New life lesson: never volunteer for a for-profit company.
But then how would spez ever be able to take Reddit public?!
People who keep trying to do Socialism in a Capitalist system are doomed to fail, because Socialism produces enormous surpluses and Capitalists love to just gobble that shit up.
“If peoples basic needs were met nobody would work!”
People “work” all the time of their own accord, we just call it volunteering instead of “work.” People love saying “I don’t want to work,” but really what they mean is “I don’t want my economic output stolen from me by my employer while what’s left is stolen by ever increasing prices with no wage adjustment to compensate.”
People “work” all the time of their own accord, we just call it volunteering instead of “work.”
Never even mind volunteering. $50B/year in wage theft in this country. People contract to do labor and then their bosses simply short them. Back in 2019 a coal company attempted to close a mine without paying over $1M in back wages. The workers shut down the rail out of the money and seized the coal until they were made whole.
Wish more folks who got fleeced by DuoLingo had the gumption to do something similar.
It’s harder to protest and make demands when most volunteers don’t even know where the fuck Duolingo’s HQ is, much mess live anywhere near it.
Love that username 😂
It’s the best spell in existence
Agitate on the forums. Let other people know about open-source alternatives. Organize other power users to submit bad data in protest.
I would argue the traditional family structure is a micro-socialism state.
That depends heavily on how the family operates.
Historically speaking, the male head-of-household had dictatorial control over the ownership and expenditures within the household. Only in the last two generations have western women gained the right to hold down jobs and assume credit for large purchases, to own their own homes, and to take full custody of their children. The idea of emancipated minors, civil rights for children, and labor protections for young people are even newer. And there are plenty of reactionary political attitudes in the country that would see these reforms rolled back.
A family certainly can operate in a socialist capacity, when productive property and its surplus is shared equitably. But there are plenty of instances in which the head-of-house is functionally no different than a landlord, demanding the rest of the family live contribute surplus labor while existing in relative poverty.
dude what
Make sure to put anything you want public under the correct license. If a platform doesn’t support CC or GPL or MIT, then leave.
EDIT: Or Apache, or IDGAF, of course. ;) But what I would really want is a license that forces your content to remain free, even if used in something else. Basically copyleft: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.html
All my stuff is under Apache-2.
I put all mine under AH64
Oi, you got a loicence for that choppa?
This baffles me. We’ve seen time and time again that for-profit will fuck you over any chance they get over a dollar if they must, and people still volunteers for them.
I guess that’s the difference between normal people and capitalists.
And yet I am sure everyone reading this comment will leave a rideshare driver review this year or answer a question from Google maps or post information on Faceboot. A policy doesn’t mean much if it isn’t possible to enforce in a consistent manner.
Yeah dude, leaving a review for a gig worker is totally the same thing as volunteering for a for-profit corporations.
never give a corporation your labour for free.
People should have known this from the beginning.
These volunteers didn’t think about it in these terms.
They gave away their work for free to help people learn languages, and for a long time Duolingo seemed like the best platform for that.Starting your own platform is much more difficult than contributing to an existing one that seems to be operated with some amount of goodwill…
I understand that. Unfortunately, though, one has to expect always the worst from Corps, no matter how “good” they appear to be at the beginning.
If we always assumed the worst no one would buy/accomplish anything. This is not a realistic way to live. The best we can expect to do is making the best decision with the information we have at hand at the time. Of course a healthy dose of scepticism isn’t a bad thing either as long as it doesn’t get in the way of living a relatively normal life.
Poor computer literacy is really biting people in the ass. Quotes like this really stand out to me:
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company.
Did you not know that they would be able to do this from the start? Or perhaps you knew and were just being extremely naïve? Either way, not being aware of what kinds of control other parties have when you share data with them is something that’s all too common these days. I really wish people would consider the ramifications of what companies can do when you give information like this to them.
Like giving your phone number away for no reason. The moment you share it, you give companies all they need to start spamming the shit out of you (or giving it away to other companies that will happily do it instead). How is a concept like this so hard to understand?
It’s not that they didn’t know that they could. It’s that they didn’t think they would.
Because—and I say this as a user of Duolingo who first started using it after the old comments were made read-only, but before they were removed entirely—it’s fucking insane that they did. Those comments were so useful to the user. I don’t know how many times I went to them to have some aspect of the lesson explained to me because the app itself doesn’t actually do any real “teaching”, it just tells you that you got it wrong and what the right answer is. The comments from users helped explain the nuance in word meaning, or the relevant grammar rule, helping add enormous value. By removing them they are literally making their product worse for no gain.
