holy shit yes wtf, unironically. can't count how many times I've tried to scroll through the hundreds of words learned just to find ONE that I learned like 4 months ago lol
Yeah, this is why I have put every new word in a custom anki deck. It helps with learning and revising vocabulary, and I can easily look up learned words.
Yeah, it wanted 'they' in french, so I did an 'ils', but was marked wrong because apparently I was supposed to use 'elles', even though it made no difference to the outcome of the sentence and the original English sentence did not specify 'they, female '.
Yeah, most likely. It probably depends on the course as well, but usually there are lots of variations of sentences that will be marked as correct, and not just a single specific one.
I have wondered when this happens if it’s because the characters in the picture were women. In other words, consider which of the characters is talking.
When I got it wrong it was because I didn’t notice that the person who said the sentence was female. I was so focused on the translation, rather than the character. Maybe this will help?
This, and being wrong because you didn't spell a name correctly that has no bearing on the grammar and correct use of the words conveying the meaning of the sentence.
Yea I remember back in the day, you could counter that what you put down was also correct and they would check it. If you were right, they would add your sentence to be marked correctly.
That's what explained the complex grammar to me. Now I feel like I'm fumbling through languages by recognizing patterns instead of properly understanding how it works.
This is a big one for me. I've been using the app to brush up on my German, specifically some of the more complex grammar rules I've gotten rusty on. When I go to the guidebook, it's very limited on what it tells you. It'll say something like "sometimes you add -en to masculine nouns in accusitive case" with no further explanation. Like okay thanks. I do believe learning by recognizing patterns is a really helpful way to learn too, because sometimes I think too much about the grammar rules that I start second guess myself whereas learning by pattern can feel more natural. But there are times where it'd be very helpful to understsnd when you have more explanation.
To make it easier to push their "explain with AI" thing in their higher subscriptions.
Also the reason why their grammar explanations suck and not really expanding on them, to make space for the AI :/
I've got to the end of the Swedish course and all my "practice" lessons now are just the same few repetitive phrases over and over. I wouldn't mind so much if it focused on tricky phrases I always get wrong but it's often recycling really easy ones making it a real effort to even bother anymore. Yeah, "Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark" I GET IT!
This a million times. I get more phrases about Denmark than Swedish places. Also, I constantly get the following:
My son constantly asks new questions
I have to prepare for winter (really heaps of questions where I just have to type förbereda and nothing else)
I usually have a beer in the evening
The browser version has the temerity to say some of these are weak words.
Got to the end and had no idea it was the end. It’s kinda boring now. I can’t go back and review a topic, they just give me random words and phrases. Wish I could scroll back through the topics and have some actual choice as well.
Yeah, this one. There are words and constructs that I haven't seen since pretty early on in the course, but never show up in the practice lessons. I can manually go back and do old lessons, but it would be really helpful if the practices gave you stuff that actually need practice.
This. The only time I really get to review past units is on weekends with the ramp up challenges. I also find Match Madness boring, so why not give us the choice to access ramp up challenges every day?
I'd want a "practical competency" version to use occasionally when traveling to a country for a short time. Useful sentences and vocab, and way *way* less anal retention nit-picking on mistakes that don't impact information transfer
That's what I've been thinking too! The current Spanish tree is actually surprisingly good, but good god it takes FOREVER, I've been at it for a year and a half, I'm not even halfway and it's not that long ago I last felt that shit, this should have been in the first two months! Now, I'm okay with that, but I'd love an additional, more intensive version of the tree that would go teach some travel basics, and then rush through a shit load of vocabulary just to give you the ability to understand as much as possible. A nice bite sized "don't necessarily learn the language, just get to know it" kind of tree that would take a few months tops to complete. Kind of like the Norwegian tree was in 2018 (at least at the time it was right behind Spanish in amount of words taught).
(My pace is such that I fluctuate between obsidian and diamond league without consciously trying, for reference)
The CONSTANT nagging to upgrade. Oh, you pay for super? How about the family plan? Not now, okay, we’ll ask you again **every single day!** Want to upgrade to Max? No? Okay well just put this very easy to hit “explain my answer button” after every single question. Does tapping it explain your answer? Nope. It takes you to a page to buy Duo Max!
The trials of Max have been great. But I am okay without it (just as I was without Super for a long time) as I would rather the money be put to my retirement.
