Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI

jherazob@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 385 points –
Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI
futurism.com

Duolingo is very much on the Enshittification path, seems like they fired a number of translators and have the rest just proofreading AI.

For the interested, here's the place where you can request your personal data and delete your account

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Anecdotally, a friend who's pretty handy at languages uses more Memrise than Duolingo now. Similar sort of setup, but with a different style of delivery - more visual cues and a better repetition approach.

in my experience, Memrise teaches you useful phrases much faster, while Duolingo drills you about horses eating blue apples and turtles wearing yellow hats.

To be fair, as a Duolingo hater myself, I do see the logic in teaching wacky phrases. It at least gives me the impression that it makes it easier to improvise sentences based on the grammar you've learnt by drilling "the bear should eat some cheese when it rains" or whatever.

I just tried it out and I like it a lot better than duolingo.

Duolingo is super gamified and you can’t keep practicing after you made a few mistakes. I just practiced for an hour with memrise and it was nice. There’s also video exercises in the app, and you can also practice chatting (with an AI probably?). I hope it holds up.

I would love to compare babbel too, but Arabic is not available there.

Awesome, I think I may go back to a language myself. Thanks for checking it out and letting us know!

Just fyi you can keep practicing as much as you want in Duolingo, just tap the heart in the top right and click practice to earn more hearts.

Huh, I didn’t know that. I just tried it out and it worked.

I think I’ll stick with memrise for now.

Thanks though!