People thinking that they’d act rationally wouldn’t expect that.
Seriously. I don’t know what outcome people expected. Duolingo is not a non-profit, or a community project like Anki. I hope everybody who is surprised by this is receptive to the lesson.
While it is true that corporations are terrible and will do anything in the name of profit, what you guys are saying is “they got fucked and it’s their fault.” It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are. They are formed by people who choose to fuck other people over for their own benefit. Fuck off with your victim blaming.
they got fucked and it’s their fault
That’s not at all what I’m saying. What I’m saying is people can choose to participate in a community that is controlled by a for-profit company if they want to, but they should temper their expectations accordingly.
It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are.
That’s exactly what they are. They are composed of people only to the extent that a car is composed of wheels.
If it’s otherwise in working order, a flat tire will be replaced and the car will be going wherever it’s meant to go. Profit city is where all roads lead to, and a flat tire (or four) can only delay for so long.
If you want to hold corporations to moral standards, you have to change the incentives (destinations) and restructure corporations to be actually owned and controlled by people who are then held to those moral standards (put more of the car into the wheels).
It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are.
I think you need to read a little more about economics, because this is exactly what they are. In fact, they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits.
That’s for publicly traded companies. Duolingo wasn’t public when OP contributed to it.
Corporations don’t exist in a vacuum. They need to fuck people over or they’ll get outcompeted.
Thieves don’t exist in a vacuum either. So what you’re saying is a thief should rob more, or else other thieves will take what he could have stolen instead, and then he’ll be out of the thieving business? What kind of fucked up bullshit logic is that?
I know corporations are part of reality, but that doesn’t mean they should be excused for profiting on volunteer work. But my point is that the volunteers are being blamed as if they fucked around and now they’re in the stages of finding out, as if they’ve done something so stupid no one would have ever done. Unfortunately, part of reality too is that unless one of these volunteers has sufficient power and money to fight them, corporations like Duo will go on with impunity and they’ll keep fucking people over and others will keep not only justifying them, but also supporting them by buying their products, because it’s just easier to be spineless.
Unless I’m mistaken, I read that as them agreeing with you. They were just pointing out the reality, they didn’t say they agreed with it.
Why do you believe non profits are immune to this? They’re still incentivized to produce value. Maybe we just don’t mock volunteers for doing a good thing and instead shame the people taking advantage of them?
I didn’t say nonprofits are immune to it. I essentially said for-profit companies are for-profit. That says nothing about non-profits.
Same for people contributing to google maps
I mean, I do that for me. If I’m going to a road I want the name and address to be right. I use g maps a ton.
I wrote the comment more as throwing some complementary thoughts. I understand how hard it is not to use google when they provide essential services. Regarding maps, I’ve been trying to use openstreetmaps as much as I can, and adding places using streetcomplete, but every now and then, I find myself using google too.
That’s right, never trust a private company that might go public in the future.
That’s why you should build your communities on Discord instead. 🤡
That shit is the most infuriating thing ever to me. It seems like so many technical discussions and communities are going to Discord now where that information is not indexed or preserved. How many issues have I had where the answer was sitting on a Discord server that will never appear in any general search result?
I’ve tried to use discord before but it seems just kinda… awful. It’s essentially a single uninterrupted, general purpose comment chain about a singular topic. It’s a forum meet twitter but worse than either?
Yea that’s cause originally it was just meant to be gamer friends voice chatting and text chatting with each other. They build all the other features on top of what they had originally so it’s terrible as a reddit/social media alternative.
Yeah. I’ve come to believe the problem isn’t Discord itself but how people use it. But I totally get your point. So many niche communities. I had to make a Discord account and then someone just fucking answers “!faq” and a bot pastes the answer. Why was that not on their GitHub page? It is what it is.
A Discord server can be created in seconds and can easily have everything they need. I get why they turn to it but it sucks.
Discord is the same thing as technical slack threads, or IRC chat. People try and use it as a reddit replacement when it really truly is not.
Forget reddit replacement, people try to use it as a wiki/documentation replacement.
Deranged behaviour.
Unfortunately, I feel forum communities have themselves to blame for a lot of people not wanting to interact with their forums.
