Beli Tsar wrote:Cainntear wrote:WildGinger10 wrote:I get that funding for education is a tricky business, and good resources are expensive to create, but if Duolingo starts a trend in making language learning programming free/inexpensive, then I am in favor of it.
But how can it? It hasn't revolutionised the production of language materials in a way that will remove the high cost of creating high quality materials, they've just burned through thick wodges of investors' dollar bills making mediocre materials, as well as getting untrained volunteers to make much of the material for them.
Making high quality materials is already difficult enough to justify in terms of cost, due to the way well-marketed rubbish tends to dominate the sales charts -- while a certain big yellow box could be made much cheaper without cutting into the budget for R&D (I recall someone saying that 95% of the yellow box's budget goes on marketing) that's not true of good and/or genuinely innovative material. You wouldn't get anyone to fund 26 hour of video à la French in Action or Destinos if you were just going to put it on YouTube and hope to make the budget back through per-click advertising, for example.
This is absolutely true. As an ex-publisher, even if not of language materials, I can vouch for the fact that free resources and big discounts are not helping produce cheap resources. There's a lot free on the internet, and there's a lot discounted by Amazon and others.
The result is that publishers' margins are horribly tight. And what gets cut is good editing, good planning, all the care and love of producing a great resource. The great language-learning series, like most good things, are as much labor of love as they are profit-making. There is a reason no big publishing house produces anything like Assimil.
And free resources directly impact sales themselves, of course. So authors don't make money, and publishers cut those smaller-seeking but excellent series we love.
It's true that giant publishers are often profit-hungry sharks. But that is not the same as saying that the industry is awash with too much easy cash. Rather, hard times give the sharks plenty other fish to gobble.
I love free resources, and use them a lot. But they come with a long-term cost to us all, and that cost is investment in quality resources.
The problem is that both of you are looking at the issue with a lot of priviledge, no offence meant. Don't get me wrong, I know damn well how much is to much pressure on stuff being cheap killing the quality. The czech medical textbook market is a wonderful example of the "cheap above all" approach being taken ad absurdum and still not leading to cheap good resources for everyone. Curiously, more and more students are paying for the better foreign books instead, because quality matters. But of course they would not buy bad textbooks in English, when they can borrow bad textbooks in Czech for free in the library.
When it comes to language learning, even mediocre and bad resources are often paid and expensive. This is not a fight between high quality paid resources and low quality free resources. And Duolingo being free, and being quite good for some of the languages and purposes, is actually helping a part of the disadvantaged learners.
Good luck learning a language from scratch to a solid level using just what you find in a public library in Prague, and we have one of the best networks of libraries in the world. Good luck finding good quality and cheap material based in the smaller languages. Good luck learning English as a poor person from the second or third world country, with majority of ESL stuff being very expensive.
If you want money, make so good resources that everyone able to pay will pay for them. So far, most publishers haven't done much to deserve the money. A pdf scan in an app making it impossible to write in or print is being sold as an e-course for the price of the paper version (which you can write in and use much more comfortably), and they are not ashamed. The assimil e-method has been criticised on the forum too, because the quality of the digital platform is simply horrible, considering the price and the good name of the publisher. No publisher has put high quality official word lists for SRS out there as an external component of the course. Many still sell a CD that you need to rip in order to use, unless you don't mind still living in the 90's and being CD player dependent.
Most publishers are simply not even trying, so they have no right to complain about Duolingo or other digital tools. If they are unable to profit from the advantages of the modern times, it is not Duolingo's fault. We should actually thank Duolingo, if it forces the publishers to enter the 21st century and to fight with quality of both the content and form. Because what many publishers have been selling is a shame and such publishers deserve to not earn money on such trash anymore.
It is about balance. Duolingo (let's not forget that it is not completely free, it shows ads, which is some income based on the amount of views) is struggling with it and brings some problems and not only advantages, true. But the problem is Duolingo having so much PR it steals the light from everything else, another bigger problem is it presenting it as a full course (which is not true), and it is being pushed into schools (which is an awesome marketing strategy, and I don't get why the schools don't care more about the quality of the content and choose other resources).
The other stuff doesn't get enough attention and also the average Duolingo target customer doesn't have a clue what those other products' advantages are. Let's not forget that a large part of them would just opt to not learn a language at all, if they didn't get free Duolingo. It is naive to imagine that all those millions of users would suddenly buy a coursebook, if Duolingo was paid or didn't exist.
So, I get your concerns. But some free products available are a wonderful thing. Of course that all the users should be told openly "here is free Duolingo, or you can pay for better products here and there", that is the missing piece of information.
MacGyver wrote:lavengro wrote:MacGyver wrote:.... . No real improvements to how a language is taught or extra content.
I believe this depends on the language at issue. The English to Spanish tree has recently (within the last month) been very substantially revised and the content considerably increased, and Duolingo is always tinkering with and beta testing new features and increased content - for example, there are four versions of the French tree currently rolled out to users for testing purposes, and I understand French V.4 will be issued soon as the standard tree, and that has dozens of additional skill units and quite a bit more content that its earlier French trees.
Fair enough. Then, in my experience, the language i am learning doesn't get much love at all. Probably about as much as Klingon and the Game of Thrones language.
It seems like Spanish is their most important language.
Exactly. Talking about Duolingo without keeping the differences between the individual courses on mind is a mistake. It is obvious some of the courses were made too quickly and only to prevent people from going to Lingodeer, for example (the timing of the south east asian languages was really precise).
Duolingo is hiring some professionals now and experimenting with the courses. It is not always a good change. If I remember correctly, the German tree was criticised for actually having less content or being much slower after the change (but that was some time ago). Now, the goal of the French professional team is the turn the A1 tree into A2, which sounds good. It is possible Latin will be made by professionals.
Whether Duolingo decides to make the courses paid, that is a question. But I don't think the income from advertisements is so small, the app (which is becoming the main product now and attracting exactly the millions of people who wouldn't pay for any language course at all and would play candy crush instead) shows you ads all the time. Or you can pay for the Plus, which is definitely expensive, considering the fact it gives you no useful improvements, except for the advertisement removal.