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.
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But, retention means repetition, so you learn more, right? Not trying to defend Duolingo but I've been enjoying it for the last 3 years or so. Almost got 1000 day streak and my Spanish is getting better.
It is fair to say it helps people stick with it but it ends up avoiding harder facets and puts more focus on memorizing rather than learning
Well, proper language learning is more about memorization than understanding. People learn language as a child through repetition, and the understanding comes later.
Just because people learn that way as a child, that doesn't mean that it's the best way to learn.
it's not really memorization, children don't learn languages by sitting there desperately burning every word into their memory, they hear it repeated over and over and the brain just passively soaks it up and eventually starts making sense of it.
And i'm pretty sure this is why people who learn to speak languages in school are generally terrible at them, it's shoved down their throat and the brain is given no time to process understanding the language before trying to speak it.
I've found that my ability to speak languages i learnt in school has become significantly better a couple years after the fact, presumably from my brain having had time to process the information.