differ.

One thing that I deem a falacy though, is comparing it with e.g. an expensive paid for classroom or personal lessons. It may well fail in such direct comparison, and no surprise!

People then use that comparison to claim "it's worthless", and I disagree with that.

If the claim is "30min of structured learning with duolingo will get you no closer to learning a language than 30 min of mindlessly scrolling facebook cat videos", I don't believe that's true. And THAT is the correct comparison :)

One thing to note though, is how you use it - note I used the term "structured learning" in previous sentence, not "doing match madness for points" :)

Personally, I spent first few months learning on duolingo, and it was wonderful; had some small chats with people who speak that language at work, occasionally wrote a sentence or two in that language in emails, etc. Then I spent next few months preserving the streak. I did the challenges and matches and got thousands of points and first places... but learned nothing. In fact, my knowledge deteriorated.

Then after 200 days, I lost my streak and... breathed a sigh of relief. I am now making sure I do the lessons and practice and learn, and purposely avoid the competition part of it or activities which give many repetitive points but don't increase my knowledge. My familiarity with language is increasing again and I can make more and more sentences on my own.

When I started learning French (probably 8 years ago), I started with Duolingo. Pairing Duolingo with some other tools/methods, I made good progress, and before long, I outgrew it.

Last year, I decided I'd start working on Japanese, so I did the same thing I did before: hit Duolingo hard, listen to audiobooks to build up my phoneme recognition, etc. I was shocked at how slow progress was - not because I wasn't putting in the effort but because it had me redoing over and over and over again the same damn words and phrases. Gohan, mizu, sushi, gohan, gohan, mizu, gohan, sushi.

I was a proponent of the site/app for quite a while - even after I outgrew it - because I legitimately believed it helped me. Now that I've seen what it's become, I can't recommend it to anyone unless you strictly do it for entertainment value with no expectation of useful education.

"Unless anyone has had a different experience"

I've tried classroom instruction, and teacher-driven courses, multiple times in my life. They never really stuck for me.

Duolingo has worked for me where other techniques haven't. I'm now at a stage where I can read a newspaper article in Spanish and understand ~90% of the content.

(5 year streak, but that's 5 years of 5-15 minutes a day which turns out to be exactly the commitment that works for me.)

I'm sure it's not the best language learning tool around, but it has taught me enough of three different languages to visit a foreign country, ask for directions, order things, etc, with a number of conversations never falling back into English. And all for the price of free.

Learning a language at an older age is anyway difficult and will only succeed with a lot of effort. As someone that's learned a foreign language at almost 30 in a classroom, I can say that Duolingo does some things well, mostly by forcing or motivating you to repeat to memorize things. I say I learned it in a classroom, but objectively I never would've made it if I was not in the country whose official language I was learning. So the classroom gives you some basics and then you need to practice a lot until it becomes something you don't need to think about. As they say, internalize it. This takes years, but also depends on the language, some are more difficult or have different learning curves. Duolingo is again good at the practice part.

Most people try to use logic and comparisons to their native language, but this is imho not a good way. Kids don't learn like that. It's argued that grownups lose this ability, but personally I sometimes say thing where I have no idea why I said that and if it's really correct. But then it turns out it is. It's somewhere in my head and it got there by listening to other people speak or reading. I know a lot of people that got nowhere by going to class because they had their group of friends from e.g. Spain, China or Korea around them. I met a person from the US who was disappointed with the little progress they made and said "I don't understand that and why it's like that". My only answer was really "because it just is". So I think Duolingo has a place, as a sort of a virtual native speaker you can interact with.

Duolingo has the same incentives problem as dating apps - once someone is sufficiently fluent in the language they want to learn, they stop using the app. So instead of efficiently teaching the language, Duolingo makes the process as slow as possible while tricking the user into feeling that they're quickly learning.

> I spent 18 months on it and the learning was soundly thrashed by three weeks in a classroom, and for all the pupils, not just me, primed for success by 18 months with Duolingo.

I wonder how well you would have done if it hadn't been for that 18 months. Because 'three weeks in a classroom' sounds suspiciously to how I learned Polish: I seemed to be making zero progress for years and then in a very short amount of time (a couple of weeks at most) it suddenly 'clicked' and I started to make sense of what I heard. I probably was learning at some level that wasn't accessible all the while thinking I wasn't making any progress at all.

