Just use anki.
This is why agpl exists
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?
Yes you can tell by the way he used nonce
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.
Thank you for this!
Any suggestions for other languages? German? Italian?
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.
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!
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’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?
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 just wish there were foss alternatives to Duolingo
Try Language Transfer. It’s free and different in how it teaches.
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.
never give a corporation your labour for free.
People should have known this from the beginning.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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 still mad I bought the super duo costume which they then completely removed from the app
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’m all in on Matrix. After hearing the words, “Nobody uses IRC anymore, everyone uses Discord now”, I knew we were in trouble.
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
Why would you give away your production value to a capitalist for free?
It’s literally the only power you hold in the labour market, and it’s your own fault if you give it away for nothing.
not everyone started as an epic lemmy leftist
New life lesson: never volunteer for a for-profit company.
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.
But then how would spez ever be able to take Reddit public?!
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.
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.
