Do you like Duolingo?

[Cavesa]

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.

.... . 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.

[Keys]

To answer the original question, I like Duolingo just because it's pretty easy to use and gives me some basic vocabulary for a language. I only do the passive click through levels though, I don't like typing in stuff, that makes it way more of a time investment.

My main method would be to find some bilingual reading and listening material and dive in from the deep end, but that's impossible without some basic knowledge. Also my goal is just to read and understand a language fluently.

Probably Glossika or other such sentence repetition tools are better but they also cost money. However if I'm serious about a language I'd be willing to pay for a good tool. I don't like subscriptions though, I always end up paying monthly while not having time to use the tool so I quit those.

[MorkTheFiddle]

I'm new here and I don't know how this community feels about necro-posting, so I will put my comments here rather than in the older thread linked above.

I am not new here, and I don't know how this community feels about necro-posting, either.

[Beli Tsar]

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.

I do agree with nearly everything you say! But I'm just not as optimistic about the effects on the market. Yes, Duolingo does something good, and it ought to make publishers up their game.

But I fear the reality is that instead they will continue to focus on marketing and over-promising, on convenience, promised speed-to-fluency, ease of use, lack of effort required, and so on.

I hope I'm wrong. And there are people out there producing good stuff.

[Chupito]

After having read your post, I wonder if you would know the answer to a really old (but still relevant) question. Or maybe someone else would know it as well.

The main "issue" that prevents me from using Duolingo is the following. "Having to remember what typed answers are recognized by DL". In many situations, there are more correct answers than DL knows. And in that "type in your answer" quiz, DL makes the following equation "I don't know that it would be true = it is false" .

So how to deal with that, well, non-feature of Duolingo? Because not everyone would want to start the very same quiz over and over just because of not remembering what particular (correct) answers DL accepts.

I find that in courses that got enough attention, like Esperanto or Spanish, it isn't much of an issue. If you give a correct and rather straightforward answer, it will be accepted even if it isn't the one DL expected. I frequently give a correct answer with a different gender/level of formality/word order/synonym/whatever than expected and it's accepted.

If not, on the Website, when a sentence is counted as wrong, you only have to retype that one sentence at the end of that particular lesson; you won't have to start the whole quizz over again. Of course, report it so that the next person doesn't have the same issue.

So my advice would be: type a straightforward translation/stick to the script (within reason), act as if the "teacher" wanted to see if you knew those specific words/expressions/grammatical features, and remember that DL is anal about this/that/the/a.

[Cainntear]

Sorry...meant to come back to this ages ago.

I do not share your views concerning Duolingo Cainntear, but I am always interested in reading them, and even when they do not correspond with my own, I am interested in understanding them.

I am not sure I properly understand your comment "Duolingo was never sustainably free" - do you mean only that there were and still are costs (to the company) involved in setting it up, continuing to maintain/modify/expand it, host it, advertise it, populate a staff beyond the legion of volunteers? If so, for sure. More than for sure: very obviously true.

If by Duolingo not ever being "sustainably free" you intend to mean that Duolingo has proven unable to continue to offer full access to its language programs for free (for those who would like to access them for free), I don't with respect think that is at all correct, at least at present.

Well, apparently they're already restricting access in the US by having players lose "health" for their mistakes, and offering to sell them new health when they run out of it (because you can't continue without it).
They justify this by saying "The Health feature encourages users who are making mistakes to take a breather and review previous lessons before moving forward."
But I just made a bunch of mistakes (non-US) and the app told me:
"Don't worry, making mistakes helps you learn."

The ads haven't been enough to provide stability, and they're still looking for a business model that actually works, so it can't be sustainable for Duolingo.

But then there's also sustainability in terms of ecosystem. Imagine a furniture company need 10 oak trees in order to make their furniture, and they go out and cut down an entire forest looking for those 10 oaks. They burn all the pine, birch, beech, etc etc that they have cut down because they don't need it.... but someone else could have done something useful with those trees, and if they were still standing in the forest, you'd have a much healthier ecosystem.

