I love effective studying. What I love *especially*? Studying languages. Language is often seen as an art form- and as I have seen in the beginner crafts and design course I took in high school (A.K.A, the last art class I will ever take), it’s hard to learn how to be artistic. However, I took great joy in learning French throughout the past four years. How can one come without the other?
I, honestly, attribute it all to Duolingo. The little green monstrocity of a bird not only made learning a language entertaining, it made it almost easy. Duolingo’s appeal comes from a long progression of simple exercises, intertwined with audio stories and readings to supplement your knowledge. With their advanced sentence generation software (especially in languages with latin-based sentence structure), you won’t ever encounter the same sentence twice.
Duolingo makes it appealing to continue practing every day, as well. It’s become a widespread joke on social media about how passive aggressive their app notifications are- with some online satire showcasing the Duolingo mascot bird threatening bodily harm to one or more people (not that the app actually does that… yet). The app almost guilt trips its’ users into beginning a ‘streak’ of practice days, whether that’s 5 minutes or 50. Similarly, the ‘leagues’ feature allows competitive people, like me, to battle other users for top spots, being ‘promoted’ each week and forced to do more work to remain on top.
Duolingo was such an effective learning tool for anyone- no matter how much you knew of the language, how much time you had, or how fast you wanted to go. It was incredibly versatile, easy to use, and even gaves some room for personalization in which order you wanted to complete lessons.
The past tense is used here because, as of November 1, 2022, this all changed.
I have been using Duolingo since 2017. I had the diamond trophy for French, signaling that I had completed the entire course. I wouldn’t call myself a hardcore user like some of my friends, but I was there for a long time.
And I never, NEVER, thought that the Duolingo developer staff would have to justify their own wages enough to completely overhaul a system that was *already working perfectly* and not even allow users to switch back to it.
If you’re not an avid user, let me update you. On November 1st, a new ‘Path UI’ mass rollout update began. Almost immediately, it recieved very severe backlash. Not only does it completely revamp the learning path to force users to follow a set curriculum of content/reading/exercise/content, users also see more coercion to purchase the “super duolingo” subscription.
The update is forcing duolingo practicers to speak their minds on social media, with many commenting that users learn in all different ways, and the fact that the company is now forcing users to learn in one specific way is completely superfluous and unneccessary. It’s also interesting to note that the majority of beta testers, who have had the update for multiple months, have also said the same things on social media.
Personally, I agree with the majority opinion. Why change an app meant for learning to restrict the freedom of its’ users for… aesthetics? I’m unsure of what actual purpose the update had- I just know that right now, it’s not making anyone happy.
I guess we’ll wait and see if Duolingo rolls back their update, or at least gives users the option to switch back to the old learning method. In the mean-time, I’ll *begrudgingly* continue my streak.
Do you use Duolingo? What do you think of the update? Comment your thoughts down below.
As someone who could never decide in what order and with what frequency to practice each skill, I actually like the new update. Now I can just go in the order they came up with and know that it is the best way to go about the Duolingo tree. However, I totally understand that for people who like to do things their way, this could be so annoying. They should really give us the option to let us choose if we want their way or ours.
This is me also. For learning something, I want someone to show me the way. I used to bounce around almost randomly. But I think giving a choice is good also. The stories are another matter. After months, I just ‘discovered’ them about a week ago. I had only completed 4 of the dozens available and now they are buried somewhere.
I haven’t been on Duolingo in a hot minute, but I definitely enjoyed it when I was just beginning to learn Spanish in middle school. It’s a great way to learn and maintain skills in a certain language, and I know people learn a lot. Sorry to hear about the update though, some companies go against their audience’s wishes and just try to solve problems that don’t need to be fixed.
I detest the new Duolingo model, I have been using Duolingo off and on for several years, and today am on day 1459 of studying German. I think I will be quitting and giving up my streak, as the content no longer suits me. I am very sad, as it’s been a nice way to keep up my German and work up the levels, watching each topic change colour as I master it. Oh well, perhaps it’s time to move on to reading German books and pulling out the old German-English dictionary.
Absolutely hate it. It has dumbed down and gamified the product even further, the target audience must be very small children. I was dismayed to find this ghastly update today, with all the usual corporate happy-clappy BS about Wow! New! Fun! Whoo-hoo! and congratulations of what a wonderful thing this was.
As usual, the CEO is absolutely bone-headed and couldn’t give a toss about customers. Management know best! They always do, and the customer is always wrong – the customer is stupid.
I’m deleting the app despite having a 700+ day streak.
I liked duolingo so much that I purchased plus just to support them. The update however is a total marketing ploy. It’s focus is to drive people towards purchasing duolingo classes. They removed all the grammar guides so everyone has to resort to classes for formal instruction.