Duolingo genuinely scares me…
So I downloaded Duolingo to learn some Japanese and for the most part I did. I think my highest streak was around like 50 or so. But here’s the scary part. So after having the app for a while, I was getting a little bit annoyed of all of the CONSTANT notifications, so I went to the settings, and I turned off the notifications for Duolingo. After that I pretty much didn’t touch my phone for about 3 or 4 hours, and when I picked up my phone after that, I was shocked, because my phone was FLOODED with these weird notifications from Duolingo. There was about 80 notifications! I read a couple of them, and they were normal mainly asking about my streak, but then there were ones like, “Why’d you turn me off?” Which really freaked me out and made me a little paranoid. I used it for about 2 more weeks but then I lost my streak, and got a little mad and decided to delete it. When I went to delete it, I saw a message that said, “Deleting Duolingo? You can’t hide from Duo…” At this point, I was REALLY freaked out and didn’t want to be near my phone anymore. I don’t know if this was a hacker or some sort of weird troll, but this really freaked me out and I don’t think I’ll ever download it again. I made this 5 stars to let people know about my strange occurrences with this app. If you wanna learn another language, I would suggest this app, for various reasons, but stay safe on here.
Show less
I have some issues.
Look, for the people out there who want to get doulingo here are some things you might want to know. When you play it You usually start with five hearts, but then if you get a question wrong on the game or whatever you’re doing it says you lose your hearts and when all your hearts for an hour, then it says you can’t do any more Duolingo for like a whole day and you have to wait till the next day and then you can doMore Duolingo. But I also like to do a lingo because there’s this thing called like I don’t know but it’s called like the leagues and if you get in the league so it’s a bunch of different ones right now I am in the Goulding and it’s really fun to get into all the weeks because you start in the bronze league when you go to the silver and then you go to the gold and then from there on I guess but I really like Duolingo because it’s really fun app and it teaches you languages and math and music. My personal favorite is actually the music but Duolingo is So fun but I have one more issue is that when you have to pay to be a special Durango person is called stupid really go to like have no ads and unlimited hearts out your heart’s number so you just keep getting cards and I don’t think that’s fair that it makes you do that I think you should just be allowed to have unlimited hearts and no ads because that just doesn’t seem fair like super Duolingo is only for people that wanna pay for me so that’s my only other issue.
Show less
5+
I’ve been using the App daily for more than five years studying Spanish for work. It has helped a lot, and is easy to use. It has been updated quite a few times in that period. Lately, I have found more software glitches in the program, which I hope is not a sign of things deteriorating at the company. While I am disappointed that relatively early adopters who signed up by internet and use the app can’t yet upgrade to the AI version, which remains app only, I’ll upgrade as soon as that is available. Good business model. Good App. I find it better than Babble and more accessable than the Foreign Service Institute courses, which I also use. Not enough to really learn the language — you will have to supplement with real conversation, reading, and grammar study, but it is useful and accessible. Three recommendations. 1) Add more repetition practice of common phrases, like the Foreign Service Institute programs use. As a “side” exercise, you could gameify it to earn points. 2) Add more side content or “flags” to understand and remind on grammar concepts. I know, that is not how people naturally learn languages. But, for adult learners, we do just have to memorize some things — like how to conjugate some irregular subjective, or something. 3) Your word practice games are okay, but having the option to save certain words myself that I have trouble remembering and practicing them would be a help.
Show less
Great but some significant drawbacks over time
Paid for family membership and coming up on a year now of French. I’ve got nearly a year streak and no question my French is better than it was. But I’m coming up against some limitations of the service that might mean I’m unlikely to renew.
I’m at stage 3 I think now and the app is continually feeding me new language to learn but I feel this is at the expense of stuff I’ve learned from earlier on. I would like more means of refreshing my knowledge of earlier material without having to go back to the earlier stages like a beginner.