Essentially, there’s a level of gatekeeping that existed where if you didn’t ask questions the ‘right way’ or even ask the ‘right questions’, you would be flamed and potentially have your post deleted. Some of these people actually believe that if they can’t answer a question, then it’s the fault of the asker and not their own.
Why go through the effort if that’s how the community is going to behave? Sometimes, it’s more fruitful to say nothing than to tear someone down or give wrong information just so you can contribute something.
Discord is nice because of how informal it is, although it’s also getting corrupted by the same autists who need to have everything ‘just’ their way. (referring to things like forcing people to start threads instead of an open room for questions.)
Since when as autism anything to do with this? I’m figuring out but can’t find an answer.
The worst part is that it is preserved, as long as the Discord channel still exists, but is functionally impossible to find. Because search engines can’t index it from the outside, and Discord’s search function is just a dumb literal string matcher.
And that won’t stop all the regulars in the channel from jumping down your throat anyway because you asked a question that was answered 17,782,169 chat messages ago. Didn’t you see it? It’s right there. Nestled in between said regulars posting pictures of their cats, or showing off the latest computer peripheral they just bought, or kibitzing about the weather in whatever towns they live in. Interleaved between six separate conversations that were also going on at that time. I mean, duh!
“Just search!” I did, and all the results I got were you guys likewise jumping down the throats of the last 200 people who asked the question before me.
I thought that Slack was what that use case is for. It’s an acronym that stands for Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge. I didn’t realize folks were using discord for productivity use cases.
Tons. A special firmware I use for my 3D printer is supported through Discord. All questions and new firmware links are posted there. Even with Slack being “searchable”, unless I am mistaken, it’s not indexed by search engines, right? So when trying to figure something out I would need to search for webpages and then also search Slack right?
Well modded discord servers for popular topics will have forum channels that behave exactly as you would expect them to. Sure they’re not indexed on search engines, that much is true, but discord isn’t the “blink and you’ll miss it” live chat client that it once was.
I was specifically referring to the forum like sections. The lack of indexing and internet archive means large swaths of knowledge, timelines, history, and even culture will become dust in the wind.
Why discord? Everything on it will be lost without exception. Fuck discord.
It’s why they put the clown face emoji at the end. Discord sucks so hard for finding information. The number of interesting projects that exclusively use Discord for their documentation is astounding and frustrating as hell.
I’m all in on Matrix. After hearing the words, “Nobody uses IRC anymore, everyone uses Discord now”, I knew we were in trouble.
mIRC for the win.
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Mozilla is a non profit foundation, the corporation is owned by the non profit and exists for tax reasons only. They’re different than a regular corp.
The NFL was a non-profit until 2015.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a non-profit that stopped the free distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Non-profit status doesn’t automatically equal good but Mozilla has been good so far…for the most part. It has had its own controversies.
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Not what I’m referencing.
Oxford originally pledged to give their vaccine away for free but Gates convinced them otherwise.
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Correct. I should have gone into more detail. Cheers!
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Well fuck, I guess enshittification is universal. The only safe space is community foss/libre projects I guess
And only as safe as the audit it gets
This has been going on for decades. CDDB, IMDB, Redhat.
Anything you volunteer for will be monetized and you will get cut off from your own contributions.
Even here on Lemmy people post Twitter images and Reddit reader apps which only helps those platforms retain mindshare even if they aren’t directly profiting with ads.
Google has a volunteer program to make their AI better. Fucking one of the biggest corporations in the world asking for free labor and apparently people do it?
You were/are doing it every time you solved a Captcha to prove you aren’t a robot.
Google banned 4chan from using recaptcha at the time because everyone was just typing swear words in place of the scanned word that Google couldn’t OCR
Where did you hear about that? It sounds odd, because surely Google could’ve filtered out the swearwords, and at the end of the day users still had to solve the captcha correctly sooner or later if they wanted to post.
The old two word captchas were one word that Google knows in order to test if you’re human, and one word scanned from Google’s book scanning program that their algorithms failed to properly OCR, meaning for the second word you could type in whatever you wanted and you would pass the captcha
Sites were allowed to use recaptcha for free because their users were actually doing work training neural nets to read books better, if a large percentage of their users are saying every unknown scan is the n-word, I could see why Google wouldn’t want them having access to it
Long live 4chan
Yeah but this is in the area of unpaid labor. You “had to” solve a captcha in order they let you use another service. You are not visiting a page with the sole purpose of voluntarily solving captchas
This is a bit of “no true Scotsman” fallacy. If something you volunteer for hasn’t been monetized you can always say ‘yet’
FOSS is something people volunteer for and it mostly doesn’t get monetized and cut off. Sometimes this means that the original is cut off but a fork lives on, so I would rather say that volunteering for a closed product is dangerous in that regard, not volunteering forany product
This is where licensing is important. If you want to contribute your time to something you think is important, make sure that your contributions are licensed to be open and free.