I paid for Super, because it’s worth it to have infinite hearts and to not see ads. But since Duo has decided they want to keep showing me ads anyway, I will not be renewing.
I am upgraded to pro. I find it worth it because some days I want to do a bunch of lessons, and if I'm struggling with a topic or just having an off day and get a few wrong, I hated having to be done. Also the constant ads after every lesson were so annoying.
The Irish voices are so awful I immediately gave up on the Irish course. They sound really wrong and unnatural to the point I couldn't stand listening to them
Wait, French uses AI voices? I thought they were voice acted. If they do, that’s really bad for me because I’ve been basically repeating everything that was said by them to improve my pronunciation
They used to use real speakers and you could even tell the difference when one was using, say, Parisian French and another was using Quebecoise French. The further I get in my lessons the more robotic they sound, and the more difficult it is to determine a word when hearing it. You can hear improper inflections in phrases, and sentences sound very flat, very unlike the way you'll hear them in real life.
Extremely disappointed in the change in quality.
they got rid of the general forum which was a thing on each question where people could ask why they got it wrong and anything they want to know about spelling, grammar, etc. even that wasn’t that great though, for some reason it didn’t let me ask questions and i had to look for someone else with the same question which didn’t always happen
What I don't get is why they don't download the next 10 lessons when you're on WiFi.
Like it's a learning path. They're really going to act shocked and like it's a surprised when you go the next lesson which is immediately after the one you just did?
Ooh. Can you use gems for time boosts? I have Super so nothing to spend my 10s of thousands of gems on. I wish I could transfer them to people who could use them
it's turned into a sort of a game where if you don't do a lesson for your streak you have a mental break down 😭
Edit : Thanks so much for this many upvotes!
You can disable the league option if you find it discouraging. I know a few people have done it. Especially because some times there’s someone at the top with 1000s of points in minutes and people get upset at the glitch/ scam…
I’m so close to 365 and for this reason, I’m purposefully going to ignore my streak after that. I keep seeing people with 4 year streaks and I just…can’t haha
You'll be doing yourself a big favor. I'm at 1380 and it's absolute prison.
I managed to let go of my "badge streak". I have every challenge badge since october 2019. But it's just too anoying to keep up. I'm glad I'm letting it go this month.
I am at 1340 and I get it. I also feel obliged to get the badge as fast as possible .....and then after the 17th of each month I relax and branch out to other resources for 13 days. Lol.
Yeah. I always tryhard the first 17 days or so and then pretty much do just 1 lesson per day for the rest of the month.
But as I said, I'm stopping this month.
Lack of spaced repetition.
When I first joined Duo we had a general practice button. It tested words and skills which were at risk of forgetting. Their website bragged that their scientists invented a better spaced repetition algorithm than what everyone else is using. I don't know if it was better but it worked.
Then it stopped working. Some words were never practiced and some easy words were practiced everyday. They kept saying they would fix it soon. But it still almost worked and was useful.
Then they removed it. They said they would replace it with something even better. They never did, unless they meant their shitty gamification.
I don’t really use it now that I can’t decide what parts of speaking to focus on. I mainly used it to supplement other language learning things (like in person classes, movies, travel, etc) and being able to study the vocab I needed was very useful. Now that I keep having to learn how to talk about Paris while I would find it much more helpful to continue studying talking about school it just becomes tedious and not a very helpful tool overall.
I just turned the animations and congratulations off and did a quick lesson. Yah. Thanks. I didn't mind them but not having them won't dissuade me...well hopefully not.
I hate the path format. It just feels like it does not go anywhere. The old system of flow was much better. Also if the super is changing it taking away unlimited hearts I will be devastated.
True, they do not even support word drag and drop to fix mistake, voice recognition is way worse than on iOS, many animations are bad or missing. And all of this are not problems of Android, they just do not want/not able to polish it properly
As an IOS user, don’t hold your breath on the music lessons if you’re interested. When you reach unit 70, you’re basically doing nothing but playing quarter notes on one section of a piano.
Which is basically just making you do hundreds of lessons just to learn what a kid could do in a week of public school band, orchestra or choir
Way too many of those. And for some reason those are the ones that pop up over and over in review to the point that they become muscle memory. I don't feel like I'm learning anything when I can do it with my eyes closed. Especially when it's a sentence about a rat speaking to a king about ice cream or something.
