Duolingo Doubles Its Language Courses Thanks To AI 51
Just a day after announcing its shift to an "AI-first" strategy -- which includes phasing out contract workers in favor of automation -- Duolingo revealed it is more than doubling its course offerings by launching 148 new language courses. The Verge reports: The company said today that it's launching 148 new language courses. "This launch makes Duolingo's seven most popular non-English languages -- Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin -- available to all 28 supported user interface (UI) languages, dramatically expanding learning options for over a billion potential learners worldwide," the company writes.
Duolingo says that building one new course historically has taken "years," but the company was able to build this new suite of courses more quickly "through advances in generative AI, shared content systems, and internal tooling." The new approach is internally called "shared content," and the company says it allows employees to make a base course and quickly customize it for "dozens" of different languages. "Now, by using generative AI to create and validate content, we're able to focus our expertise where it's most impactful, ensuring every course meets Duolingo's rigorous quality standards," Duolingo's senior director of learning design, Jessie Becker, says in a statement.
Duolingo says that building one new course historically has taken "years," but the company was able to build this new suite of courses more quickly "through advances in generative AI, shared content systems, and internal tooling." The new approach is internally called "shared content," and the company says it allows employees to make a base course and quickly customize it for "dozens" of different languages. "Now, by using generative AI to create and validate content, we're able to focus our expertise where it's most impactful, ensuring every course meets Duolingo's rigorous quality standards," Duolingo's senior director of learning design, Jessie Becker, says in a statement.
As long as you don't memorize artifacts (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm curious and hopeful about this, if it could make it inexpensive to learn (skeptical about that part). However, I spent years in language labs learning Japanese with a Tandberg cassette tape recorder. It had a dual volume control so you could match your voice to the speaker's which was fabulous and was especially effective interspersed with summer work overseas, I remember one student in 4th year unfortunately ended up sounding like a tape recorder to us. Another student sounded like a charismatic NHK news announcer somehow! We were just kind of in awe. ;) I haven't used Duolingo and this might be a good learning tool, but I'd caution the student to combine it with talking to actual live humans in any way possible, lest you somehow learn a pronunciation, inflection or (shudder) hallucinated idiom from generative AI. I'd say I am fluent but even so, Japanese movies are difficult to understand for me so your mileage may vary. Well, I have trouble with English song lyrics too so could be a me problem. That said, I remember trying Plimsleur CDs for Spanish but they only had one that used a dialect calling the word for the language "castellano" instead of "español". I tried learning Chinese from phone app briefly, so if you like learning languages this could be a lot of fun. I would be very interested in having an app that could produce a subtitle overlay based on AI's understanding of the text as opposed to the shortened subtitles you often get. All these things sound great but also not sure if this will lose people jobs or create false "imagined" language artifacts that ickily make their way from genai into popular discourse.
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I remember trying Plimsleur CDs for Spanish but they only had one that used a dialect calling the word for the language "castellano" instead of "español".
Which dialect of Spanish doesn't call it castellano? It's how you distinguish from catalan.
Re:As long as you don't memorize artifacts (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't it that they call it "español" in Latin America, and "castellano" in Spain?
Re: As long as you don't memorize artifacts (Score:2)
many Argentinians call it castellano due to some silly perceived anti imperialistic view.
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Isn't it that they call it "español" in Latin America, and "castellano" in Spain?
No, letters like ñ are only used on Slashdot.
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Wut? Two wrong make one right? I wanted to copy the broken Unicode, now it looks (here) quite fine ruining the whole joke.
Re: As long as you don't memorize artifacts (Score:2)
That one is from the upper half of ASCII not Unicode
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I copied the two characters, the A with tilda and the plusminus and it gave the n with tilda. ð
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I copied the two characters
Welcome to the world of computers. What you post and what is displayed is often translated for display. Try and copy and past this text and see how far you get: <quote>
Whether ASCII or Unicode, when you copy and paste something it may be mushed up by your system locale as well. It's why the iPhone crowd has such a problem with apostrophes.
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I copied the two characters
Welcome to the world of computers. What you post and what is displayed is often translated for display. Try and copy and past this text and see how far you get: <quote>
Whether ASCII or Unicode, when you copy and paste something it may be mushed up by your system locale as well. It's why the iPhone crowd has such a problem with apostrophes.