The freemium model (the majority get stuff for free and 1% or less of users pay) has never really been a great business model, and my concern is that among the 99% of users that aren't paying anything, there are quite a few who would have paid for something, but have now seen that they don't need to, so don't. I believe that what DL has done to increase their market share has damaged the wider market (while still not making DL a stable business).

to rephrase your sentence a bit, "Duolingo appears at present to remain sustainably free for language learners."

That's only true if their income covers their costs, and I don't believe there's anything public to say whether this is true or not. You think it is, I think Duolingo is still running through investors' cash. I can't prove I'm right, but certainly they were still reliant on investment capital 2 years ago, spending $42000 daily on keeping the site going. They were predicting revenue of $30-40 million last year, and with 42k a day being $15 million a year, they might be finally in the black, but the monetisation of the health thing makes them sound a little desperate to me.

The problem is that both of you are looking at the issue with a lot of priviledge, no offence meant.

I acknowledge that I am in a privileged position, but I do not accept that this has any bearing on what I said.

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.

No, because nothing's ever that simple. The market's already against the specialists, with big names drowning out the smaller specialist stuff just on grounds of brand recognition and marketing spend. This means most language resources are squeezed to fit a house style and template that is uninspired and gives little recognition to the differences between languages. Duolingo may be competing more directly with the big publishers and their crap, but it still has an impact on the smaller specialists.

And Duolingo being free, and being quite good for some of the languages and purposes, is actually helping a part of the disadvantaged learners.

Yes... for now. But what is the long term effect? How will the production and availability of materials be affected by reinforcing the idea that language is something you shouldn't have to pay for.

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 a course for Czech speakers on Duolingo.

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.

Good luck finding an ESL course on Duolingo if you only speak Igbo, Swahili, Nepali, Lao etc.
Good luck finding any language other than English if you don't speak a European language.

Cos you see, right now Duolingo is massively more useful to first-world citizens than anyone from the developing world. It's free to everyone, but only really of use to people from rich countries -- poor people just get table scraps.

I don't see that as a challenge to privilege.

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.
..
Most publishers are simply not even trying, so they have no right to complain about Duolingo or other digital tools.

The assumption you're making is in focusing only on the publishers. Yes, they have the money to innovate, but no, they don't have the motivation. But the people with the motivation are generally people who don't have the money. Duolingo exists because of von Ahn's money and fame -- he was the rare person who had the motivation and the money. He's moved the goal further away for people with motivation and no money, because they can't just burn through investors' millions the way he did -- they have to show some possibility of making profit, and how do you do that when your main competition is free?

[Cavesa]

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.

No, because nothing's ever that simple. The market's already against the specialists, with big names drowning out the smaller specialist stuff just on grounds of brand recognition and marketing spend. This means most language resources are squeezed to fit a house style and template that is uninspired and gives little recognition to the differences between languages. Duolingo may be competing more directly with the big publishers and their crap, but it still has an impact on the smaller specialists.

I don't think there is much difference between the specialists being oppressed on the market by ten big brands or eleven.
Also, the number one answer to "how to start" used to be Rosetta Stone and Duolingo has changed that. That is a huge step in the right direction, better both for the learners and the market. Duolingo has also challenged the hype of "learn like a child" or "avoid L1 at all costs" ideas, that is another good thing. I think learners are now much more likely to look for better resources than to think of themselves as desperate failures who should stop even trying, as even the almighty RS hasn't managed to teach them.

And Duolingo being free, and being quite good for some of the languages and purposes, is actually helping a part of the disadvantaged learners.

Yes... for now. But what is the long term effect? How will the production and availability of materials be affected by reinforcing the idea that language is something you shouldn't have to pay for.

THe language learning business is still huge. Anybody wanting certain results will still pay. Just the initial investment is much lower now. I believe that with the proper development on the side of the publishers of good resources (including marketing), a part of the free Duolingo users is likely to become more ambitious and pay for the quality. People who don't even try because of the initial costs will never pay for more resources.

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 a course for Czech speakers on Duolingo.

No need for luck, there is an English course. Sure, the other languages would be great, but this is the most demanded one. It is better than the situation before Duolingo, when Czech learners had no clue that any digital tools for langauge learning even existed.

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.