Duolingo is 'infotainment', it gets you from zero to a little bit above zero and it may give you some useful number of words to recognize and maybe even to use actively. But it won't help you to speak a language, for that you need to progress beyond it. This is pretty much the same story with every other language, nobody learns to speak and use a language actively by reading the dictionary. But it certainly doesn't hurt to have a basic 200 or 300 word vocabulary on which to build.

Personally I use Anki for such learning rather than commercial services, it allows for far more customization and you won't be sucked into silly gamification for the sake of extending your subscription because there is none.

The thing is that their whole marketing and selling point is mostly to people who don't have real strong motivation or focus to learn a language or don't have the time. E.g. to the tone of "you'll need to do this for just two minutes a day", "it'll feel more like a game", " much easier than in a traditional classroom setting ", etc. But the truth is that it doesn't really work that way; someone with focus and motivation learning grammatical rules and more in a classroom will always be either more effective or progressing at least at the same pace (or at least be just as ineffective). Their business is more about selling the idea of learning a language and that it is actually easy, partly by presenting it in a gamified way. It kind of works because people fall for it and buy a subscription for ~3 months but probably eventually stop. They then need new subscribers and have to double down on that marketing/selling of the idea.

In reality, there is no shortcut to learning something. It's just about having the curiosity, motivation and discipline to do so. And many people may think they have that or are enticed by the idea of learning a new language but their life doesn't depend on it enough to have the aforementioned qualities to do it.

I found Duolingo to be incredibly helpful.

The language I was learning had no tuition available for adults in my country and I practiced with native speakers when I could find them and consumed media from the community of the target language.

All while on public transport, when I would otherwise be on my phone. All for the price of nothing (though their model has grow much more user hostile).

This is not to advocate for Duolingo as a company or even the app as a method but I found it effective and useful as a tool.

Duolingo isn’t going to learn a language for you. You have to internalise the grammar and vocabulary.

Could I have done the same with a book? No. I could have done something different. Could I have done the same with a class? No, no classes existed for me.

The first time I used DuoLingo, I was just trying to get through the tree, without really learning, and that was useless. Now I have a different technique: I’ll only listen (never read), and if I can’t comprehend and respond immediately, I’ll fail that exercise deliberately, so I’ll be re-tested later. For me, I only understand the language if I can understand some one speaking to me and respond in real time.

IMO this is a misunderstanding of the product.

This might be a cynical take, but I think that for most users of Duolingo, it functions more as a game than as a tool which produces substantial gains in language knowledge. I'm a computational linguist, and whenever on hearing this people ask me what I think about Duolingo, I like to say it's language-flavored entertainment.

I know of some people who have learned languages through Duolingo. I also know some people who took classroom courses and accompanied those with Duolingo – and they believe Duolingo was helpful in that sense. I know people who learned foreign language by a combination of Duolingo + staying in a foreign country at the same time.

I myself have used Duolingo to learn some rudimentary basics of a foreign language and I haven't forgotten those.

I doubt Duolingo is the most efficient, but that doesn't mean it's useless.

You learn the vocabulary, you learn pronunciations and you learn how to listen and comprehend. I don’t see what’s so bad about it. It’s never going to be able to compete with a native speaker just speaking to you in that language but nothing will.

> Duolingo should be on borrowed time, as a method to learn a language it’s inefficient to the point of being ineffective

A lot of Duolingo's questions ask a user to pick and choose words to complete a sentence. That gives a false sense of achievement when in reality it simply does not challenge one's mind enough to learn a language effectively. Besides, a simple sentence does not give me enough context to build my intuition. I personally find the idea of Comprehensible Input works much better: reading extensively, watching videos extensively, using a language increasingly frequently, and etc.

The way to think about Duolingo is like another mobile phone game. Except the "universe" of the game is language learning instead of a random farming or middle ages theme. And so you learn about the language in the same way you learn about farming or middle ages from those games. Meaning if you never read anything about farming or the middle ages now you know of some things, but you'd really be much faster ahead by picking up a proper book on the subject. So it is with language learning apps.

I have found it helpful, even as the central foundation for learning languages, but you have to remember at the end of the day it is *you* who is learning the language and you absolutely must mentally engage yourself, it can definitely lure you into a path of scoring points without making real progress.

I will pause my lesson and jump over to Google or ChatGPT, and usually end a session with a pen and paper writing out any phrases I was less familiar with. You also need to make sure you’re being challenged, with some languages I get into a phase where it is really easy for a long time, when that happens, you need to skip ahead because just scoring points is meaningless. I still think the gamification is useful and unique and can help keep your overall learning efforts progressing. Also I always supplement with Pimsleur, an audio-only program that is great for listening while you’re at the gym or biking or otherwise unable to read or interact with a screen.

