Their comments cemented to me that they have no long term value. If the ceo of Duolingo thinks AI will teach me a language then I’ll use a low cost LLM to get there without Duolingo.
Like that would be like the Chipotle CEO proudly announcing that they’re firing their workers because they’re getting all of their ingredients from Taco Bell now due to “Taco Bell’s system being so much easier to operate” and “Taco Bell is so cheap and they have so many locations”
It would be quite surprising for there to be some other company with capacity to supply thousands of restaurants with exactly what you need.
The ideal AI-powered tutor would work more closely to a private language tutor. It would speak with you and gradually integrating language concepts into the conversation. When you make mistakes, it could correct you on the spot and keep track of where your strengths and weaknesses are.
Actually, in some ways better. HelloTalk has a "correct the other person's sentence" feature that shows an inline diff, yet it's simple enough for people who have never heard the term diff.
No offense, I can tell you're neither a linguist nor a language teacher.
This is one are where the human input is invaluable and irreplaceable. Because language (the complex kind) is inherently human. It quite literally is.
Spanish is not a programming language.
Years later I learned from people with the same method I described.
The AI models (large LANGUAGE models) of today seem very close to replicating that experience.
Try telling ChatGPT with voice mode "let us talk about X in [pick language]... Correct me when I'm wrong and explain why".
I'm curious where you think it's failing.
What do you feel is missing to replicate a good language teacher?
When I was working as language teacher, I was tasked specifically with teaching speaking. I would often use information gap activities. These are activities where two or more parties have pieces of information but need to obtain pieces from others in order to complete the task. Sometimes, these would us language forms (re: sentence structures), but most of the time they were free flow activities. It didn't matter how "correct" the language was so long as the idea was communicated.
To think about it another, how often do we make mistakes when speaking? Writing? And yet, we still managed to communicate just fine.
That's not to say there shouldn't be any focus on form, but simply that it's not nearly as important as many tend to think when it comes to language learning.
When I was learning Spanish, the other person I was speaking to would simply repeat what I was trying to say in Spanish.
It wasn't always nitpicking my grammar. In many cases it was predicting what I was struggling to say.
I would have loved to be in your class because it sounds a lot more focused on practical conversation than my first language class!
However the stock did rise about 25% after his comment so maybe it was at least working for the short term if some investor wanted to cash out?
If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my exact needs.
I feel like so many AI products these days won't be around a few years from now once more people find out that all their doing is providing a slightly different UI to what you can get directly from OAI, Anthropic, Google for cheaper and better and more tailored to you.
Then again, the only languages I actually learned - besides my mother tongue - to the point of being able to do things were English and Latin and both were very much acquired offline. I have plenty of experience with language learning apps and I'm not convinced tech is the solution or even part of the solution.
I've used Duolingo in the past (and other apps) and quickly lost interest, it's a fun app, but I feel like you don't learn from it. If I had to learn a new language today, I'm confident I could make good progress with GPT or Gemini, but tailoring it to how I learn.
After 4 weeks I also learned Spanish enough to maintain casual conversations just from trying to talk to someone online who did not speak English. I am rusty now, however, because I do not speak it with anyone, nor do I see or hear Spanish anywhere. Spanish is way easier, IMO, in comparison to Polish.
Thoughts?
On what? If I understand you correctly you learned through people and practice and community.
It worked for me, and I found it to be the best way to learn a new language.
I tried Duolingo but I got nowhere useful that way.
My take is that basically anything can be made to work if you are properly motivated. Tech is - at best - a secondary concern.
Could I ask ChatGPT to just "teach me spanish"? Surely not. But if you've got even a slight idea of what to do (learn present tense and vocab, then progressive, future and past, then some conditional, hypothetical etc...), it can be an absolutely incredible tutor.
I started using it when i was already at a pretty high level, but I'm quite certain that it would have been excellent from the very beginning. It translates, gives varied examples, explains syntax, compares verb tenses and conjugation and more.
Those are all things books will give and people as well and often better.
Can it be a tutor? Sure, if you squint. But "tutoring" you on some question you have is not the same as "learning a language".
People buying expensive products (assuming they aren't truly better) are helping screw over poor people. Just slightly.
Anyway you're not really helping the poor in practice when you do this. Corporations aren't hurting because one guy or even a dozen he inspires through HN stop buying a few boxes of kraft dinner.
If more people did it, and it became a movement, like buying clothes from the thrift store is becoming, then clothiers will shift business focus. Which to some extent they seem to have done over the past 20 years. But only slightly.
The more effective way is to form a group, call it a "club" or whatever, that does it. The group can then advertise to other people and get more people to join the club. Eventually, it becomes large enough to gain political power. This is called "unionizing" — people with a shared interest joining together for a common goal. Eventually you get large enough to hold the corporations over a barrel, either through strikes or a mass disinterest in buying products, etc.
