From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.
There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.
All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.
Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.
#duolingo #languagelearning #enshittification #capitalism
A friend of mine moved to Japan about 10 years ago and has spent a lot of time solo developing his site, Kanpeki Study, for efficiently learning Japanese kanji and vocabulary in bitesize, daily chunks. I’d be doing all his effort a massive disservice if I didn’t mention it - hopefully turns out to be a good fit for you 😄.
Man, that site looks slick as hell. Props to your buddy, if it teaches half as good as it looks he’s gonna have wild success! Someone I know was talking about learning Japanese in the last few days so I sent 'em the link. If they enjoy it, I might just buy them a belated Christmas gift of a lifetime account. Cheers for the tip 🙌
Renshuu is Japanese specific and has been really enjoyable for me. Has a community of people contributing fun mnemonics (eg. “WArio’s big fat dumpy” for the hiragana of Wa) and a clearly caring developer.
I used Wanikani to learn most kanji… textbooks and actually talking and listening to Japanese ppl for the rest… still not that good but can converse. Much better at reading. Recommend watching japanese shows w japanese subs once you get to that level.
Any advice for an alternative for Japanese learning? I am on a two week streak and getting ready to give up because it’s super repetitive.
A friend of mine moved to Japan about 10 years ago and has spent a lot of time solo developing his site, Kanpeki Study, for efficiently learning Japanese kanji and vocabulary in bitesize, daily chunks. I’d be doing all his effort a massive disservice if I didn’t mention it - hopefully turns out to be a good fit for you 😄.
Man, that site looks slick as hell. Props to your buddy, if it teaches half as good as it looks he’s gonna have wild success! Someone I know was talking about learning Japanese in the last few days so I sent 'em the link. If they enjoy it, I might just buy them a belated Christmas gift of a lifetime account. Cheers for the tip 🙌
Busuu is fantastic. Gets you to think through the words and gets your feet wet with hiragana/ katakana right away.
Renshuu is Japanese specific and has been really enjoyable for me. Has a community of people contributing fun mnemonics (eg. “WArio’s big fat dumpy” for the hiragana of Wa) and a clearly caring developer.
Repetitive yes, but that’s the point of Rote memorization. Duolingo should be a tool in the toolkit but not the only one.
I used Wanikani to learn most kanji… textbooks and actually talking and listening to Japanese ppl for the rest… still not that good but can converse. Much better at reading. Recommend watching japanese shows w japanese subs once you get to that level.
Assimil courses are always a good choice