My experience was different. I was able to learn enough Spanish to survive in Peru for a month with just 6-7 hours in Duolingo. Different people may have different learning styles. When you're comparing to classroom, are you normalizing the number of hours spent? Of course live interaction will be several times more effective, but it's not something everyone can afford to do. It's also about goals. Duolingo isn't for you if you really want to become a proficient native speaker or be able to understand books. But it's great to learn a language casually enough to converse with locals.

It's excellent for building vocab and reinforcing basics. Expecting any more from it is silly.

I'm about 18 months in as well and feel like I don't know crap. I just can't memorize thousands of new words. I honestly have no idea how anyone is bilingual.

> I spent 18 months on it and the learning was soundly thrashed by three weeks in a classroom, and for all the pupils, not just me, primed for success by 18 months with Duolingo.

Yeah, but if you have time for 3 weeks in class, why do Duolingo in the first place? Those serve different markets. Duolingo is for low effort, low commitment, but interested enough to do it a bit in their spare time kind of people.

I found it helpful for reacquainting myself with vocabulary from a language I learned decades ago. I think it would also be helpful in learning the basics of a new language adjacent to that language (romance, in my case) before going on a trip. Beyond that, I’m not sure how useful it is on its own.

I used Spanish with DuoLingo for 3 months straight.

The matching is ridiculous. It doesn’t really challenge you with conjugate variations.

Example, your answer choices are: estas, estamos, or somos.

Hmm which one is not like the other?

I felt like I was pattern matching my way into Dora leveled “can you find the airport?”

I feel like you’re saying “primed for success” ironically but I’m not seeing the irony.

It seems like AI, deployed against a few hundred learners, ought to be able to discern what the most efficient path to learning a new language is. Then you can just create a new app that does exactly that

I canceled Duolingo subscription in favor of just using ChatGPT. Duolingo wanted $30 (a $20 increase) for Max, which is as far as I can tell less flexible and capable than ChatGPT anyway.

As someone else has said in response, my vocabulary, pronunciation, and understanding of grammar rules are solid. I believe I've already learned 3000 words of Spanish at this point. I will need immersion to gain the speaking and listening skills, but I was never deceived about that. I figured this would be a small daily investment for a few years that I would eventually need to actualize.

Maybe because your brain made new connections, but was "primed" by what it knew from Duolingo.

A bit like you plan a holiday, read the guidebook, then you go to the destination. Your knowledge of the place was thrashed vs. reading the guide book. But the guidebook helped with some foundational knowledge and was still useful.

I learned better with Duolingo than during Class. It really depends on the quality of the material and teacher.

I've found Anki way better than Duo for learning vocabulary.

Clozemaster is a bit like Anki with prepackaged sentences.

I don’t know if it will be on borrowed time when there’s deeper things to go into.

It’s important to not throw the digital learning baby out with the bath water.

No single EdTech is that effective or ubiquitous, even though the possibility of new solutions anchored in the future starting to form is increasing.

Thanks for posting your experience. I haven’t tried duolingo. Do you think it’s possible that the 18 months helped prep you for classroom learning , vocabulary etc?

How intense was your classroom learning and how much time per week?

I took years of French in school and would like to learn Spanish.

Duolingo works for me because it keeps me engaged in a way other language learning resources wouldn’t. I might be making super slow progress but I’m making some progress versus none at all

Are there any better apps for learning a foreign language?

I’ve used it when visiting countries to pick up some very basics - if I wanted to actually learn a language I would get a tutor.

You said it yourself they were primed by 18months of duolingo. Your classroom experience could have been different otherwise.

I used Duolingo in 2022 for the 35 days leading up to a holiday in Greece. I went from knowing 0 greek to being able to read the alphabet and words, pronounce them and do things like order in a restaurant, explain allergies and convey our room number.

Around the beginning of 2023 they did a couple of things that ruined it a bit for me. They completely changed the track system so now you have to follow one set path, and they got rid of the classes feature which was awesome because for around $5 I could have a zoom lesson with a native teacher and other people learning the language.

Also the sentences it teaches you are a bit less silly now and that was a cool gimmick.

honestly you sound like a success story for the app. 3 weeks in-class after 18mo fiddling on phone leading to dramatic progress.