The only reason we have a 40-hour work week is because of unionizing, it's a very, very effective tactic that is severely underutilized.
The problem with Unionizing in the US, is there's very little cultural problem with crossing picket lines.
I really liked the solution in the movie Our God's Brother adapted from a play written by Karol Wojtyla in the 1940s in Polish who later became Pope John Paul II.
> If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my exact needs.
That said, I've found LLMs to be terrific if the goal is to learn the rules of language's grammar. But to actually learn to speak the language, find HelloTalk to be best, beaten by nothing other than actually sitting down with a native speaker.
you cannot build a moat with LLMs, so there is no value in using any service that is wrapper around the chatpgt
For what it's worth, I also stopped using Duolingo when the human forums closed. I often found as much value in the forums as in the actual course. And like GP, the hardest part was relinquishing my nearly 1000 day streak.
My dad likes doing oil changes himself which I'd never do, but it doesn't occur to me to insult and question why a person has different values than I do.
Which, at the point I was welding together solar panel mounts onto shipping containers was true. But maybe i could have asked myself ‘should I’ instead of ‘can I’ somewhere earlier in the process hah.
Software freedom has never been about money, and always been about preserving public access to a software commons. You might believe your local bookstore is a better source of knowledge than your local library, but that's only because you don't really know what you're missing.
If you hate ads, deception, and dark patterns as much as I do, then most software has a negative value. But I'll only pay for it if the value exceeds the price. That means there's a rather large (and probably growing) share of the software market that I'll just never pay even a penny for, because in my opinion, it has negative value. But it's not because I don't want to spend the money. It's because I want those companies that are peddling ad-laden bloatware to be a financial failure so that the market will intervene and offer better alternatives.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising. How else do you let your potential market know you have a product that they would benefit from? It's not always deception to get into their wallets, sometimes it's a genuine fair value trade.
Though I do think modern practices are full of immoral patterns, especially what George Lucas pioneered of brainwashing children into buying things. So yeah I agree that in practice, most modern marketing is just plain deception.
On the other hand, you then have millions of young, talented developers wasting their time and energy on open source projects that are hugely innovative and useful, but because they wholesale reject marketing, their projects never get anywhere, and they settle for unfulfilling jobs that society could do without.
And maybe the saddest part of all is that many such young talented devs spent so much time making useful projects for free, and never saw a dime because of it, despite the fact that corporations are now profiting from their work daily. You may say, well, the dev put it out there for free and didn't ask for money, but in the current market, what other choice is there? The race to the bottom has already been won and first place was $0.
Because when you write it yourself, you can share it with others. Those others can then build on what you did or use it themselves.
Not everything needs to be a transaction - some people just want to make the world slightly better without asking for anything in return.
Duolingo being crap and costing anything/month is the problem.
(Paid Duolingo user and long time GNU/Linux user here)
Let me introduce you to the ancient lore of BrandonM, in his epic treatise "rsync v Dropbox": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Anyway, Im responding to you because i find ChatGPT to be a FANTASTIC tutor. Like I was absolutely blown away. It can do all the translation stuff, but also answer questions about different verb tenses, conjugations, syntax etc... I'm sure that an extremely good spanish teacher would be better, but I think ChatGPT is probably better than most. And it is free.
When I am learning something new in development, the LLM is immensely useful since it has unlimited patience, and I can zero it in on exactly the level of complexity or understanding that I need.
You don't even need to know any grammatical terms (I barely do for English, and suspect most people don't either for their native language), so long as you can speak a language. Like, I don't have a clue what past participle or present perfect tense mean in either language. Nor do I particularly need to know them.
Though, I'll admit that it would surely be easier to learn Spanish if I knew and understood the equivalent constructs in English. Case in point - when I was a kid and they taught us French in school, it was just an exercise in memorization rather than understanding, because they hadn't taught us the English versions. Apparently that's just what happened where I'm from for an extended period of time. Yet, I'm very significantly literate.
Still, you just ask chatgpt "how do I say _ in Spanish?" and then ask questions with variations for subject, object, tense, etc. You obviously would start easy "how do I say 'I eat bread'", but can progress to 'I ate/will eat/am going to eat/had eaten/would have eaten/could eat bread'
And you could eventually make it quite complicated eg "if you had told me xyz as you should have, I would have asked him about it. Now I am hoping that etc..." There's a huge mix of grammatical concepts in that (and I know very few of their names), and chatgpt would easily translate it and explain the concepts to whatever degree I desire.
If I was sufficiently motivated, I am quite sure that chatgpt could rapidly and effectively teach me all English and Spanish grammar.
Perhaps it would be a different story if learning something wildly different - eg Vietnamese. Yet, there's surely still similar constructs underlying it, since they all have to reflect the same world.