Anki is free. If you need gamification, then perhaps memrize is for you. I'd just go with anki though. Ankidroid is a good app to work with the anki decks.

I canceled my sub, but sadly not out of principle on the AI thing. I just accidentally hit the button that accepts an upgrade to the family plan and it didn't look like there was an easy way to undo it so I just killed the whole subscription.

Pimsleur has been making "real" language courses for 20+ years, you could get CD's with languages back then, there should be plenty to choose from.

The missing comma in the second bullet point changes the meaning of the sentence.

Many libraries also give out subscriptions.to Mango. That is usually a paid app and much better than doulingo

I tried out a bunch, including Babbel, Busuu, Language Transfer, Mango, and Memrise. I didn't like them for one reason or another. I finally landed on Lingodeer. It's similar to Duolingo, but it is a paid app. (You can try level 1 of any language for free.)

The regular subscription price is definitely not worth it. It's okay (not great, but not awful) when they do their sales. But I felt okay about paying human workers.

This kind of learning is a great start, but will only get you so far. If your local library has access to Kanopy, look for the Great Courses series on Spanish. I thought that was an excellent series after a little bit of Duolingo.

I remember easily getting gems for free. Also the streak basically doesn't matter at all. What made me uninstall is the slow pace. It felt like I was stuck on the same words and topics forever. It felt like I was not actually learning anything, which if you've ever started learning a language if a formal setting, is very apparent.

Those rich idiots figure you just have to act a certain way, and they conveniently forget that you also need the talent to justify the act instead of just being born with a silver spoon. It´s also that silver spoon shields them from many of the consequences and being called out.

Respec the AI with lots of points into Charisma and Legal Dexterity. It also needs a large amount of Gold to get started.

Theres also basically zero server side-checking on anything. Hacked APKs let you get premium features for free :3

Got any recommendations for where to find said APKs?

That's awful! Could you please let me know where these APKs are hosted so that I may avoid them?

Just a guess , but maybe the extra net by the bay of torrent.

I've found it's best for drilling and not for learning. You'll probably learn faster by reading a textbook or listening to something like the Michel Thomas method that gets you speaking super fast. Then you can hop on Duolingo and make it stick. The secret is knowing the vocabulary beforehand to finish the lessons faster by focusing on your accuracy instead. It's still a lot of grinding, though.

I'm a long time user of Duolingo and you earn plenty to give yourself the occasional streak freeze if you can't go two days without doing a lesson. It's not really as predatory as it sounds. It's nothing like pay to win type games.

Fuck Duolingo for the AI shit though, don't mistake me for a Duolingo simp thinking their blameless. It's just that the monetization is not as predatory as it sounds.

I have so many could probably keep a streak foing indefinitely without ever doing a lesson, but I'd need to log in every couple days to repurchase the streak freeze.

Ah, okay, thanks for the info! I've never used Duolingo so I genuinely don't know.

I deleted the app the second he said this. Get fucked, AI.

Tl;Dr: skip the apps unless they're part of a bigger in-person course. Prefer reputable sources like pimsleur and mango languages. If you have no rush, get graded readers and watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, etc.

Ok, so here are my two cents on learning languages and the whole category of learning apps. They are all flawed on some major way or another. But mostly it is about pacing learning progress.

Teaching absolute beginners is easy. They know nothing, thus anything you show them will be progress. The actual difficulty when learning a language is finding appropriate material for your level of understanding, such that you understand most of it, but still find new things to learn. This is known as comprehensible input. The difficulty of most apps is that they are not capable of detecting then adapting study content accordingly to the student's progress. So they typically go way too slow, or sometimes too fast. Leaving the student frustrated and halting learning.

Jumping with some nonzero knowledge into any app is also torture. It's known as the valley of despair. The beginner content is too boring and dull, now that you know a bit, but the intermediate level is way too much of a gap for you yet.

My advice is to skip language learning apps. The "motivation via gamification hypothesis" is flawed and lacks nuance and understanding of behavioral science. People don't stop studying out of a lack of tokens, gems, streaks or achievement badges. It's because the content itself is uninteresting and bores them. Sure, the celebration and streaks work at first, but they usually lose effect by something known as reinforcement depreciation. The same stimulus shown too much or too frequently stops being gratifying. The biggest reward for learning a language is actually using it.

A method that is known to work is to find graded readers. Watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, social media, in the target language (avoid the language learning influencers) listen to native influencers speaking about topics you care about. Books work, in-person courses work, learning apps are good to start you up form absolute zero. But most learning happens on what you do in your everyday life. Using the language is the most effective way of becoming good at the language. Everything else is just excuses for using it.

AI is social cancer

It's a lie told by marketing companies that have gaslit artists into automating their creativity and gaslit governments into automating fascism