If a for-profit company violates the license, the contributors can fight back. If there is no license, you’re just giving them free labor that they can exploit however they please.
Hashicorp recently commandeered its community built products from thousands of contributors by changing open source projects to an ambiguous if not hostile BSL. Opentofu for any current terraform users out there.
Previously named OpenTF, OpenTofu is a fork of Terraform…
🤭 LOL @ the name change.
Reminds me of OpenMW for Morrowind being listed as “OpenMicrowave” on the Google app store
And still being removed from the store
They didn’t want people think OpenTF meant they were DownTF.
They totally are DTF, they just didn’t want you asking about it.
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Definitely in two minds on Hashicorp’s license change. I understand why they did it, even if I don’t agree. Other for-profit companies were screwing them and the community over by taking, competing, and seldom contributing.
I have heard this point of view and truly don’t understand it. There were companies making money with an open source tool. That’s what some companies do, and the license allowed for that. They weren’t taking; they were using a tool, and providing a service upon it. If anybody is taking, it is Hashicorp from their own community that contributed thousands of hours to their business for free.
And those companies you refer to tried often to push upstream but Hashicorp just refused contribution time after time.
That said I understand it too. Insofar as capital investment demanded the cornering of a market and miscalculated the likelihood of a well backed fork. As a result I think, they probably sealed their fate even if it takes many years. How many people remember Hudson?
Good callout. Even Twitter images shouldn’t be hot linked but copied and pasted for preservation purposes; if a copyright takedown happens, then it happens. But at least we don’t risk having access cut because of a corporate killswitch.
It never stops shocking me that people think they can trust corporations which are run by upper middle class entitled business bros who never worked an honest day in their lives.
To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work. Even if you get a bit lax and include MIT and BSD licenses as FOSS, a company still cannot take your work and stop other people from using it.
In the case of Duolingo, it’s pretty different because that volunteer labor output is gated in a proprietary walled garden.
Whereas contributing a patch to chromium for example will never gate that contribution, even if it makes it into chrome and produces millions of dollars of profit for google. You can always and forever freely access and use a version of chromium with your patch as long as there’s still a copy left to access.
To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work
The trajectory for many Foss projects is to get the hardest part off the ground with mindshare and initial development. Then after all the hard work it becomes successful, the project is closed and all new features are added into the closed fork.
Technically you still have the original work but within a few years the project is dead except for your personal work because the main fork has a large corporation behind it continuing the development.
Meh Rehat gets a pass in my mind at least. They give back to the community enough. We are never going to get perfect people or groups. Microsoft is a totally different story.
Oh wow cddb. Completely forgot that was even a thing until just now.
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Anyone who has a passion for open source and wants to learn Spanish should check out LibreLingo! It’s also a nice project for people who want to contribute to something that is not owned by a company, though it’s a bit too early for contributors who have language skills but no coding experience.
Fantastic recommendation, thank you
Thank you for this!
Any suggestions for other languages? German? Italian?
Unfortunately I don’t know of any open source alternative. After another response in this thread I started using busuu.com for French and Italian, and I’m liking it so far. Their business model is pretty transparent, but I find it less annoying than Duolingo so far.
Viel Glück and buona fortuna with your language learning!
Duolingo, the dominant player, can simply buy competition like busuu, bypassing the need they’d otherwise have to improve their software.
I like that’s it’s more real life, the talking, people, subjects etc. Think I’ll use it for a while, because on duolingo I wasn’t evolving much anymore in German, this goes further up it seems
Just as pushy as duolingo unfortunately in ads and mainly in pushing to and rewarding premium.
Yeah, the adds take up some time, but I still find the overall experience less annoying than I did with Duolingo last time I used it. The push towards human interaction, which Duolingo has actively pushed away from, is also welcome.
I like to use Anki with some shared card decks: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=german
The learning pattern that Anki has configured by default suites me quite well and the app and the card deck is highly customizable.