Wait... yes, yes, we know iOS generates smart quotes by default when you type "", and you can turn that off.
It does not smush anything into Unicode AFAIK, it's sending Unicode as-is. Your system is probably smushing Unicode down to ASCII, like allo's. That's how an extended ASCII nyeh showed up.
Unicode is EVERYWHERE, except Slashdot. Go pull this article on the minimalist alterslash.org, check LANG and locale, curl it on a Linux system if you don't believe me. If you have Unicode support, there are smart qu
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Well .. IDK they look OK to me right now. I don't trust my eyes, if I turn around and come back will it be mangled? Character set translation problems really suck.
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Yeah, but usually I would expect either the two broken characters are copied as they are, or two be encoded twice resulting in four broken characters. Slashdot converting them back was a surprise. The ð in the last post was the experiment if a double encoded emoji would be converted back, but that did not work.
Spanish and Español (Score:2)
All over Latin America and Spain you can hear both. I'd say Latin America slightly favors "español" and Spain "castellano", but it really changes with region and age group. It originated from the Castilla Crown, hence the name.
The recommendation nowadays is to call it "español" everywhere. And I think that's where it is going. But in Galicia, Basque Country and Catalonia that change will probably come last.
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They made the new courses with AI.
That does not mean you talk to an AI.
It is cartoon based, voice recognizing, whole word clicking to make sentences etc.
It is actually quite fun to use. I only use the cost free version to freshen up my Japanese.
Lets see if they have Thai now ?
That said, I remember trying Plimsleur CDs for Spanish but they only had one that used a dialect calling the word for the language "castellano" instead of "español".
Because in Spain they speak about 10 languages, and Cestell
Re: As long as you don't memorize artifacts (Score:2)
This can be a problem. I've flagged a number of bugs where instead of pronouncing the word "y" it will say the letter's name. They said they were going to convert to voice actors, but it's rare.
I have noticed news presenters on DW's English channel that do sound like text to speech. It's kind of charming to think o
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I remember doing a few Pimsleur courses, I really enjoyed their intuitive way of getting you to "feel" the language.
Re:As long as you don't memorize artifacts (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm curious and hopeful about this, if it could make it inexpensive to learn (skeptical about that part). However, I spent years in language labs learning Japanese with a Tandberg cassette tape recorder. It had a dual volume control so you could match your voice to the speaker's which was fabulous and was especially effective interspersed with summer work overseas, I remember one student in 4th year unfortunately ended up sounding like a tape recorder to us. Another student sounded like a charismatic NHK news announcer somehow! We were just kind of in awe. ;) I haven't used Duolingo and this might be a good learning tool, but I'd caution the student to combine it with talking to actual live humans in any way possible, lest you somehow learn a pronunciation, inflection or (shudder) hallucinated idiom from generative AI. I'd say I am fluent but even so, Japanese movies are difficult to understand for me so your mileage may vary. Well, I have trouble with English song lyrics too so could be a me problem. That said, I remember trying Plimsleur CDs for Spanish but they only had one that used a dialect calling the word for the language "castellano" instead of "español". I tried learning Chinese from phone app briefly, so if you like learning languages this could be a lot of fun. I would be very interested in having an app that could produce a subtitle overlay based on AI's understanding of the text as opposed to the shortened subtitles you often get. All these things sound great but also not sure if this will lose people jobs or create false "imagined" language artifacts that ickily make their way from genai into popular discourse.
Why bother adding dozens of languages when it can't even get the basics right.
I tried using Duolingo to supplement actual face to face lessons when learning Spanish (as an English L1 speaker) and even from a very early point I was able to spot that "no, you don't speak Spanish like that". It was often completely wrong, even accounting for dialects (I.E. Basque, Mexican, latino and suramericano) or even a more formal form. It's almost as if a human wasn't reviewing the lessons 10 years ago when I was trying.
Apparently it's gotten worse these days according to friends.
Lessons were complete pants, it didn't teach you how or when to use words, conjugation, articles, et al. It was marginally useful for learning vocabulary and only marginally. Less so than a WOTD calendar
The worst part was the gamification. They added it in the worst way to try to force you to use the app every day. If you took a few days off because yano... you had a life or something your progress was reset so you ended up doing the same things you did a week ago.
