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So some time last year, my mom decided to download Duolingo to learn French. It was free and easy to do a quick lesson a day, so I decided to give the app a shot and learn some Japanese! It was fun at first, learning simple phrases and the 3 writing systems. But over time, I started to grow more frustrated, not with learning the language, but with the app itself. After maintaining a 127-day streak, I finally deleted Duolingo off of my phone recently. Here are my reasons why:
The RPG-like leveling up and leaderboard systems were fun to engage with for the first couple of weeks. It was fun to compete for first place on the boards while learning a new language, but it quickly lost its appeal once I progressed past the easier bronze, silver and gold leagues.
Competition only grew more ridiculous with each league. You could be in a nice 3rd place when you finish your lesson, come off the app for a few hours, come back on and suddenly you're in ninth place. And you gotta do more lessons to just stay in the league, otherwise you're gonna be knocked back down to the last one cause you didn't have enough points! The app just keeps punishing you non-stop for not dedicating all your time to it.
Nowadays I'm trying out Renshuu to learn Japanese. While it doesn't have a super sleek interface like Duolingo, I really like how refreshingly plain and simple it is.
What I mean is it isn't really trying to be your hip and relatable friend like EVERY company seems to be doing now. Renshuu just gives you a simple manga strip and gachapon capsule reward after a lesson. No bombastic ad campaigns about the mascot dying, no quirky or sassy persona, no memes.
This style of advertisement was cool back in the mid/late 2010s when it was just Smug Wendy, the KFC dating sim, anime mixed media art from Arby's and even the older "Duo will kill you if you miss a lesson" memes, but not every company is cut out to do that 24/7. It's overstayed its welcome and feels disingenuous most of the time now.
Time to address the elephant in the room. In a recent company email, Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahin announced that the company would be phasing out contract employees for work that could be handled by AI.
To summarise his justification for this: To overcome the "human limitations" in creating "massive amounts of content". The article goes on to state that Duolingo will "only allow new hires once teams prove they can’t automate the work" and that "candidates’ facility AI will be evaluated during the hiring process". On top of that, even down to hiring employees and giving performance reviews will be evaluated by AI!
This news did now sit well with users at ALL, with tons of them dunking on Duolingo and deleting it off their phones (myself included).
And apparently the gradual removal of the human element from the app is nothing new. Older users are talking about how Duolingo once had forums and comment sections under lessons, where users could talk to each other, ask for help and bring up errors in lessons that needed to be corrected.
This video provides further insight into the backlash.
There's no denying that with moderation, AI can absolutely be a useful tool in making work less tedious and easier to do. The problem is that these CEOs are clearly out of touch with the actual wants and demands of the consumers. Shitty AI generated art and content, finicky AI chat bots and AI assistants are in literally EVERYTHING now. You can't escape them, and it's very, very annoying.
So with that being said, that's it for my Duolingo era. Was nice while it lasted, and I can't deny that I did learn a good bit from it, but it's time to move on now. I guess I'll either stick with Renshuu, or learn Japanese the good, old fashioned way: By watching a shit ton of anime with the subs on.
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