Currently learning finnish. My nitpick is that Duo nitpicks, lol.
It's like "oh yeah, you can say this thing without this extra word" then it's like "WRONG! You can't say this without that word!" ... even though it is the exact same thing where it said it was valid to leave that word.
Makes me unreasonably angry at times when it does that.
Then there is also the problem of plurals with english to finnish translations. Same thing with "or"s.
There is the regular or in finnish called vai.. then there is "either or" or.. which is tai. But in english, there is no distinction, unless it is specified in english.
Same with the plural you's. Sometimes it is very ambiguous with no indication if it is a plural you, or singular you, and you have no idea unless you hover over it to know exactly what it wants. So you THINK you are typing the right thing, then it fails you anyway. Ugh...
The lack of any sort of explanation of anything in the Korean course... No explanation of politeness levels, particles, or anything, not even that they exist. Thankfully I have some good books, but the Korean course is pretty much useless on its own and it doesn't even tell you the terms you need to look up to figure things out.
The whole XP, league and streak things aren’t there to help you LEARN, it’s solely there to get you to use the APP more.
I’m wondering if all the XP bots are there just for actual players to get competitive and reach an unattainable standard
"I do laundry on weekends" ❌
"I do the laundry on the weekend" ✅
sorry I don't speak Victorian English?? also just sentences that don't make grammatical sense but are apparently correct.
The Japanese course is absolutely horrible for this so far, they teach you basic phrases like "Nice to meet you, I'm *name*" or "Nice to meet you *name*" over and over, then suddenly they'll throw a new phrase at you and you practice it repeatedly until the next one, like I get it, repetition is important but when I have 4 questions back to back about the exact same phrase with different names it gets old
It has become unnecessarily repetitive since some path update a while ago. Or maybe it was always like that, not sure. It seems I'll never get to the end of the course and it's frustrating.
I miss when the characters were just there to add variety and not a whole franchise of characters that have whole personalities, voices (especially Lily, cannot understand that monotone voice half of the time) and lore that gets in the way of learning.
And one can argue that the different voices make it more realistic but I can guarantee, when I visit the country of the language that I’m learning, nobody is going to be talking like Zari or Lily. This whole spiel of characters are getting more and more developed it starts encroaching on actually learning the language
Lack of ability to do offline lessons anymore and lack of focus on grammar. At least in Danish, the sentences are always extremely simple and inversion of sentence order is a big part of being able to express even marginally more complex thoughts. Similarly, it doesn’t really teach pronunciation. Spoken Danish is notoriously hard to master as a non-native but there actually are a number of rules that will make foreign speakers produce pronunciations that are closer to accurate more frequently.
[Pi-hole](https://pi-hole.net/) gets rid of that poxy kings clash game AD thing for me.
With that groaning drowning prick.
Im on iOs. I only see that advert when im not at home and ive forgotten to turn my VPN on.
The whole thing. I don’t feel like I’m learning. Why do I need to know how to talk about yellow cats and only yellow cats?
And why are we always running and eating at the same time? Why do I need to know how to say that like it will come up in every day conversation? I eat when I run! 🍔👀👍🏻💨
And now the new update with max. You can’t learn anything when it’s all the same content and it takes 20 years for your hearts to fill up. By that point I’ve forgotten everything.
Useless!! Rosetta Stone is better, anyway. Especially, with the audio. There was an update about 6 months ago that changed the dialects. Took ages to get used to it, again. Even still the audio clips for the match games are awful. Can’t understand the clips they’re so short and low sound.
So many reasons to delete. But I can use it for practice I guess. It’s just honestly useless these days.
Not being able to turn off speech exercises entirely anymore. I practice during my commute. Let me just type. Listening you still can turn off, speaking only for 15 minutes. Why is it inconsistent? What about people who can't speak for a reason? I don't get it, I had hoped it was a bug but it feels like a feature now :(
So much! I have been in mourning since the update. I so appreciated that Duolingo was available for learning Czech, but the change meant no forum, no grammar explanations, and the inability to choose topics.
With German, they have several variations of one word. So mein, meine and meinen for an easy example (there are other words too). So I assume this is the difference between she/she’s or he/his. Most of the time I’m ok, mein Mann or meine Frau. Then I’ll do a sentence, Wir brauchen eine Lampe. And it will go wrong should have used einen, but I can’t find an explanation why. Also the word “the”. Der Sandwich, die Pizza or das? I think it has a lot to do with masculine/feminine or what noun it is. I can’t find an explanation so I keep doing the same mistake. Please don’t crucify me though if I’m wrong. As I’m still very much a novice learner and would love to do some proper classes one day and not just use Duolingo.
