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Comment by morkalork | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like they suffer from the same illness as dating apps: Being successful means users graduating and leaving the platform.

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It doesn’t have to be that way; learning a language is a long process. I took about 3 years to reach real practical fluency, and I still have to say “what?” more often than I’d like and I still need to learn a ton of more advanced vocabulary. Duolingo unfortunately doesn’t offer any C1 content so I’m stuck using other methods.

Imagine the shareholders saying:

"Why settle for 3 years when you can milk people for a lifetime? If it takes 10,000 hours to master something," it doesn't but they'll likely use that meme, "and you plan to spread that learning over 72 years, they must not spend more than 22 minutes a day actually learning anything! The rest of the day should be adverts and retention."

I could see it as well. For me currently, I’ve completed 100% of the Spanish course, and I’d like to keep learning more, but there’s no more content. I think there’s a lot of more legitimate opportunities they could find, in the way of more content, to keep me coming back. Right now to be honest I just continue using it to maintain my streak, since I’m already fluent. But! I’ve recently started learning Italian, and maybe that way they can get a couple more years out of me.

I completed the Duolingo German course several times as they kept changing the course rendering the previous all-gold as more-to-learn. And the Esperanto course. Tried Arabic for a few years over the course of the pandemic.

I can hardly remember any of the Esperanto, I never even mastered the Arabic alphabet let alone basic phrases, and actually living in Germany rapidly revealed how mediocre it had been at teaching me German.

I stopped at a 2500 day streak, shortly after one of the big controversial UI changes.

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