Duolingos discussion pages are gone (2024)

This is a strange one. I do log into there and use it, mostly for the Latin course I've been going through casually. I no longer bother with sentence discussions or visit the forum part. The majority of the discussion threads were absolute drivel or weirdos writing attention-seeking posts about how Duolingo had saved their life and sanity.

I did click on a sentence discussion today, but noticed it was locked. And that all of them are locked. Then that the general discussion tab is gone (which I hadn't noticed before).

Is this a good or bad thing? Aside from all the piles of nonsense the discussions did have a function for clarifying language points; though not always from the appointed amateur moderators. With the number of irritating changes and monetisations that have taken place in a few short years a lot of the discussion ended up critical of Duolingo's policy and changes than about languages.

One loss, imo, is that no-one can really give quick and easy feedback about courses. Perhaps even that doesn't matter because the stubborn creators there insist on devising nonsensical sentences which confuse learners even before you have the chance to work out any grammar going on. They've refused to acknowledge this. I remember when I first registered there over 10 years ago now, that there was much more flexibility and courses less didactic and repetitive. Maybe 'free forever' was a bold claim and at some point Duolingo will disappear, though that would be a shame.

One of my big worries about Duolingo is that the gameification leads people to not have a good measure of their actual progress so some end up amassing multi-year streaks on what is a beginner app. (Kind of the reverse problem of the Fluent in 3 Months, 7 days etc marketing it somehow got people to actually compete how many years they could keep using a beginner app for.)

With the forums at least I could think that some people getting caught up in the app could learn from the experience of others, and find alternate resources to progress into the later stages. I didn’t use the forums myself, and I’ve heard in practice they weren’t the best, but at least people had more of a chance to come across helpful info. Hopefully people still seek out other language learning communities where they can get better information.

They apparently announced the removal of their forums a few months ago, but I missed it completely even though I log into their app daily:

https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comme ... urce=share

Someone in the thread linked above claims that Duolingo recently went public and suggested that the forums made them no money and so they removed them. I don't know if that's true, but it sounds like a plausible theory. Duolingo's official announcement, now a dead link, apparently directed people to the reddit feed above as an alternate resource.

I never made it to their forums. It sounds like they were not available on mobile, which would explain it, since I typically access the app on my mobile. From what I can see, reviews of the forums remained wildly mixed and vary everywhere from "garbage" to "very helpful."

I've always thought of Duolingo as more of a game than as a learning tool. Though it can reinforce vocabulary and does have some real benefits, it has recently made me feel like I'm learning more about how to play the game than about the languages themselves. One thing that reinforced this was trying to learn Greek and Portuguese from scratch on Duolingo. At first, I made rapid progress, but I quickly hit a grammar brick wall and suddenly found myself stuck. To go further I would have either had to memorize patterns in the app, which would arguably not have taught me the languages, or actually learn grammatical structures and rules of the language outside of the app. So I no longer see it as a good way to learn a new language, but instead as a good way to reinforce a language one already has some knowledge of. I use it for Spanish, French, Arabic and Japanese and it works great, but only because I have a fair amount of pre-existing knowledge of those languages.

If the claims above are true, and if I'm expected to spend money on the app, then I may not remain a user much longer. I find it an enjoyable and a helpful tool, but not an essential one.

It's never really been a place for actually learning a language. As RyanSmallwood said it's really a beginner app. At a push it can get you moving enough to take up something more substantial, if a person ever gets that far. And in that sense it does have value. That gamification was lightweight many years ago and clearly helped motivation for a lot of users. Now it is almost the central driving force.

when it launched I used to log in and use it for amusem*nt. Later on I used it for testing myself when I was learning Norwegian and it was quite useful. Again RyanSmallwood hit on the problem of people logging in primarily to maintain long streaks and it's obvious that some just start every language and end up in a mad juggling exercise to keep them all active whilst learning little of substance. To be fair there are people there who also use outside resources, so it's not all misguided users.

I remember laughing when they initially announced 'free language learning forever'. In my little crystal ball I saw the adverts, the nag screens for paid memberships, the downsizing of facilities. It has all come to pass. Of course U-block origin eliminates all their irritations for me, but it's often been months between logging-in. One time it was three years. I only went back for for some lightweight Latin entertainment, even that course is starting to annoy me. It could have been such a great website.

Le Baron wrote: It could have been such a great website.

Apart from what I call the "Cult of Duolingo" people who swear it took them to an even B1 in all skills (how is beyond me when there's no real practice of skills, just translation) and won't ever let you complain about it because it's 'free', this is what really frustrates me about DL. I think vohn Ahn was misguided from the start now -- if he truly wanted free language learning for the world, as he often advertised when it first started, he needed a NGO, not a for-profit company. That's where all the problems set in. Since then, it's just been a race to make more money, which means the things that get optimized are the things that make the users stay, not what actually really promotes learning.

If it had been a NGO that strove to make good learning courses with good discussion and tips, I would gladly donate money each month for it. Sadly it's not. And they also didn't vet their contributors very well -- the Irish course had lots of mistakes and I'm pretty sure nobody working on it originally was a native speaker; in fact, I know a native speaker who volunteered to do all the audio for free, with experience, who was turned down because he wasn't part of the clique that did it. I have more faith now that it's been taken over by Duo themselves, as I know the Irish speaker who works on Duo's team. Despite the half-veiled insult from the original Irish team that his Irish is "too traditional", it's actually a great thing because he'll make sure it's grammatical correct and traditional, not full of English syntax/phrasing. If they redo it, that is.

But, yeah, DL could've been so much, and instead the desire for profit ended up making it go the other way. At least, that's my impression of what the major issue behind it is -- you can't have a high quality "free language learning forever" site and still be trying to make profit. They're two diametrically opposed goals.