Good luck finding an ESL course on Duolingo if you only speak Igbo, Swahili, Nepali, Lao etc.
Good luck finding any language other than English if you don't speak a European language.

Yes, but the answer to this is not "Duolingo is evil and damaging the market". There are English courses based in 22 languages on Duolingo now, including a few non european ones, like Thai, Vietnamese or Turkish. In the incubator, there is an English course for Telugu, Punjabi, Bengali, Tagalog, and Tamil speakers. This is one of the areas, where I can't see much reason to criticise Duolingo. It is not unlikely that the Swahili or Lao learners will get their English courses, not sure about Igbo or Nepali.

Yeah, good luck finding other langauges with non English base. But guess what, that is not a problem of Duolingo either. If Duolingo convinces some learners with other native langauges that they can learn something else through English, they might buy the better resources. Without Duolingo, they will not be better off. It is simply the reality that a Czech monolingual is extremely unlikely to find stuff for Vietnamese or Swahili. Actually helping those people stop being monolingual and access the wider selection of sources is one of the solutions, cheaper than tons of courses based in Czech (or the even smaller and non european languages)

Cos you see, right now Duolingo is massively more useful to first-world citizens than anyone from the developing world. It's free to everyone, but only really of use to people from rich countries -- poor people just get table scraps.

I don't see that as a challenge to privilege.

There are no poor people in the US or the western european countries, who have a real problem finding money to spend on non obligatory education? The Czech Republic is a rich country (even though second world), looking at it globally. Yet, every tenth person is in the debt trap and one third of the population has a real problem with even rather small unexpected expenses or putting anything aside. We don't have many starving people, but we have many who are exactly one salary away from that at all times and who could actually get a better job thanks to a free way to learn the basics of a foreign language. You underestimate the economic value of A1 English.

A free course that can help people get started is making a lot of difference, it would just need to be more known. And a free German course (if it was the same quality as the English based one) could actually improve the economics of one or two regions here! And those richer people would be much more likely to buy resources to get a few levels higher than A1/A2 than the poor people not knowing anything.

Yes, Duolingo is not trying to solve all kinds of inequality. And it is much less helpful to the poorest in the third world for now, you are absolutely right. But overlooking the impact on at least a small part of the problem is unfair.

Am I wrong, if I believe that there are at least a few millions poor americans, struggling to make the ends meet? Yes, they may not be as poor as the poor indians, true. But they still could do with some free education, they could use to improve their situation. Feeding a starving person in your town is not unnecessary or not worthy of praise (and pushing down the prices in the local restaurants) just because there are billions of starving people elsewhere.

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.
..
Most publishers are simply not even trying, so they have no right to complain about Duolingo or other digital tools.

The assumption you're making is in focusing only on the publishers. Yes, they have the money to innovate, but no, they don't have the motivation. But the people with the motivation are generally people who don't have the money. Duolingo exists because of von Ahn's money and fame -- he was the rare person who had the motivation and the money. He's moved the goal further away for people with motivation and no money, because they can't just burn through investors' millions the way he did -- they have to show some possibility of making profit, and how do you do that when your main competition is free?

You are right about the disparity between people with the money and people with the motivation. But right now, lots of them are surprised they are not making profit on selling train tickets to the bus users. Those selling cars make the profit.

You do that by quality, user friendliness, marketing.

You underestimate the value of being viewed as professionals, being backed by universities or other such institutions (just look how even horrible ESL courses sell much more than better ones, if they have the magical word "Cambridge" or "Oxford" written somewhere on the cover), cefr labels, and all the other stuff that non-Duolingo companies can present themselves with. Duolingo may be appealing to the anglophones not much in need of another language. But people who actually need one still widely believe that Duolingo is just a substitute for the better (objectively or seemingly) tools they are struggling to find.

They will pay as soon as they find something with good enough value/price ratio for them. And free Duolingo as an alternative just means they'll expect more quality for the money. That is actually great.

If the companies are not trying hard just because Duolingo is free, then perhaps they don't deserve to earn money. It is sad, that many such companies may leave the market, but it is right. Profit is for those, who adapt.

The majority of the market hadn't appeared much more motivated to innovate before free Duolingo either.

