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---
title: "Against Duolingo as a language learning platform"
date: 2022-11-06
lang: en
categories: [ blog, software, language ]
tags: [duolingo, language, learning, software, rant]
translationKey: "2022-11-06-against-duolingo"
---
Up until last week, I would still have recommended Duolingo for language
learners for beginner's material, but now I can no longer do so.
It is undeniable that Duolingo is a great source if you want to learn a
language (well, great in terms of quantity at least). If you want to start
learning a language and don't know where to start, just select a Duolingo
course and you will learn from greeting and introduction to political and
scientific vocabulary, from alphabet to relative clauses or conditional
phrases.
People often criticize Duolingo for having nonsensical sentences you would
never use in real life or having only one sentence rather than a conversation,
or doesn't have grammar notes. I would even defend Duolingo here, and say they
are using it wrongly. Whatever common phrases you would expect to say,
"hello", "sorry", "thank you",... are all taught just fine, and the silly ones
are actually only a few to let the learners have some fun. Grammar notes
~~are~~ were provided for each lesson, and the silly sentences help you
remember the grammar very well. Monologous sentences... well, they solved that,
I suppose, with a side effect, but let's leave that for later. The claim that
you can't learn a language from solely Duolingo is moot, since you're not
supposed to do that; you can't learn from your textbook alone even; you should
use it in conjunction with other resources.
Duolingo added ads and ad-free premium tier. It's business as usual; I didn't
bat an eye.
Duolingo gamifies the thing further with a leaderboard and ranks? Another silly
decision I could ignore.
Duolingo removed discussions. Okay, that's a rather backwards move. Maybe they
didn't have enough moderators to handle it, which I doubt since they're
expanding their business, but discussion was a very nice feature that allow
learners and native speakers to discuss and ask questions on their grammar
mistakes or ask for extra learning materials. This was a serious downgrade.
Duolingo made a [huge redesign][duo-redesign] and you can't say no to it. They said you
wouldn't lose your progress, but this is a lie: my French and German course
progresses which was completed 100% returned to zero (not that I use it for
those anymore, but those are on the contrary to what they claimed). Questions
now are often dialogues (if you could call 2 sentences so), which probably
caused it. Grammar notes are removed, and in their place are these "guide
books", which consists of nothing but mere "phrases you will learn in this
unit". This is not only an immense downgrade for the learners, but also a huge
disrespect to the contributors. They spent time to write those grammar notes,
but now they're all gone.
It's not like this happened before. One or two years ago, they added some kind
of changes to this, which lost me some progress also, but they didn't go this
far. Either way, I should have known better that you cannot trust proprietary
platforms to respect you (see: a similar story from someone [whose Twitter
account is deleted without clear reason][data-del]). If you don't own it, it
will fall out of your hands in one way or another.
So in short, I advises against Duolingo for learning languages because:
- it has become terribly broken as a language learning platforms, and
- it is proprietary, it does not respect you
Of course, this extends to online services run on free software as well. Let's
say, my Mastodon or Akkoma instance admin can just stop running that server at
any moment, intentionally or not, and my data will be lost. The developers can
decide to add a new feature that will breaks old data, and I will also lost
access to old data. The only solution to this is run the server yourself or
back up your data regularly[^0]. However, with a free platform, that data backup
can be useful, as it can be used for an another instance of the software. With
a proprietary platform, that data will probably just be a big <abbr>JSON</abbr>
that's very hard to read without a piece of software that no longer exists.
So, my advices to language learners (and to myself as well):
- use free software, such as Anki, to assist your learning
- keep local copies of your learning materials, and make sure it's not
DRM-encumbered. This includes not only movies, books, music, but also
notes and tips from online forums, though the latter might be less
valuable.
- avoid online services which don't allow export/import your data, even if it's
run on free software
Basically: own your software, own your data.
[duo-redesign]: https://blog.duolingo.com/new-duolingo-home-screen-design/
[data-del]: https://www.matuzo.at/blog/2022/your-account-is-permanently-suspended/
[^0]: I don't do this, though, as I consider social network ephemeral
interactions, but for this website it is the case.
|
