this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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LinkedinLunatics

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A place to post ridiculous posts from linkedIn.com

(Full transparency.. a mod for this sub happens to work there.. but that doesn't influence his moderation or laughter at a lot of posts.)

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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (8 children)

I'm working on Spanish now with it and I have to admit it's significantly improved from the last time I used it a few years back. Fewer nonsense sentences to translate like "My bear loves your house", which was frustrating and felt so useless. There's way more listening and speaking modules, they are generally decent at speech to text, and the language pronunciation sounds more realistic with multiple very different voices.

However, I never know why I got a question wrong, and can't do anything to rectify that other than report that the AI made a mistake, which helps with their model training, but does absolutely squat for my learning. Even the more gamified exercises are just fancy tests, where you are expected to 'learn' by getting things wrong, seeing the correct answer and regurgitating it. The community forums and explanations are gone, and each module has maybe one or two example sentences that typically don't even cover the full range of content in the module.

My husband and I have a family plan, and he is a much more dedicated user than me, but I would never pay for duolingo on my own.

[–] gramie 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (2 children)

I have found that Language Transfer is a far superior way to learn languages (including Spanish), and it's free (although I make a monthly donation)!

It is available as YouTube videos, SoundCloud MP3s, or on a very simple but effective app.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

https://www.languagetransfer.org/

I think you mean this, your link is broken. I love them too and recommend them all the time (it's mostly a one guy effort actually, it's super impressive).

[–] gramie 3 points 23 hours ago

Thanks, I fixed it.

And yes, I agree that he is amazing. One guy teaching courses in Spanish, Italian, Greek, Arabic, French, German, Turkish, and Swahili!

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