[lavengro]

Thanks very much Cainntear for your detailed response - I had typed up a wordy, boring reply, but got frustrated because my sign-in status kept crashing and just gave up. I had intended to echo many of cavesa's comments (and I had actually researched and typed out "Bengali, Punjabi, Tagalog, Tamil and Telegu" similar to the manner in which cavesa has done) but she has made most of my points so much more eloquently than I would have.

Well, apparently they're already restricting access in the US by having players lose "health" for their mistakes, and offering to sell them new health when they run out of it (because you can't continue without it).
They justify this by saying "The Health feature encourages users who are making mistakes to take a breather and review previous lessons before moving forward."
But I just made a bunch of mistakes (non-US) and the app told me:
"Don't worry, making mistakes helps you learn."

The ads haven't been enough to provide stability, and they're still looking for a business model that actually works, so it can't be sustainable for Duolingo.

Just on these points: I assume you accessed Duolingo through an app. I only access Duolingo via the web version, and have never encountered the Health system you and others describe. Sounds awful and counterproductive, but is not replicated at all in any form on the web version (at least for me; I understand that they sometimes randomly beta test for some). I can go all day long without restriction, and trust me, I make a ton of mistakes! I understand there are other advantages to the internet version over the app version, including increased availability of Notes. The one time I took a quick look at the app version, I did not care for it at all and ran back to the web version.

About the future, I have no idea about Duolingo's finances or history and it sounds like you know quite a bit more. But at present, surely Duolingo has not yet run afoul of its principle, "shouted from the rooftops" as you say in your February 1st post, of providing language lessons for free? I do not consider the fact that there is advertising means that one cannot access it for free, in the same way that YouTube is free. Perhaps you are suggesting that free distribution by Duolingo will come to an end at some point?

TL:DR: avoid the app version like the plague; speaking of plagues, Duolingo does not cause leprosy as suggested recently by another forum member in a separate thread; enjoy the free lessons while you can if they are to your liking; access the money back policy if necessary.

[Cainntear]

Just on these points: I assume you accessed Duolingo through an app. I only access Duolingo via the web version, and have never encountered the Health system you and others describe.

As noted in several points in this thread, the health system is currently only in use in the US, so I haven't seen it either. I can't say for sure whether it's in both versions or not, but I would be surprised if it wasn't. Any US posters want to clear this one up?

About the future, I have no idea about Duolingo's finances or history and it sounds like you know quite a bit more. But at present, surely Duolingo has not yet run afoul of its principle, "shouted from the rooftops" as you say in your February 1st post, of providing language lessons for free? I do not consider the fact that there is advertising means that one cannot access it for free, in the same way that YouTube is free. Perhaps you are suggesting that free distribution by Duolingo will come to an end at some point?

YouTube took a loooooong time to turn a profit, and it does so by just being the server, not producing the content. The people who do produce the content don't make any money, and have to beg for loose change on Patreon. Duolingo wavers back and forth on this, releasing community-sourced courses, getting criticism for the quality of courses, producing professional courses, then making more community-sourced courses.

The reason it works for YouTube but not for Duolingo (or LiveMocha before it) is because YouTube is a pick-and-mix -- watch what you want, ignore what you don't care about -- but a language course is take-it-or-leave-it; if you don't think the Xish course is well written, you can't just go to another Xish course by a different author. YouTube doesn't lose viewers from one bad video, but Duolingo can lose chunks of their userbase through one bad course.

[WildGinger10]

As noted in several points in this thread, the health system is currently only in use in the US, so I haven't seen it either. I can't say for sure whether it's in both versions or not, but I would be surprised if it wasn't. Any US posters want to clear this one up?

The "health bar" function is in-app only and doesn't appear in the browser version. Still not sure why it exists at all. It kept me from making any Russian progress as I only had access to my app and was having trouble internalizing the alphabet AND vocabulary at the same time. But I had only gotten through maybe four lessons so eventually I didn't "have anything to review" to regain health but I couldn't get through a lesson in less than 5 mistakes, so my only option was to pay Duolingo real money to give me more tries, or wait a day and try again, when I would inevitably make another five mistakes and be barred from continuing.

Absolutely infuriating.