Secondly I’m a paid subscriber, something that I gather puts me in a minority of users, and yet I’m finding this AI stuff being pushed at me for which I presumably have to pay even more. Sorry but as someone who’s taken the trouble to pay, I think I deserve the lot.
Finally and I think now most troublingly, I’m finding the app isn’t actually teaching me sufficiently when introducing new things. I’d always understood “nous” in French to mean “we”, but lately the app isn’t actually asking me to use “on” instead with no explanation of why I’d use one over the other. I’ve had to look that up elsewhere. The only time it’s really teaching you stuff is if you look at the short stage summary at the beginning or if you keep getting something wrong and eventually it tells you where you’re going wrong. That doesn’t seem right to me.
I’m at stage 3 I think now and the app is continually feeding me new language to learn but I feel this is at the expense of stuff I’ve learned from earlier on. I would like more means of refreshing my knowledge of earlier material without having to go back to the earlier stages like a beginner.
Secondly I’m a paid subscriber, something that I gather puts me in a minority of users, and yet I’m finding this AI stuff being pushed at me for which I presumably have to pay even more. Sorry but as someone who’s taken the trouble to pay, I think I deserve the lot.
Finally and I think now most troublingly, I’m finding the app isn’t actually teaching me sufficiently when introducing new things. I’d always understood “nous” in French to mean “we”, but lately the app isn’t actually asking me to use “on” instead with no explanation of why I’d use one over the other. I’ve had to look that up elsewhere. The only time it’s really teaching you stuff is if you look at the short stage summary at the beginning or if you keep getting something wrong and eventually it tells you where you’re going wrong. That doesn’t seem right to me.
Show less
Fabulous resource, absolutely love it, but use alongside other methods
I absolutely love the new and improved Duolingo. I first dabbled with it to learn Spanish about 10 years ago but left it to used more structured resources. I came back to it very recently having read an article about its use of AI to enable realtime conversational practice, an area I am weak in. Having used it for about a week I upgraded to max because I really enjoy the AI enhanced features. Duolingo has changed so much since I last used it, it is now a really fun and well thought out learning exercise that is really enjoyable to do and has improved my confidence in speaking 100%. There are a variety of different learning techniques that have really helped me and some of which are really entertaining. The characterisation of Lily and the radio hosts are a touch of genius. I would say however, that most benefit would be gained if you have already undertaken some more structured learning in terms of verb tenses and usage and grammatical rules. My only other criticism of the app is that after a conversation with Lily you can read your conversation as a transcript but there is no correction or feedback on your errors. I know this is possible from another app I use. So my feedback would be that if you can afford to use Duolingo Max coupled with another resource you really are all set for a very powerful learning experience.
Show less
Finishing a course…
I just finished the French course. It was nice, but I thought it was pretty anticlimactic. I didn’t get gems. It didn’t show up on the feed. It didn’t unlock any new features that might enhance my immersion in the language. Nothing. It would be nice if I could turn off hints. I tried the AI video call. It was ok, but Lilly thought I said Teningen instead of Tennessee. Overall, I don’t think AI is where it needs to be in order for the price of Duolingo Max to be so high. But I do have to give Duolingo credit for the linguistic abilities that I’ve accumulated over the years. I’ve now been friends with a French person for several years, with whom I converse fairly regularly. I can understand French and (less so) German pretty well. And, Duolingo provides me an opportunity to learn a completely obscure and extremely difficult language such as Greek, which I would likely not be able to do otherwise. These things being said, Duolingo is far from perfect, and I hope they continue to improve the app in meaningful ways. One more thing: I literally don’t care about ads, so it annoys me when I see tons of ads for Super and Max because, presumably, these ads don’t earn Duolingo any immediate money that they can then use to build and improve the app. I want to see Duolingo improve, but I personally don’t think it’s worth paying for Super or Max to see those improvements. I think they should stick to the freemium model and play ads that actually earn Duolingo money.