Mind you, this is mostly only for learning vocabulary, not for learning grammer.
It looks cool, but I can’t even sign up for it (infinite spinning loading icon). I did a search and it’s been a problem for more than a year at this point, yikes.
And here I am just pissed that Duolingo keeps overhauling their whole program. Like, in less than 2 years time, they’ve had 3 different versions of the website and of course it wipes out all of your progress and approximates where you may be in their new system. Except the latest. The latest update just wipes all your shit out and says “good luck fuckface!” I’ve become less and less a fan of Duo over the last 4 years and yeah, not gonna do the AI thing with it anymore. Sari can go on vacation with my one-eyed dog named Max and eat cheese sandwiches for all I care.
I’m still mad I bought the super duo costume which they then completely removed from the app
Yeah, very annoying to be told a word is “new” when I know it well, and vice-versa be expected to have done whole lessons on other words that I’ve never seen before. That said, not many options for Hungarian, I’ve only seen Drops as an alternative daily app.
I’m contributing to openstreetmap because I think there should be a free alternative to Google or Apple maps.
Am I running the risk of having my contributions stolen?
OSM is run by a foundation - https://www.openstreetmap.org/about
This makes it a lot more difficult to cock it up compared to a shareholder run company.
Thanks. I’ll continue my small contributions then.
If anyone want to help I can recommend StreetComplete. It’s a bit like pokemon go, but you’ll help improve the map of the world instead. Only in android now I think.
OSM is good people and very much within the FOSS ethos as far as I can tell. Their Humanitarian work is just awesome: https://www.hotosm.org/
Ohhh interesting, just grabbed it on F-droid. I’ll be playing around with this for a while.
Downloading now
Oh I should do that, I’m often in new builds and redevelopments, I’d think that’s where it’s needed most?
I think it’s needed everywhere. I can start it wherever I happen to be and find a lot of “quests/tasks” to complete.
Thanks yeah I’ve downloded it and there are loads of little quests, I’ll give it a try
Open source is a safe bet since anyone can make a new fork(Spin-off) of the original if it went down a direction you didn’t like or just wanted to make a version with your preferred features. So openstreetmap is the current safest option since it has an Open Database License.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The Open Database License (ODbL) is a copyleft license agreement intended to allow users to freely share, modify, and use a database while maintaining this same freedom for others.ODbL is published by Open Data Commons, which is part of Open Knowledge Foundation.The ODbL was created with the goal of allowing users to share their data freely without worrying about problems relating to copyright or ownership. It allows users to freely use the data in the database, including in other databases; edit existing data in the database; and add new data to the database. The license establishes the rights of users of the database, as well as the correct procedure for attributing credit where credit is due for the data, and how to make changes or improvements in the data, thus simplifying the sharing and comparison of data.
Not really , they use the Open Data Commons Open Database License which means it can be used commercial but they have to release changes under the same license.
Mapbox sells your work for a profit.
OSM is the best kind of Open Source.
It CAN be used in commercial products, but any contributions to OSM from those commercial enterprises is still open, so you end up with commercial users contributing to the open system.
I’m in charge of GIS for a city that uses and contributes to OSM and QGIS.
I don’t think so. But people who donated to Mapilary found out it now belongs to Facebook
Is KartaView better in this respect?
I honestly don’t know. It’s open and quite transparent but who knows when will they sell out. I think “Not Facebook” is their best feature
Apple Maps is in part based on openstreetmap https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple
I just wish there were foss alternatives to Duolingo
They exist, but they often lack the front end polish and they never get the kind of publicity enjoyed by their for-profit peers.
10,000 sentences and OpenWords are others to consider.
Librelingo
Try Language Transfer. It’s free and different in how it teaches.
Anki is the best language app I’ve yet encountered including non-foss alternatives, but I needed to watch their tutorial video to understand the ui. Also it is only a flip-card app, so you might want to complement it with something else.
I saw one interview with the CEO on Reddit and deleted the app. The guy is an absolute nonce.
So we’re still using nonce then?
So long as you keep acting like one.
Are all of us here aware of the meaning of the word ‘nonce’ or are we using it as a different word for “idiot”?
For the nonce I’ll go with that.
…nonce means paedophile…
Welcome to the party pal - where you get downvoted because you thought the word used to marginalise gay people had fallen out of favour…along with poof and bender.