I can imagine it being used by millions of Indians and Chinese and making English standards even worse than they currently are.
The best tool I used was Italki, it would connect you to actual tutors, both professional and community. You'd do a bit of shopping around to find a decent one but it was relatively inexpensive for one on one sessions with someone who actually spoke the language. The big caveat was, sometimes they weren't that good at speaking your language but this is where you need to have a good grasp of your native language to compensate (and if you do, it is no issue at all). The only reason I stopped using it was because they made it too difficult for me to pay... Seems crazy they wouldn't take my credit card and wanted me to buy "money" from a 3rd party (skrill or something)... Maybe they have sorted their shit out in the last 10 years.
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Basque is not a dialect of Spanish. It's a totally separate language, about as distinct as is Hungarian.
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Apparently it's gotten worse these days according to friends.
I couldn't disagree more. Single examples may have been rubbish 10 years ago, but virtually all common languages are excellent these days and have gone through years of review by native speakers.
The worst part was the gamification. They added it in the worst way to try to force you to use the app every day.
The gamification is the entire point of Duolingo. From a ground up concept the idea was to promote the language learning through gamification, much the way fitbits gamify getting your 10000 steps.
your progress was reset so you ended up doing the same things you did a week ago
Your progress is not reset not unless you don't use it for like a year. It backtracks for review slightly the more you do
Re: As long as you don't memorize artifacts (Score:1)
Re: As long as you don't memorize artifacts (Score:2)
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rae.es%2Fdpd%2Fespa%25C3%25B1ol
There is a movement of calling it castellano in regions with a cooficial language. That's making everything confusing for the sake of giving participation award
Re: As long as you don't memorize artifacts (Score:2)
You must speak to people, and listen, to fully learn a language.
Duolingo is great to start building vocabulary and basic pronunciation. It's not the end of the journey, it doesn't ever claim that.
IDK, I thought it went without saying, like you can learn to ride a bike from a book, but ... you also can't learn to ride a bike from a book.
accent would be a more useful use of AI (Score:2)
As I've mulled things over, the one use of AI that I would really welcome would be as an accent coach.
Find a baseline for the accent, compare to the user's speaking, and subtract that "error" from the base, and repeat for the user to emulate.
I suspect that optimal would be to "overcorrect" for the user to hear, tapering off the amount of overcorrection as the user improves.
The AI voices are awful (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the voices are really bad.
It's a pity they don't also make available the old courses, with audio from native speakers.
Re: The AI voices are awful (Score:2)
The voices have been machine generated for years already? How long has it been?
These changes are about them already having Spanish for English speakers, and automatically making Spanish for German speakers, Spanish for French, etc. all the other X for Y combos. So they can focus on a Spanish course and not a bunch of different permutations of one. Not the voices, they have that taken care of already, the translations of the content.
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For the Irish language course the recordings of native speakers were taken offline in 2023. The AI replacements are nonsensical.
This story is about AI generated courses, not voices, but my post was still (accidentally) on-topic: when they previously used AI to increase volume of content, they were ok with quality being thrown out the window.
The AI generated courses might be low quality, and the original (English) courses might also go downhill because the type of exercises they produce may now be restricted
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The latin course was put together by volunteers, who recorded everything themselves./
I was amused at how often I could hear the click when they turned recording off, although I don't know whether it was keyboard or mouse.
My Hovercraft is full of eels (Score:5, Funny)
My nipples explode with delight! [youtube.com]
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and translated into multiple languages: The Hungarian Phrasebook sketch [omniglot.com]
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Fix the english one first? (Score:3)
I've been running the english->japanese "course" for a bit less than two years now. It barely held itself together; weird english phrasing (maybe also weird japanese phrasing, but I have no frame of reference for that); broken audio on the regular, mistranslations, inconsistencies, false negative/false positive in valid answers, etc. It's not completely unusable, but it clearly needed a ton of improvements to be called decent.
And now they're likely to push out the door some automated second-rate translations, with even less oversight, and call it a win.
When they first announced this move months ago, I set my subscription to not automatically renew. I'd rather pay people that actually care, especially since Duolingo never goes past basic vocabulary building anyway.