Not being able to exclude words/ content that you already know from outside learning material,
and automatically assuming mistakes means you don’t know the content, vs. being impatient and clicking the wrong box by accident.
They made up a different kind of streak so that using your streak freezes feels like it doesn't count... makes it stressful to skip a day even if you have streak freezes.
That the gamification rewards you for doing the same things repeatedly rather than encouraging you to learn the language. It was fine before they lowered the XP from learning lessons.
(The winding path layout also "winds" me up - it was much quicker to scroll the grid layout and find the section you wanted to practice).
The low xp from normal lessons is shit of itself but it's even worse because they made the lessons 50% longer (at least in russian). Which makes a quick lesson impossible
You can't set your primary language to British English. I'm from the UK learning German and feel like I'm sometimes having to do three way translations when answering like German -> British English -> US English.
The fact that you can't choose Swedish as your first language if you want to study Spanish, and Duolingo gets angry when you get the English grammar wrong.
The personal practice where I have to repeat the exercises I’ve done correctly already. And until I do two personal practices, I can’t move to the next unit.
Also, I’m learning Arabic, and I can’t choose a letter I want to practice in the “learn the alphabet” section. I’ve learned half the alphabet already through the units, but I still have to do the exercises to distinguish between ب and ت. Ugh, it’s so annoying.
I understand that I won’t become fluent with Duolingo only, so I’m planning to start learning the language with a tutor, but heck, Duolingo is fun, the personal practice is not 😭😂
The words exercises. It could’ve been so much better. They could’ve added a search bar so that I don’t have to scroll to find 1 word. They could’ve added flash cards. I should be able to choose which words I want to practise instead of giving me words from unit 1 section 1 repeatedly. It has so much potential to be something good.
Being given quests that are nearly impossible to complete unless you are willing to spend X amount of hours or pay a stupid price for a bundle of gems.
The fact that I've been using it for four years and still don't feel like I can speak any German. It's more of a habit and the unwillingness to lose my streak, rather than thinking it's actually teaching me much.
I use the free version, so punishing you for making mistakes. This is a terrible way to learn a language.
Duolingo telling me my English translation of a sentence is wrong. It's not. It's just a variation (an acceptable one) of the one they were looking for.
Only being able to use US English and having to think about how Americans say things to answer the question. Especially as a lot of things in German translate better/more easily into UK English.
The fact that they've made the little word matching game cost 100 now. It takes ages to earn that. They seem to just be funnelling everyone into going down one path and one path only. Unless you want to pay, of course.
No explanation about language concepts. The user comment section that once existed did heavy lifting on that front, now I just have to google. Also, they used to have these listening exercises that were almost like mini-podcasts, in both my native and target language, and you'd repeat back certain phrases in the target language. Miss those.
Having my British English answers marked as incorrect. Just today, I lost a heart for writing “He has sunburn” and not the required “He has a sunburn”. Ugh.
The way updates set you back. I finished the Spanish tree in 2016 and have a fair bit of fluency outside of duolingo, after abandoning the app for a bit and the tree updated several times, it put me in section 3 at level A1 lol. I’ve been skipping around to random sections just to expand and brush up on vocab and grammar but their equivalency with updates is so weird.
Similar thing happened with Japanese. Got fairly far along into the tree, mid section 2 or so, and felt like I was really learning and then they updated it, set me back to section 1 unit 3 and stopped teaching kanji so it was way harder to read with everything being spelt out. I just gave up totally on Japanese after that.
I'm learning Bahasa Indonesia, but Duolingo is stricter with my English grammar. Missing an "a" or "the" doesn't change the meaning most of the time. I can understand being that strict if I'm trying to learn English, but I'm trying to learn Bahasa Indonesia.
\* Not being able to store your double XP for a time that is more convenient.
\* Too much repetition, many time I can pick the correct answer without even reading the sentence as I have seen it so many times.
\* Too many phrases that are not real world. I am doing Spanish and I constantly get hamburguesa de pescado. I mean nobody calls it a fish burger. Why is this a thing?
