Postby Cavesa » Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:32 am
While there are some great aspects of this (because sure, it is not cool to gain so much on someone else's volunteer work), I am a bit worried this will just mean another wave of lowering the quality and dumbing stuff down. Some of the volunteer courses (such as Norwegian) have a great reputation for being solid and thorough. The old volunteer courses for the major languages used to be at least not too slow and to fulfill the expected function not too slowly.
But ever since they hired "professionals" to make the major language courses, the quality dropped.
-The main courses (such as Spanish) were redesigned very badly. They are now much slower paced, which combined with the exercise and algorythm changes (many more dumbwit exercises, significantly lower % of the valuable exercises even at the higher crown levels) leads to Duo being even less efficient. The lessons were chopped into smaller ones, so the not true beginners (or people using Duo alongside a coursebook) cannot progress much faster even by testing out.
I know that this fits with what the CEO even admitted in an interview. They are primarily targetting the huge crowd of americans interested in playing, not really learning the language. That would be ok, if only Duo's marketing didn't also mislead real learners into falling for it. Let's never forget that all the Duo's "research" on "successful learners" is focused on people staying on Duo forever, not on real success.
-The pace is even more uneven in the offical courses. The equivalent of the first few units of a normal coursebook is spread over half the course, then a lot of stuff gets introduced fast. Therefore you will be useless for very long, and struggle to use Duo alongside a coursebook, but later you will "learn" a lot of stuff just as memorised sentences, due to lack of varied practice.
Btw B1 content was promised ages ago, but I highly doubt it will arrive. And even if it does, Duo will suck at teaching it, due to the preference of easy exercises (to keep people coming back and seeing ads. Learning is not a priority).
-The CEFR labeling (or rather the way the cefr has been applied here) has done more damage than good in this case. Why? One of the few huge advantages of Duolingo over many of the nowadays common coursebooks used to be the grammar based organisation. It was a nice supplementary workbook. You could just go and review this or that grammar feature.
Now it is all about vocab and stupid conversation situations. This approach is actually rather discouraging to some kinds of learners. (Instead of an approach "hey, this is a versatile feature to be used in so many situations, you've learnt a huge chunk of the language today!", it's like "hey, you've learnt to handle one situation, just a million to go").
-The "professionals" (using the "" to suggest that they are professionals in the sense of being paid. But imho, they are just some not too bright college students hired for cheap) are paid just to make a course, but there are probably no or very few people paid to maintain it and add alternative answers. That's actually a huge problem and a huge advantage of the volunteer courses. If the team of volunteers sticks around (but sure, some languages are orphaned), they take care of this rather efficiently. But when you report something to the "professionals", there is no reaction. You'd better memorise the official correct version, even if yours is totally valid or even better (for example, the Spanish course really overuses the personal pronouns very unnaturally), because there might be a reaction in half a year.
Duo deserved better. It does have problems, it hasn't become what I had hoped it to be. But it is just sad to see that they are gonna dumb it down even further by paying some morons to replace people, who may have less time for the project, but genuinely care.
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