"There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo... Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company."

Star@sopuli.xyz to Technology@lemmy.world – 1130 points –
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Anyone who has a passion for open source and wants to learn Spanish should check out LibreLingo! It's also a nice project for people who want to contribute to something that is not owned by a company, though it's a bit too early for contributors who have language skills but no coding experience.

Any suggestions for other languages? German? Italian?

Unfortunately I don't know of any open source alternative. After another response in this thread I started using busuu.com for French and Italian, and I'm liking it so far. Their business model is pretty transparent, but I find it less annoying than Duolingo so far.

Viel Glück and buona fortuna with your language learning!

I like that's it's more real life, the talking, people, subjects etc. Think I'll use it for a while, because on duolingo I wasn't evolving much anymore in German, this goes further up it seems

Just as pushy as duolingo unfortunately in ads and mainly in pushing to and rewarding premium.

Yeah, the adds take up some time, but I still find the overall experience less annoying than I did with Duolingo last time I used it. The push towards human interaction, which Duolingo has actively pushed away from, is also welcome.

Duolingo, the dominant player, can simply buy competition like busuu, bypassing the need they'd otherwise have to improve their software.

It looks cool, but I can't even sign up for it (infinite spinning loading icon). I did a search and it's been a problem for more than a year at this point, yikes.