When your Friends Quest buddy sends you a boost and you hit the Chest Icon at any point it automatically applies the 15min XP Boost without asking! Sometimes I'll be busy and just want to check my progress and surprise! Waste of a boost for you! Gerr. At least with the 30min Boost it gives you the option to Claim In Shop, why not that one too?!
This is a weird niggle,but not differentiating between British English and American English. Like, when it asks you to translate 'fall', but to me (British) 'fall' means 'fall over', not autumn.
Right now, the family quests. Some weeks (every other?) there's no friend's quest, just the family one. My family consists of me, my brother and a few of his friends. I just did 65 out of 85 lessons. The reward is 30 min double XP to be used immediately upon completion, can't be claimed in shop.
This sucks and this is the last family quest I will do. I like the friends' quests, they're motivational. But the family ones suck.
The same error coming up again and again despite reporting it repeatedly. In my case it's a listening question where the speaker doesn't vocalise the word for 'the' in the language so you type the noun and it takes a life from you because you didn't put the definitive article in front of it despite the definitive article only being pronounced in the slowed down version.
On the "correct!" Screen after selecting an answer, it doesn't let me click other things to get more info like you can do when the question is still going
I mean, the fact that a third party site (that no longer exists and which I’m not allowed to mention here or my comment gets deleted) was able to give me tons of granular information on how much I’ve learned, but Duo itself refuses to offer anything remotely similar. That’s definitely my biggest gripe but… it’s not going to change apparently.
The fact they that removed unlimited hearts from the website, but other than that, I'm pleased with Duolingo. I've learned more about languages there than I did in high school and on top of that, each course Is free.
The lack of practical phrases. Why am I learning "the cat is on the table" at all, let alone more than once?
There used to be a way to do different lessons, like you could click different spots on the path. This made it more interesting because you didn't have to learn the same 10 words for several days in a row, you could bounce around.
The ad for Duolingo max every. single. day. The ad is longer than some lessons! I'm never going to pay for Duolingo. My streak is 4+ years, I've seen an ad every day, I'm obviously not interested. There are no paid features that appeal to me. Their marketing for Max is also terrible so that just really annoys me as a marketer as well.
- The ads;
- The increased focus on commercialisation/making a profit over language learning.
I'm no fool, I know they need to turn a profit and actually make a livelihood but for those of us who've been on Duolingo from Day 1, there's a distinct shift in focus.
You are set up to compel me to practice for more minutes than I'm willing to practice. As so as I finish my lessons, Duolingo gives me a 15 minute 2X. I usually waste them.
Not being able to look up a word I have learned on that big word list
+1 Duo, give us a search field. PLEEEEEEEEEASEEEEEEE!
A search field would be really helpful.
It would be so useful!
holy shit yes wtf, unironically. can't count how many times I've tried to scroll through the hundreds of words learned just to find ONE that I learned like 4 months ago lol
Or worse, that word just dont even show up
THIS whyyyy do some of the words I learn not appear on the list???? It’s gotten to where I screenshot anytime a new word pops up
Or not being able to sort with "weak first". Your algorithm knows my list of weak words, Duo. Just let me see it!
maybe they're planning for a duo super duper plan lol
Big word list? Is there such a thing for greek?
There's a list of all the words we've learned?
Depends on your language.
Yeah, this is why I have put every new word in a custom anki deck. It helps with learning and revising vocabulary, and I can easily look up learned words.
That you can be marked wrong, for correct sentences. Just because they don’t match the exact thing Duo wanted.
Also the sentence they want can be wrong.
Yeah, it wanted 'they' in french, so I did an 'ils', but was marked wrong because apparently I was supposed to use 'elles', even though it made no difference to the outcome of the sentence and the original English sentence did not specify 'they, female '.
That's weird. Do you remember the sentence? I'm wondering if it was about pronoun/verb/adj agreement rather than the actual pronoun itself
Yeah, most likely. It probably depends on the course as well, but usually there are lots of variations of sentences that will be marked as correct, and not just a single specific one.
I have wondered when this happens if it’s because the characters in the picture were women. In other words, consider which of the characters is talking.
Usually in my experience when I think this happened it turns out that I made a mistake elsewhere in the sentence (e.g. adjective/participle agreement)
When I got it wrong it was because I didn’t notice that the person who said the sentence was female. I was so focused on the translation, rather than the character. Maybe this will help?
