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Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI (futurism.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Duolingo is very much on the Enshittification path, seems like they fired a number of translators and have the rest just proofreading AI.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

I never liked Duolingo anyway. It's a bit stupid, it just teaches you some basic phrases without explaining the grammar behind it. So you're not really learning anything.

And I really hate 'gamification' in general. I love computer games but not gamified learning or exercising etc. It just puts me off.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I actually had it the other way around, I wanted to learn to understand and speak Spanish a lot better. My wife is half Spanish and her family speaks zero English. Anyway started to learn with Duolingo and my Spanish did improve. But after a while I got to a point where most of the mistakes I made where spelling errors. I don't care how to spell in Spanish, I'm not going to write them, I just want to understand it and be able to respond. There is no option (afaik) to just learn the meaning of the words.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

If you’re having spelling errors in Spanish that’s something you could fix in like an hour by student Spanish pronunciation. It’s like the easiest language to spell in given its deterministic mapping between spelling and pronunciation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Learning Spanish as well via Duolingo, but I feel like it's slowing down and based on this post, looking at alternatives. Have you found one that works better?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Duolingo does have grammar lessons, they cover the parts of speech, rules, exceptions and interesting notes.

You actually have to click the grammar notes for each lesson, and many people skip it. Still it's up the user, not sure why this myth persists.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I'm studying a couple of languages that don't have English as the native tongue. They provide no grammar notes.

The ones with native English do, but accessing it is not intuitive since you have to go to the Units view.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

You don’t need an explanation of grammar to use proper grammar. Your brain is ready to absorb language and intuit the grammar.