Elenia wrote:Much earlier in the thread people expressed the idea that Duolingo bought out a competitor. Now, I don't see that, because I can not in any way see ReadLang and Duolingo as competing products. I'm wondering if this could be a move that is good for both companies - Readlang gets more attention in time and funding and reaches a wider audience (ready and waiting) and Duolingo can expand their offer so that they can retain those learners who've done their tree and reverse tree and don't understand why they're still not as fluent. As a bonus, Duolingo get's to compete against another market heavyweight*, namely LingQ.
*For a given value of heavyweight.
Actually, Duolingo had something like a weird Readlang LingQ mutation some time ago. I think it was called Immersion and it consisted from short pieces of free stuff from the internet being translated by Duolingo learners. I didn't find it useful even for my beginning languages.
Without this, I would see it similarly as you do, Elenia. That is why I am not optimist about this. Duolingo may want to make something similar to LingQ. And it will have the same mistakes due to which I don't use LingQ. Short bits of content that are useless and boring to me and perhaps to other learners too. We are learning languages to get more freedom of information. Readlang is making this possible earlier, LingQ later.
If Duolingo wanted to improve the results of their learners, there would be different ways. Don't you find it weird that everything about Duolingo is so professional, except the real content? The trees are made by volunteers. And they are absolutely awesome for volunteer work! But they still don't even cover the beginning level properly, because they are too superficial. The potential of explanatory notes is highly underexploited. There are too few, and not good enough. Or you could make the trees much bigger with more practice of each skill, or you could keep the tree looking so safe and not difficult at first sight, but open additional levels with more sentences, more vocabulary, more exercises for each skill. They even removed the tests for lingots, which could have been an awesome way of feedback to improve the courses. And I don't know whether it isn't just my impression, but I'd say Duolingo is letting much less prepared courses into beta than before. The Mandarin course had been prepared ridiculously fast.
So no, I don't think Duolingo wants to gain more money primarily by teaching better.
Adrianslont wrote:Still, Steve Ridout’s expertise IS in developing an online reading app so I suppose they hired him for that skill so we may just get lucky and get an even better version of Readlang with no downside. I’m 55 days into my one year subscription and Steve has said Readlang will continue for the moment so I will just have to read as much as possible for the next ten months - which would undoubtedly do me good!
You are absolutely right about his expertise. But the question is not whether or he is able to build a great thing, given the funds allowing him not to do it after other work, he definitely is. The thing is what are his supperiors going to want from him. I don't think he'll have a problem making a LingQ like thing, and it will be very good for a product of this kind. But it simply won't fulfill the needs of Readlang fans.
I wonder, is it worth it to buy the subscription now? Would the money go to the creator or to the new owner? I know they don't care about so little money, but I do.
emk wrote:Cavesa wrote:Perhaps I am being naive, I am sorry about that.
No, you're not being naive at all. Those are
exactly the right sorts of ideas to be proposing, in my opinion. Good tools for intermediate students of German in Eastern Europe sounds as plausible as anything else I've heard. You know the market, and you have answers to most of the objections I can think of off the top of my head. This doesn't mean that there won't be nasty surprises that wreck your plan (there always are). But all you'd hypothetically need is a starting point, a strong team, and enough money to survive the inevitable learning experiences. Also, if you wanted to partner with language schools, it would be good to have a strong relationship with an insider who believes in your vision.
Anyway, it would be fun to look at the numbers.
Not in Eastern Europe. What I was describing was central and southeastern europe (I don't know when will finally the world notice the Europe changed a bit in the last thirty years). I know central europe well, that is my region. (Sorry about sounding a bit negative but it is really offensive to be still called "eastern europe" in spite of the last thousand years of our history. The two regions are extremely different in terms of economy, religion, international relations, history, culture and so on. And given the 20th century events, such as my country being occupied for twenty years, I still wonder why are people in western europe and america so convinced about the "eastern europe myth")
Actually, eastern Europe is much less enthusiast about German. German speaking countries are not their direct neighbours, not their uncontested main business partners, and definitely not sources of
that huge crowds of tourists. Those eastern europeans who don't speak Russian natively are very often learning Russian and most are learning English, as far as I know. Everything else is way less popular. On the other hand, half the central europeans are considering moving to Germany or Austria to get paid four times more for the exactly same work and with less bureaucracy. You can hardly think of a better motivation than this.
So, these two markets are extremely different.
Convincing the schools would be very hard as many are building their whole marketing on the cheesy photos of people so relaxed and smiling I wonder whether it is photoshop or amphetamines. And for those, such tools using memorisation would be too old fashioned. Or there are the traditional schools that, while using the cheesy coursebooks too, are building their image on being serious and traditional. For those, these things might be too modern.
Another problem: From my experience, teachers tend to discourage students from using native media until very late stages of learning. Perhaps they mean well and don't want people to find something too hard and give up. Perhaps they believe reading in the language=reading the classics, because that's what they were reading at university, and therefore assume every learner would tackle something so ridiculously hard and distant from modern spoken language. Or they simply believe their methodology is the only right one, and won't believe even their own eyes and ears.
But perhaps they could see these independent and efficient activities as a danger for their business. If their B1 or B2 students moved too fast and got through the usual everlasting complaints "I am having such a hard time understanding natives" and "I cannot remember everything while speaking", they would sell fewer solidification classes, conversation classes, reading classes, or learning with cinema classes.
You are absolutely right such a company would need someone an ally excited about the idea.
I think we haven't mentioned a different problem. The non anglophone world has masses of intermediate learners who would like to improve. But what they lack are the huuuge amount of blogs, forums, and websites about learning. The internet part of marketing would be much more difficult. People who are in learning communities have already learnt one language usually. For example the Czech internet has very few blogs about language learning and they are mostly written by schools and teachers and regurgitate well meant but inefficient advice (or just marketing). But on the other hand, once you'd build something like Benny's profitable blog with a forum, you would be the King without competition.
These markets have a lot of potential but would require a lot of investment and care to get things running. But such a company that would put this effort into such a market would actually profit from customers being in awe of being treated well, not like an american who is used to getting nothing else than 100%. We are used to being the last market addressed by large companies, after they offer their services everywhere else, they give us a worse version like Netflix, and act surprised when we can see the difference. The phrase "the Czech Republic is a specific market" is something we hate, as it usually means "a place where they have no choice but to buy crap we cannot sell elsewhere". Convince the Hungarians or Poles that they are a really important market to you, and they will love you. (And go to Slovaks earlier than to the Czechs and they will love you twice as much
We love each other, but both nations love "winning" over the other one even more, with slovaks being more sensitive to the issue.)