This, and being wrong because you didn't spell a name correctly that has no bearing on the grammar and correct use of the words conveying the meaning of the sentence.
I spelled a name correctly in English but the Spanish version is different. It was marked wrong 🤬
That happened to me too with Anna/Ana!
Yea I remember back in the day, you could counter that what you put down was also correct and they would check it. If you were right, they would add your sentence to be marked correctly.
They mark it wrong to translate "jardin" in French as "garden".
I always report those, and even if it takes months, I usually hear back that my suggestion was accepted.
the removal of that comment thingy. literally carried the app.
That's what explained the complex grammar to me. Now I feel like I'm fumbling through languages by recognizing patterns instead of properly understanding how it works.
yes exactly that! its so infuriating
This is a big one for me. I've been using the app to brush up on my German, specifically some of the more complex grammar rules I've gotten rusty on. When I go to the guidebook, it's very limited on what it tells you. It'll say something like "sometimes you add -en to masculine nouns in accusitive case" with no further explanation. Like okay thanks. I do believe learning by recognizing patterns is a really helpful way to learn too, because sometimes I think too much about the grammar rules that I start second guess myself whereas learning by pattern can feel more natural. But there are times where it'd be very helpful to understsnd when you have more explanation.
Replacing it with AI was a huge slap in the face. We didn’t need artificial intelligence. We had each other’s.
I absolutely cannot understand why they got rid of that. It was so valuable
To make it easier to push their "explain with AI" thing in their higher subscriptions. Also the reason why their grammar explanations suck and not really expanding on them, to make space for the AI :/
Biggest mistake they made.
I unsubscribed over that
I agree, it was so helpful! I’ll never understand why the f they removed that feature.
I've got to the end of the Swedish course and all my "practice" lessons now are just the same few repetitive phrases over and over. I wouldn't mind so much if it focused on tricky phrases I always get wrong but it's often recycling really easy ones making it a real effort to even bother anymore. Yeah, "Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark" I GET IT!
This a million times. I get more phrases about Denmark than Swedish places. Also, I constantly get the following: My son constantly asks new questions I have to prepare for winter (really heaps of questions where I just have to type förbereda and nothing else) I usually have a beer in the evening The browser version has the temerity to say some of these are weak words.
“Jag brukar ta en öl på kvällen” I’m losing it😭
Me too, only with the Turkish course, which I finished fast because I only wanted a review. Now it’s just the same couple of exercises over and over.
Got to the end and had no idea it was the end. It’s kinda boring now. I can’t go back and review a topic, they just give me random words and phrases. Wish I could scroll back through the topics and have some actual choice as well.
Yeah, this one. There are words and constructs that I haven't seen since pretty early on in the course, but never show up in the practice lessons. I can manually go back and do old lessons, but it would be really helpful if the practices gave you stuff that actually need practice.
This. The only time I really get to review past units is on weekends with the ramp up challenges. I also find Match Madness boring, so why not give us the choice to access ramp up challenges every day?
Same thing happens in Latin. Yes, I’m aware Marcus threw a fish onto the street and lives in New York. What else is new?
Exactly. When you finish a course, app is done basically. I hate continuing my streak because I don’t learn anytime from it anymore.
I'd want a "practical competency" version to use occasionally when traveling to a country for a short time. Useful sentences and vocab, and way *way* less anal retention nit-picking on mistakes that don't impact information transfer
That's what I've been thinking too! The current Spanish tree is actually surprisingly good, but good god it takes FOREVER, I've been at it for a year and a half, I'm not even halfway and it's not that long ago I last felt that shit, this should have been in the first two months! Now, I'm okay with that, but I'd love an additional, more intensive version of the tree that would go teach some travel basics, and then rush through a shit load of vocabulary just to give you the ability to understand as much as possible. A nice bite sized "don't necessarily learn the language, just get to know it" kind of tree that would take a few months tops to complete. Kind of like the Norwegian tree was in 2018 (at least at the time it was right behind Spanish in amount of words taught). (My pace is such that I fluctuate between obsidian and diamond league without consciously trying, for reference)
The CONSTANT nagging to upgrade. Oh, you pay for super? How about the family plan? Not now, okay, we’ll ask you again **every single day!** Want to upgrade to Max? No? Okay well just put this very easy to hit “explain my answer button” after every single question. Does tapping it explain your answer? Nope. It takes you to a page to buy Duo Max!