Show less
The duo review
I’m learning French, I’ll start with the bad things, there are too many pop up ads. I get that you need to advertise but there are just too many. Another thing is when your streak doesn’t count when you are offline. Sometimes people go camping and don’t have wifi. Now on to the good things. I like how we get streak freezes. It’s good when people forget to do it once or twice. The friend streaks is a great way of getting some reminders on doing our daily lesson. The interactive tasks are good. I like the games and stories. And all this good stuff makes up for the bad. The only thing I’m suggesting is in the book activities, some people perfer doing them with no volume. But we have to wait until the volume is finished before we can move on to the next part. Some of us read faster than the audio. Can you make it so we can advance even if the audio isn’t finished.
Love from your long time user
-Haze
Love from your long time user
-Haze
Show less
Duo
You know when u first open duo u think it going to be normal like any other language learning app that people throw in the trash cause we talking Duolingo right now. Well my first thought when I opened it up was I’m going to be a super learner and be super lingual but ofc it was going to take time to do that and learn every day with school and stuff in the way but I told my friend about it and I wanted to learn with her and I’m not doing so well but ofc I open it one’s in a while and start learning most of what u want to learn it music math and language for language it’s a lot of choices and u can do more than one bug u recommend u too finish learning the language u start with so u don’t get to carried away, also when I told my friend she said it was dope and she’s been hacking at it she’s amazing at it and I’m still learning but that’s what’s good about it , it will keep reminding u if you forget so u can do it one’s in a while so u can get ur streak on again also it gives u a break from reminders so u don’t have to worry all about it but my total is 5 stars cause it amazing for learning and it’s free I do recommend but not when ur about to leave for a trip and need to learn the language cause it will take time also the social media accounts are really cool and funny cause it’s funny and it shows us previews so overall it’s 5STARS and u need to download it and if u don’t do ur lessons duo will take u away ……. ;D
Show less
It's good but why?
Duolingo is a great app for learning a different language either learning for someone or learning a language for a new country but as much as I love duolingo and want to keep my streak going, everytime I use duolingo and try to move on to another lesson which because of this problem i'm still on section 1, unit 1 because whenever I try to do this lesson or even try to move on to a different lesson by jumping towards it, the writing lesson keeps freezing either I press the check or press the X button it just freezes and, I can't adjust anything and, I can't get out to go back to the place where you can pick what lesson to do and, what I do to keep my streak going is to review the questions I've already done and if I do get a writing question when reviewing, I have to restart the app and go back to the lesson and purposely make a mistake on either the two words one, for example, either nước or người and the answer is người, O have to pick nước on purpose so that at the end, instead of the writing question, O have to fix my mistake, but sometimes instead, I pick the right answers slowly and most of the times, the writing question doesn't appear and, I already picked the choice when you finish a level to get harder questions since I already know the answers to the questions so, if anyone knows why this is happening please tell me because I think duolingo is a great app and I really want to continue with my Vietnamese lesson.
Show less
There are a lot of issues, but it’s still good
Duolingo is still a really good app to learn any language. I’m doing really well learning my language but sometimes they’re wrong like the symbols and everything. I’m not sure if this is in every language I’m only taking Japanese but the symbols are wrong. It’s telling me my answer is wrong every time I do the same question every day and it’s always wrong, there’s supposed to be this other thing I was supposed to, but that wasn’t an option to choose. That’s why I can’t do Duolingo lesson anymore and I only have a streak it is just so hard to use this app when they are like a lot of issues that are keeping me from moving onto the next level every time it’s the same questions over and over and over again sometimes there isn’t even an option and they’re saying the audio wrong. I just can’t get my legal straight back because of all these issues so if you could please see this review and fix it that would be super nice because I actually still want to learn Duolingo learn Japanese music and maybe math learning a different language would be good for one of my classes in school so I’m really hoping that you guys can fix this, but still if some other readers reading this lead this to the support team that’s gonna fix this, but if you are just the person who wants to download this app download it not really big but they’re stopping me from moving onto the next level so you should still download the app though download
Show less
