Welp, time to quit
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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They have been shilling max so hard, the practice tab now is hidden to make room for the Video Call tab (Max only) and a tab to subscribe to Max or upgrade your plan.
Probably won’t renew this year. I have a 1500+ day streak, but a good chunk of that is just doing a single quick practice lesson every day, the gamification got me and I haven’t learned much new stuff in probably a year.
I learned enough Italian to use it when I went on a two week trip in 2023, but the problem with Duo’s lessons is nothing is conversational. I would be able to say/ask something, understand the response, but then not really have the ability to keep the conversation going.
The differences in languages after so many years is also a bit disheartening, I had a friend show me all the tools available in their French course that I didn’t have, it made their Italian lessons look like vocab flash cards in comparison.
I am not a big LLM user, but I did try to use it as a conversation partner, which worked alright. I haven’t looked in a while, but my biggest issue was it would speak too fast and none of the available tools had a way to slow it down outside of telling it to add ellipses after each word.
There are at least some Duolingo courses that use AI voices exclusively and they are shit.
On the one hand, having an AI to talk to sounds like something that could be good. Getting a real person to talk to every user would be impossible. I just don’t think the technology is going to meet expectations any time soon.
The problem is if the user asks the AI a question about the language they're learning they'll often get confident bullshit as the response and they won't know it's wrong because they're still learning.
They do this in the French course. Half the time it still can’t understand what I’m saying. Maybe that’s on me, but still. C’est la vie.
R.I.P Doulingo.