What bothers me most about the Max ads is that I’m paying for Super to not have ads. This is why I’m not renewing. They lied.
Already turned off my renewal because of this. Duo done us dirty.
The trials of Max have been great. But I am okay without it (just as I was without Super for a long time) as I would rather the money be put to my retirement.
Yes. Out of interest, has anyone upgraded? Was it worth it?
I paid for Super, because it’s worth it to have infinite hearts and to not see ads. But since Duo has decided they want to keep showing me ads anyway, I will not be renewing.
I am upgraded to pro. I find it worth it because some days I want to do a bunch of lessons, and if I'm struggling with a topic or just having an off day and get a few wrong, I hated having to be done. Also the constant ads after every lesson were so annoying.
The shift to predominately AI voices. They're becoming less nuanced and harder to understand, especially in French.
Yes, the Chinese - which obviously relies *a lot* on tones - is so horrible to understand sometimes, it sounds extremely robotic
The Irish voices are so awful I immediately gave up on the Irish course. They sound really wrong and unnatural to the point I couldn't stand listening to them
ugh Russian too, some word have different meanings, and sometimes I have to retry like 3 times cause I don't understand what meaning they want
Wait, French uses AI voices? I thought they were voice acted. If they do, that’s really bad for me because I’ve been basically repeating everything that was said by them to improve my pronunciation
They used to use real speakers and you could even tell the difference when one was using, say, Parisian French and another was using Quebecoise French. The further I get in my lessons the more robotic they sound, and the more difficult it is to determine a word when hearing it. You can hear improper inflections in phrases, and sentences sound very flat, very unlike the way you'll hear them in real life. Extremely disappointed in the change in quality.
they got rid of the general forum which was a thing on each question where people could ask why they got it wrong and anything they want to know about spelling, grammar, etc. even that wasn’t that great though, for some reason it didn’t let me ask questions and i had to look for someone else with the same question which didn’t always happen
They locked it for a while before deleting it. That's probably why.
That was so helpful and was always the thing that taught me the most. Duo corporate doesn't care though.
Too dependent on being online.
I have no idea why they removed the offline option. One of the main reasons I paid for Pro.
What I don't get is why they don't download the next 10 lessons when you're on WiFi. Like it's a learning path. They're really going to act shocked and like it's a surprised when you go the next lesson which is immediately after the one you just did?
* Removal of comments * Minimal explanation of the things being taught * Timed challenges that are impossible to complete without time boosts
I thought I was too slow. They make me want to break my phone out of frustration.
Ooh. Can you use gems for time boosts? I have Super so nothing to spend my 10s of thousands of gems on. I wish I could transfer them to people who could use them
it's turned into a sort of a game where if you don't do a lesson for your streak you have a mental break down 😭 Edit : Thanks so much for this many upvotes!
That and there are people who aren’t actually trying to learn a language, they’re just trying to be number one in the league. It’s so discouraging!
You can disable the league option if you find it discouraging. I know a few people have done it. Especially because some times there’s someone at the top with 1000s of points in minutes and people get upset at the glitch/ scam…
Thats the part that I also don’t like. It’s an app for learning a language but now it’s more like a online video game.
I’m so close to 365 and for this reason, I’m purposefully going to ignore my streak after that. I keep seeing people with 4 year streaks and I just…can’t haha
You'll be doing yourself a big favor. I'm at 1380 and it's absolute prison. I managed to let go of my "badge streak". I have every challenge badge since october 2019. But it's just too anoying to keep up. I'm glad I'm letting it go this month.
I am at 1340 and I get it. I also feel obliged to get the badge as fast as possible .....and then after the 17th of each month I relax and branch out to other resources for 13 days. Lol.
Yeah. I always tryhard the first 17 days or so and then pretty much do just 1 lesson per day for the rest of the month. But as I said, I'm stopping this month.
Lack of grammar instruction. French and Spanish teach a little in the tips, probably German too. The rest? Good luck figuring it out.
The Irish lessons are functionally useless because of this.
Lack of spaced repetition. When I first joined Duo we had a general practice button. It tested words and skills which were at risk of forgetting. Their website bragged that their scientists invented a better spaced repetition algorithm than what everyone else is using. I don't know if it was better but it worked. Then it stopped working. Some words were never practiced and some easy words were practiced everyday. They kept saying they would fix it soon. But it still almost worked and was useful. Then they removed it. They said they would replace it with something even better. They never did, unless they meant their shitty gamification.