Yes you can tell by the way he used nonce
Nonce codes are very important for OAuth2 flows
I still had the app installed on my iPhone because I wanted to learn a new language a few years back. Just recently checked their App Store page and saw extensive data collection, monthly subscriptions and some kind of “gem” currency. Immediately deleted.
They tried to gamify the process, you use gems to buy an off day for a streak
Nothing against gamification, but when they added lives about two years after they said they never will I lost any and all trust I had in them.
The gems aren’t as predatory as they seem.
They still seem like unnecessary garbage though.
The only truly useful thing you get from them is streak freezes (basically to keep your streak if you miss a day). I think they’re fine.
lol learning a new language needs gems. Jesus fucking christ
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I just don’t know how I could ever accomplish anything in my life without the totally benign and helpful motivation provided by Gems™. They’re gamerrific! ^Buy some today.^
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Next is they’ll hide half the sentence unless you pay 5 gems.
It’s a for-profit company. The monthly subscriptions are so that the company makes money. The subscription gives you some extra features and removes ads. Seems pretty reasonable.
As for the gems, that’s part of the gamification. You get gems just from doing lessons. You can spend gems on cosmetic things or on buying a “streak freeze” that lets you avoid losing your “learn every day” streak if you forget or otherwise can’t use the app one day. Maybe you can buy gems too, I don’t know, but they don’t seem that awful. They’re just nudges to try to keep using the app every day, and if your goal is to learn a language that’s a good thing, right?
IMO gamification is good. Learning a language can be boring, especially when it comes to grammar lessons. Making it more entertaining means you’re more likely to want to do it, so you’re more likely to achieve your goal of learning another language.
Having said that, there is definitely enshittification going on. It used to be that the most of the program was available to people without a subscription, and only a few things were “paywalled”. Now only the main path of the main course is not paywalled. It used to be that if you got bored with the lessons you were doing, you had alternative things you could do. Even the main lesson plan used to have optional paths. Now, unless you’re subscribed the only two options are “stories” or the next lesson in the chain.
Since you took the time to leave such a lengthy response I’m going to reply, although the discussion here is pretty much over.
It’s not the single parts but the culmination of all three points; data harvesting, subscription and paid gems (yes you can buy more). Everyone has to make their own decision but for me it justifies never wanting to have anything to do with a company.
Any advice for an alternative for Japanese learning? I am on a two week streak and getting ready to give up because it’s super repetitive.
A friend of mine moved to Japan about 10 years ago and has spent a lot of time solo developing his site, Kanpeki Study, for efficiently learning Japanese kanji and vocabulary in bitesize, daily chunks. I’d be doing all his effort a massive disservice if I didn’t mention it - hopefully turns out to be a good fit for you 😄.
Man, that site looks slick as hell. Props to your buddy, if it teaches half as good as it looks he’s gonna have wild success! Someone I know was talking about learning Japanese in the last few days so I sent 'em the link. If they enjoy it, I might just buy them a belated Christmas gift of a lifetime account. Cheers for the tip 🙌
Take a look at this guide, it’s what I’ve been following https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/
Essentially, use Anki to study vocabulary in bulk, and use grammar guides like Tae Kim’s. And spend a lot of time reading and listening to real native content
It’s worth noting that Duolingo has always been considered.very bad by most of the Japanese learning community.
Busuu is fantastic. Gets you to think through the words and gets your feet wet with hiragana/ katakana right away.
Repetitive yes, but that’s the point of Rote memorization. Duolingo should be a tool in the toolkit but not the only one.
Renshuu is Japanese specific and has been really enjoyable for me. Has a community of people contributing fun mnemonics (eg. “WArio’s big fat dumpy” for the hiragana of Wa) and a clearly caring developer.
I used Wanikani to learn most kanji… textbooks and actually talking and listening to Japanese ppl for the rest… still not that good but can converse. Much better at reading. Recommend watching japanese shows w japanese subs once you get to that level.
LingoDeer is the closest alternative to Duolingo, you might want to give it a try
Around when I was getting started with Japanese, I studied around 1k of core vocab with Anki. Not that it wasn’t repetitive. The thing with learning language (IMO) is that it’s a lot more fun and easy to stick with if you find something enjoyable to practice with. Maybe in your case that’s reading really simple stories or something like that. BTW, I’d also recommend Cure Dolly for grammar.