This seems to be a scaling issue for all of these online language/SRS learning systems. Every single one of them scales and then starts dialing back/deleting/hiding all of the user-generated content that helped the platform get to where it is today.

Almost a decade ago "smart.fm" was a thing and the best thing about it was all of the user-generated content (blogs) offering discussions and explanations for so many various languages. From grammatical concepts being explained to people asking questions and having users provide answers in public Q&A style format. Then smart.fm got rid of all of that and became "iknow.jp" and deleted everyone's blogs and hard work built to create the smart.fm community (many of whom then moved to Memrise).

Memrise was originally about using user-submitted mnemonics and it had a vast library of them being created. Nowadays, as far as I can tell, none of the mnemonics are around anymore and they're no longer the focus. The focus is on monetization and gamification of their Pro user stats (of which I have lifetime membership until the year 9999 due to my help/work during their Beta testing years).

Because mnemonics were the focus - words across all of their courses had to be combined so that the mnemonics between courses would carry over. Myself and a number of (unpaid) volunteers spent months combining all of the words for every popularly used language (I helped with the Japanese dictionary) across all existing courses at that time.

Hosting (and moderating) user-generated content is an issue at scale. At the start when you have mostly good faith actors and few trolls it works quite well. But after a certain scale moderation becomes a massive issue.

At least I got a cool staff-only T-shirts out of it. Ben is an awesome dude and when I donated to the Memrise bus tour godfundme I asked if I could have one of their staff shirts that I knew they had - and they actually sent me one instead of one of the bus tour shirts!

The better funded of these sites seem to last a bit longer/scale a bit larger but it seems the death of user-generated content is inevitable after a certain point.

The founder's academic work is literally on using games to get people to generate training data for AIs. I watched his lecture on this in ~2007.

Oh, they've removed those mini threads? That's a shame, those used to be super helpful.

Those threads were great

This is not really related to AI though?

A company that was before 400 people, can now be 200 people. But people will rarely make meaningful bonds outside of those 5 people closest to them (Dunbar's number).

That's good to think about. If AI tools are genuinely helpful at work than it should change the people we meet there. Instead of bonding on lower level details we'll bond on what we choose to create or our larger contributions to larger creations. So I think that we'll still have these relationships.

There might also be companies where a few people work together doing different things, that used to each be a department. They won't have their jobs in common, but they'll bond over working in a strange new type of business and the mental agility required to be responsible for so much output.

I hope, anyway!

There is an analogue to this in manufacturing as well. We lost something when we moved all of our manufacturing to whatever the race to bottom place was of the moment instead of understanding how to make our things from top to bottom.

If meaningful connections at work go away, then clubs (books, chess, sports etc) and social hobbies will pick up the slack. Work doesn’t have a monopoly on meaningful relationships.

would you have opposed industrial revolution?

I realize lots of people have learned languages by watching movies in the target language and reading subtitles in their native language, but I have found that to be highly difficult. I guess everyone is different, but given that the vast majority of people who read something while listening to something else will either comprehend something from one and nothing from the other, or worst case, get nothing from either, it seems likely that doing so to learn a language is not optimum.

I could perhaps see this method as more effective in cases where the 2 languages are similar enough that there is some "lining up" between what you read and hear, but where the words are completely dissimilar and even sentence structure is completely different, I just don't see it as any better than a brute force method of learning.

Wow, so the layoff notice to contractors was "Thank you for working at Duolingo, here's an exit survey"?

That's cold.

> it can even perfectly translate endangered languages like Occitan

I’m continually surprised by the ever increasing hype surrounding AI. How could this statement possibly be true? Does ChatGPT have any Occitan texts in its training corpus? Are you fluent in this language to be someone qualified to make such a determination?

Every comment I’ve read from someone employed as a translator says it still doesn’t get the human nuances of languages. Yet, it perfectly knows this language?

Wikipedia even says “Occitan does not have a single written standard form”[1]. If that context is true, how could any thing possibly translate it perfectly?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language

I used ChatGPT for Turkish and it got it really wrong. Wrong enough that even my limited Turkish knowledge could see it was wrong. That said Duolingo was pretty bad for Turkish as well (Babbel was far superior).

I guess maybe ChatGPT is trained mostly on Western/Indo-European languages?

> it can even perfectly translate endangered languages like Occitan

How do you know?

I mean, how do you know it's translations are accurate without being able to speak it fluently yourself?

