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.

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.

Nobody has ever learned a language by using Duolingo anyways. It's an app that lets you pretend your are doing something useful with your life instead of just slaving away at your job enriching others.

I think it should be added that people who pay premium get infinite lives, everyone else gets 1 life every 6-ish hours with a maximum of 5, meaning they can answer wrong at most 5 times and fail a lesson, forcing them to do a recap practice lesson to earn a heart and then retry the lesson with only 1 heart or they're just done for the day.

It's kind of pay to win.

Nobody has ever learned a language by using Duolingo anyways. It's an app that lets you pretend your are doing something useful with your life instead of just slaving away at your job enriching others.

To win what? The lessons are not competitive.

• Following backlash to statements that Duolingo will be AI-first, threatening jobs in the process, CEO Luis von Ahn has tried to walk back his statement.
• Unfortunately, the CEO doesn’t walk back any of the key points he originally outlined, choosing instead to try, and fail to placate the maddening crowd.
• Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in the firm’s users.

I just started using Duolingo to learn Spanish. Can anyone recommend alternatives they have had success with that function the same way?

1. There actually is a weekly leaderboard bracket where you compete with about 30 to 50 other people.

2. Completing a lesson is winning, losing all your lives is losing.

A completely optional, side objective that has no bearing on anything else? You can completely ignore the leader board and still progress. It's not competitive.

I have definitely learned a lot of Spanish from Duolingo, and while I'm not fluent, i went from being able to count to able to hold some basic conversations with Spanish people i know.

• Following backlash to statements that Duolingo will be AI-first, threatening jobs in the process, CEO Luis von Ahn has tried to walk back his statement.
• Unfortunately, the CEO doesn’t walk back any of the key points he originally outlined, choosing instead to try, and fail to placate the maddening crowd.
• Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in the firm’s users.

Last year in February I uninstalled the app on a perfect, 2000-day streak when I got the first whiff of AI; I'm probably never going back

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?

Jesus fucking Christ, lighten up lol.

• Following backlash to statements that Duolingo will be AI-first, threatening jobs in the process, CEO Luis von Ahn has tried to walk back his statement.
• Unfortunately, the CEO doesn’t walk back any of the key points he originally outlined, choosing instead to try, and fail to placate the maddening crowd.
• Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in the firm’s users.

If anyone wants to practice their Japanese or have questions, they can message me.

I love this headline so, so much

Yeah of course, winning or losing a game has no bearing on anything. It's still winning or losing.

The main objective is to complete lessons. You have to pay to do that or wait for energy to replenish.