And it's also made it harder for newcomers to get into the sphere as well, as they're all compared against Duolingo -- both in terms of what people expect from a language app and in terms of price, which hurts the smaller companies who don't have a lot of VC funded capital.

Duolingo announced dropping the forums in February; the dropping took place on March 22. It's a shame since I found the general forums useful as a source for mining other resources. I rarely used the sentence forums as I couldn't understand how to access them after completing the sentence practice.

Duome opened forums in preparation for the change:

https://forum.duome.eu/

and a few very dedicated posters have copied selected posts from Duolingo; also there are archives of the general forums such as described in

https://forum.duome.eu/viewtopic.php?t= ... -to-use-it

but I haven't yet tried to access these.

MapleLeaf wrote:
Duome opened forums in preparation for the change:

https://forum.duome.eu/

and a few very dedicated posters have copied selected posts from Duolingo; also there are archives of the general forums such as described in

https://forum.duome.eu/viewtopic.php?t= ... -to-use-it

but I haven't yet tried to access these.

Given that their Irish one has a completely wrong title, I don't hold much faith in these. It should be "Tá Gaeilge agam" to mean "I have the ability to speak Irish". What they have, "Labhraím Gaeilge" means "I speak Irish (regularly)". A common learners' mistake and quite sad to see.

Fair play to them though. That someone has made an effort and the forum does look nice a clean. The major irritations of the internal Duolingo discussion system - and note that I ignored it after those gemstone things started, so maybe it went even worse - were that they just ignored everything that was a legitimate concern and pinned meaningless posts. You can tell when something is going into free-fall when all the threads are repetitions of similar complaints because the threads are being locked.

galaxyrocker wrote:And they also didn't vet their contributors very well -- the Irish course had lots of mistakes and I'm pretty sure nobody working on it originally was a native speaker; in fact, I know a native speaker who volunteered to do all the audio for free, with experience, who was turned down because he wasn't part of the clique that did it.

It's interesting to learn about the issues with the Irish course, I wouldn't have been able to tell myself, but it's unsurprising. This is a long standing problem, though from memory I remember that the original handful of courses were fine even if not perfect. It seems some just wanted the excitement of being a contributor. The silly 'tradition' they've developed in the courses of having nonsense sentences just riles me up. They also refuse to fix sentences with bad grammar or syntax despite a majority being in agreement over it.

I don't want to beat the Americans with a stick, because the company is of U.S. origin and therefore comes from that perspective, but the practice of shoehorning-in thousands of repeated sentences about what's going on in New York is really tiresome. The Latin course talks constantly about 'Eboracum Novum'. The aim supposedly being to develop a relevant link to the present. Yet it quickly becomes grating. There is a sentence there stating: 'Universities are not young men'... That's super. Town halls are not zebras, supermarkets are not pink flamingos.. were are they going with this nonsense? It can't be that hard to devise a sensible sentence to demonstrate a particular structure. It means you get two for the price of one: the structure knowledge and a functional sentence into your memory. Instead the creators and their acolytes (the cult you mentioned) defend this foolishness with extraordinary vigour.

I said elsewhere that the only course I ever really enjoyed was the Esperanto course. I have previous experience, but went through it to see how everyone was reacting and I knew the main creator from Lernu. The discussions were pleasant and helpful with a lot of camaraderie. It was also well-constructed with good audio from a single source. Since then they've taken to letting any old Tom, Dick and Harry record a sentence here and there. It's just silly.

I could go on, but won't.

Le Baron wrote:It's interesting to learn about the issues with the Irish course, I wouldn't have been able to tell myself, but it's unsurprising. This is a long standing problem, though from memory I remember that the original handful of courses were fine even if not perfect.

Irish was bad from the get-go. The original speaker they hired to do audio was a non-native speaker, but not a single member of the team could tell that listening to her. And it was pretty clear she used English phonetics. Thus I've still got a lot of discussion sentences under my name calling out bad pronunciation; which sucks, as the new speaker is a native speaker from Connemara (I actually know her) and has good pronunciation. But it was riddled with errors from the get-go and a lot still haven't been sorted out. It got so bad I wrote a post on Reddit, now converted to a blog post, about how bad DL was, specifically for Irish.

And now it seems sentence discussions are harder to access, if they're accessible at all. That means so many people won't get the help they need to have something explained to them or see where things are called out for being incorrect. It's quite frustrating, but I guess it helps Duo's plan of making them stick around,

I could go on, but won't.

At the risk of this turning into a Duo-bashing thread, I'd be interested to hear it. I know Cainntear and myself, among others, have written several critiquing posts of DL here over the years.

Well I'm ambivalent about Duolingo. It has good points, but increasingly a lot of bad points. It's probably better that it exists than that it doesn't exist, but it's like a poor bus service in lieu of no bus service at all.

It's worst failing is perhaps no worse than any other large interactive website: failure to listen and meet the needs of users and taking decisions opposite to what the user base says is desired. As you said the proposed aims of the site and the funding model are at odds with one another. That's most of the problem.

The purely language-based problems are: amateurs creating courses with errors; the static nature of these courses with not much progress; getting locked into gamification; no real method apart from simple translation. Of course learners ought to be doing other sorts of learning alongside, but this isn't promoted officially by Duolingo. Instead they say: 'learn a language with Duolingo!' and trundle out quotes about how more people are learning Irish there than there are native speakers. Or their old classic about it being equal to several semesters of 'college language tuition'. All of that is misleading when it's patently obvious that in an organised class you would be engaging in speaking, something unavailable on Duolingo. I get the impression it capitalises on the dire state of some language tuition in formal education. Or total lack of it.

So the aim may be noble, and I think it was, but the delivery is a shambles. And once the communication method is closed down it will stagnate.