How do you know for certain that you're not being taught by a confidently incorrect tutor?

If you are learning Polish, how do you know that ChatGPT is the better tutor of Polish?

I guess you could ask the same question of a human tutor, however this seems to me the sort of thing a chatbot could very confidently give BS or incorrect information, and you would have no way of knowing unless a human who already knows Polish pointed it out.

> I am learning Polish, and find that ChatGPT provides a much better tutor than any human

That’s a stretch, unless your goal is to think you can speak a language rather than actual speak.

How do you verify that what it's teaching you is actually true? Do you spend other effort reading native Polish and speaking Polish with others?

i’ve been using it (with a stt->prompt->response->tts loop) for chinese practice and it is very good. being able to say “role play a market” and drop into it and switch mid sentence between languages when i get stuck and it just works it out and helps is amazing. i still think a human tutor is required for foundations but gpt is very helpful for practice.

"I have not used the app"

They removed typing in answers for source language (i.e. English) translations. Was a feature, but now it's gone. You have to pick from the words they give you

Can you give an example of this? In my experience (learning Polish) ChatGPT can usually derive the gender when the subject is a common name:

    Sure, here are the translations of your sentences into Polish:
    "You are beautiful Natalia" translates to "Jesteś piękna Natalia."
    "You are beautiful Piotr" translates to "Jesteś piękny Piotr."

piękn- is correctly genered.

Google Translate and DeepL are pretty bad at this, that's true. As far as I can tell they translate a sentence at a time.

Using an LLM and giving more context, it can infer gender from signals earlier in the text. This based on testing we did at the last place I worked.

What kind of cases do you have gender failing, with which tools?

I'd be really interested in an example. Preferably a link to the actual conversation with GPT4 on ChatGPT or equivalent on another service, but even just typing out the sentence here with the translation you think is correct vs the translation you expect to receive would be helpful.

Well, these days, Google Translate is pretty bad as machine translation services go... it's much better to ask an instruction tuned multilingual LLM to translate for you.

> Why would I use duolingo if it has about the same product as opening google translate, moving the target language side off the screen, typing in some inane sentence, guessing what it says, and revealing.

That seems like a way worse UX to me than what duolingo offers

Structure and progress.

For everyone who wonder what the quality is like:

it is impossible -even for native speakers - to pronounce certain words and in particular numbers I think in a way that makes duolingo accept them. This seems to be true for more than one language (think I have heard / read about it from both a Norwegian testing Norwegian and a Ukrainian testing Ukrainian language.

that's an interesting idea, but I dunno if "language learners" comprise a sufficiently influential cultural group to influence language in this way.

If I learned a new word through duolingo, used it while speaking to native speakers of the language, and no one knew what it meant, I probably would be embarrassed and confused and not use the word again.

But maybe it'll happen! And along that line, I wonder if advanced language models will be able to identify "missing words" that we're lacking to discuss concepts that we haven't yet conceptualized.

Reflections on trusting trust vibes.

What an amazing choice of new word - it's "Generation Alpha's first foray into internet culture" https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet

Can you give just a single example of these 5%?

When you think about it, this is why using AI-generated text is no better than using a dictionary. I want to learn from someone who actually thought about the text and whether it makes sense in context, not just whether it's free from errors.

In order to translate like a human, AI needs to be AGI.

I've seen some weird sentences in the French course. I have the impression they were written by a French speaker who needs to improve their English a bit.

Interesting, why?

Indeed. Cheer on the tech if you like, but don't be surprised when you're out of work for the foreseeable future next.

OpenAI's GPT4 https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/

I don't want it to translate to my native language.

We happened to have a teacher who was an old Esperantist with some quirky ideas, so I learned English with the so-called direct method. That means that after the first class, the teacher and everyone spoke only English in class. The textbook relied heavily on pictures.

Lots of people don't like the direct method, and I can understand why it's unpleasant, but it worked really well for me. I had German lessons in school for a long time, but never gained anything like the fluency I got in English - the German teachers varied from some very archaic grammar-translation stuff ("durchfürgegenohneum", "ausbeimitnachseitvonzu" etc.) to the ones who seemed to have no plan at all.

LLMs should be able to teach me with the direct method, though fine-tuning would help.

It would be at least three different translations of the same sentence from English to any language with a grammatical gender. I hope you would experience how bad it is by yourself.

Doesn’t that just mean that more translation work can get done because all she has to do is review it instead of do it from scratch?