Assimil courses are always a good choice
Oh look, theft that’s legally protected because something starts making profit! It’s like the existence of the stock market is the central problem with capitalism, since it’s just an excuse to be a shitty person and is only ever used in that capacity. “fuck you, i get more money this way” is a dumb fucking principle to operate a society on. Antisocial, in fact. Google’s IPO can be directly traced to every single problem the internet (and so, society) has right now.
Capitalism is the problem with capitalism. And It’s not an excuse to be shitty, but the cause itself.
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And the product now is traaaash.
I used to use duolingo to learn every language whenever I visited a country, and I can’t use it at all anymore.
I still use it, and it works great for me. Why do say the program is trash?
I can’t stand the new layout with the crowns and hearts. Like you haven’t learned something unless you’ve repeated it multiple times, it’s disheartening to spend ten minutes in a lesson and get a nearly in discernible bump in a progress indicator.
And then the heart system is crazy, like you’re only allowed to study if you don’t make mistakes. That’s negative reinforcement and makes the process of learning much less fun.
I can’t really progress at the pace I want to anymore, it feels more like a mandated curriculum that only allows me to learn the way someone else thinks I should at the speed someone else thinks I should, which I don’t think helps the learning process either.
Also, they’ve removed all of the fun shop outfits and items I can buy with those crystals, so you get the crystals for no reason, where you used to be able to dress up duo or, I can’t even remember anymore, but there were tons of uses for those crystals. So now I have like 10,000 crystals and I can buy streak freezes exclusively with them?
I don’t have fun learning with duo anymore, and there are plenty of apps that allow me to enjoy studying and learning at my own pace, regardless of how many mistakes I make in the process.
I hear all of that. I also miss the champagne tracksuit :) and the ability to do my weird waterfall practice method to force spaced repetition out of my lessons. I’m not sure that I’m learning any less with the way they’ve set it up, though.
As to the hearts, I subscribed about a year ago for that reason. It’s always been an issue on the app, but I don’t think it’s gotten better or worse. AFAIK, hearts are still unlimited on the website (though that definitely doesn’t work for me. I practice twice a day, and I’m usually not at my computer when I do.)
The one thing that is driving my bonkers right now is that they just asked if I want to sync my contacts. NO! I do NOT want to friend my cousin. Leave me in peace – I only do anonymous social media for a reason. If this goes further down the social media pieline, I’ll have to reconsider and find something else.
In the meantime, I love it, and my ability to communicate in my chosen language is exhilarating.
I still love learning languages, and I used to recommend duolingo to every single person who asked me how I learned new languages, but the social media thing you mentioned is a brazen symbol of a company trying to over capitalize and over expand the system that already worked so well.
Nothing was broke, and they tried to “fix” it, and in addition to that, got rid of fun things like yeah the champagne tracksuit or other little bibs and bobs for no discernible reason.
I also practice exclusively on my phone.
I am glad it’s still working for you, though.
Just vote with your dollar, unethical companies always lose market competition ☝️🤓
I think you forgot the /s , because real life shows that unethical companies rarely lose market competition. See pretty much every oil company, facebook, microsoft, amazon…
I’ve literally put “☝️🤓” in the end though… Can’t get more sarcastic than that
Guess I’m too old, I wasn’t aware that emoji combo also acted as a sarcasm warning
No worries!☝️🤓 usually signifies a pick-me idiot who thinks they’re the smartest in the room, it’s usually used sarcastically to present a common but idiotic opinion. Emoji combination shows them at the moment of going “Uhm, akshually!!”
I’m not so sure about that.
is there a non-shitty alternative to use that anyone could recommend? would be really interested.
I started looking for alternatives when they added the weird character voices and I started noticing inaccurate pronunciation of kanji in my Japanese course. A lot of people on the message boards recommended Memrise, and it’s been great! The official courses contain actual video and audio of native speakers, so I knew for a fact the pronunciation would be correct—even better than the old Duo voices!
There’s also user-generated content, too, some of which might not be accurate, but most of the user courses I’ve found are pretty good. You can even make your own set and publish it.
(I haven’t visited the site in a few months, so I can’t guarantee it’ll be exactly as I found it, but I doubt it has changed much)
And depending on what languages you’re studying, you might be able to find some good ones dedicated to your language if you do some digging. For Spanish, I used SpanishDict, and for Japanese, I used Kanshudo (both are freemium, with more restrictions than Memrise)
My library offers Mango Languages.