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I also think there are mistakes in Japanese!
And the notorious: "Where are you from?" versus "Where are you living?" mix ups. My Japanese might be rusty: but I can read the difference.
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What does "Where are you from?" mean to you? In English the phrase is used interchangeably with Where are you living? and Where were you born? That's not a Japanese issue.
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>"What does "Where are you from?" mean to you? In English the phrase is used interchangeably with Where are you living? and Where were you born?"
Or "where were you raised?" (not born). Or what region? Or many things.
>"That's not a Japanese issue."
Nope, it is mostly a contextual issue. Those are the most difficult to figure out. There is no exact meaning- it could mean many things and is often not clear even to the people conversing *in* context.
I think the most difficult part about learning/using
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It is an issue if only one of the phrases is an accepted answer, facepalm
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I've been running the english->japanese "course" for a bit less than two years now. It barely held itself together; weird english phrasing (maybe also weird japanese phrasing, but I have no frame of reference for that); broken audio on the regular, mistranslations, inconsistencies, false negative/false positive in valid answers, etc. It's not completely unusable, but it clearly needed a ton of improvements to be called decent.
And now they're likely to push out the door some automated second-rate translations, with even less oversight, and call it a win.
When they first announced this move months ago, I set my subscription to not automatically renew. I'd rather pay people that actually care, especially since Duolingo never goes past basic vocabulary building anyway.
They can't even get English to Spanish right... what chance have they got for anything as different as Japanese?
I suspect the only thing keeping them in business is teaching terrible English to countries popular with outsourcing firms. "yes I fluent speak english" means "I did a few lessons on Duolingo".
Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I've seen Duolingo on short seller lists (Score:3)
specifically for this reason. You also have Google directly targeting them. [googleblog.com]
Obligatory (Score:2)
"My hovercraft is full of eels. Do you want to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?"
Curious List (Score:2)
I noticed Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Russian are not on their list of popular languages.
Slop (Score:2)
Duolingo is already using AI and it's low quality (Score:2)
Re: Duolingo is already using AI and it's low qual (Score:3)
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FWIW I found a series of TikTok accounts with people teaching French in one way or another, with apparently automated subtitles. Quite useful although the subtitles are extremely tiny and quick to disappear from the screen. That said, an interesting way to hear lots of individuals on different topics, I ducked out of the one on Sartre but liked some talking about different slang or "native speaker" grammatical constructions. These seem a lot more useful than say trying to watch a movie with its impenetrable
halucinated languages (Score:2)
I'm a subscriber and I can tell by the garbage (Score:4, Interesting)
Additionally, there are smarter ways of translating sentences that it regularly marks as wrong answers. Ideally, the benefit of AI is more flexible translation, which it fails at and the downside is funny hallucination sentences, which it has regularly. Also, it never really adapts and makes a lot of dumb algorithmic mistakes. For example on the quick match exercises, you'll match 100 works, but only about 15 unique ones as they're repeated over and over and over...and not even personalized to me because they're frequently those Spanish words that are identical to the English ones, so I never mistake them.
I subscribed in the beginning of the pandemic and have a continuous streak that's over 5 years long. My Spanish still suuuuuuuucks and I am not fluent enough to even understand native speakers who speak slowly, so Duolingo definitely didn't work for me. In the end, I did it just to learn something unfamiliar and slow my brain from aging.
But back to the point, Duolingo, you're clearly using AI. You're using it wrong. There are many areas where AI would help Duolingo and similar learning apps...they do those poorly....the functions that adapt lessons to me or using AI to understand my translations.
For example, in Spanish, they use the word "many" instead of "a lot of" so if you wanted to say "Huelo muchos anos de perro", they will force you to say "I sniff a lot of dog anuses" instead of "I sniff many dog anuses"...the more literal translation...both are perfectly fine in English, but saying "many" in English will be scored incorrectly.
You'd think they'd use AI to help with that....or, at the very least, have a human being review the sentences they send, because a lot are incorrect English or really awkwardly phrased.
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That's a really good example about the dogs, and a useful phrase to know, as well. Thanks!
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I guess that Spanish lesson was made for dogs and not for humans.
I have to check the lash of our dog, so that pesky bugger can not reach my computer!