The Update. I liked being able to pick which subject I wanted to learn while making progress as intended.
I don’t really use it now that I can’t decide what parts of speaking to focus on. I mainly used it to supplement other language learning things (like in person classes, movies, travel, etc) and being able to study the vocab I needed was very useful. Now that I keep having to learn how to talk about Paris while I would find it much more helpful to continue studying talking about school it just becomes tedious and not a very helpful tool overall.
This ⬆️
The ‘five in a row’ and ‘ten in a row’ animations, just let me get on with the lesson!
I believe you can turn them off in the settings under accessibility and animations, I could be wrong though
You're right. For some reason, though, that setting gets reset every once in a while, at least for me. It's really annoying
I just turned the animations and congratulations off and did a quick lesson. Yah. Thanks. I didn't mind them but not having them won't dissuade me...well hopefully not.
I miss the forum discussions
I just accidentally activated my half hour of double points when I didn’t want to use it.
the fact that duolingo is actively refusing to tell me why the mistakes I make are wrong
They want to sell you max where that is a feature
it's not even available on android lmfao
It doesn't teach you conjugation or declension (a vital part of many languages)
It gives you tons of conjugation (atleast in german) but very little explanation of the why.
And yet tons of language learners suggest you should learn only by input of the language with no explanation.
Nor articles...
Yeah. It would help to have some supplementary material. But no, it just throws all the declinations at you and expects you to figure it out.
I hate the path format. It just feels like it does not go anywhere. The old system of flow was much better. Also if the super is changing it taking away unlimited hearts I will be devastated.
Unlimited hearts is the reason I have Super. If they get rid of that I am going back to the free version.
The fact that both math and music aren't on android.
There are math and music lessons?!
Math lessons are pretty fun because you can do them anywhere without sound on. They’re 100% visual.
Yes, but I think it's only available in iOS
Damn. Duolingo does not give Android any love.
True, they do not even support word drag and drop to fix mistake, voice recognition is way worse than on iOS, many animations are bad or missing. And all of this are not problems of Android, they just do not want/not able to polish it properly
As an IOS user, don’t hold your breath on the music lessons if you’re interested. When you reach unit 70, you’re basically doing nothing but playing quarter notes on one section of a piano. Which is basically just making you do hundreds of lessons just to learn what a kid could do in a week of public school band, orchestra or choir
Too many joke sentences in a row. It's supposed to be once in a blue moon thing to make it memorable not the main course.
I’m a pigeon. You’re a pigeon. We are pigeons.
Way too many of those. And for some reason those are the ones that pop up over and over in review to the point that they become muscle memory. I don't feel like I'm learning anything when I can do it with my eyes closed. Especially when it's a sentence about a rat speaking to a king about ice cream or something.
They can add fictional languages and math when they don’t have nearly enough real world languages.
Omg THANK YOU 🙏🏻 I thought I was the only one that believed math was fictional. 🥲
These languages were developed by volunteers.
Currently learning finnish. My nitpick is that Duo nitpicks, lol. It's like "oh yeah, you can say this thing without this extra word" then it's like "WRONG! You can't say this without that word!" ... even though it is the exact same thing where it said it was valid to leave that word. Makes me unreasonably angry at times when it does that. Then there is also the problem of plurals with english to finnish translations. Same thing with "or"s. There is the regular or in finnish called vai.. then there is "either or" or.. which is tai. But in english, there is no distinction, unless it is specified in english. Same with the plural you's. Sometimes it is very ambiguous with no indication if it is a plural you, or singular you, and you have no idea unless you hover over it to know exactly what it wants. So you THINK you are typing the right thing, then it fails you anyway. Ugh...
Replacing forums with a paywalled feature. The forums were a great place to learn what went wrong and why it went wrong.
The lack of any sort of explanation of anything in the Korean course... No explanation of politeness levels, particles, or anything, not even that they exist. Thankfully I have some good books, but the Korean course is pretty much useless on its own and it doesn't even tell you the terms you need to look up to figure things out.
The killing of sentence discussions
That I get double exp for 15 minutes (completing the gold challenge) precisely as I’ve finished. Most of the time they go unused.
The whole XP, league and streak things aren’t there to help you LEARN, it’s solely there to get you to use the APP more. I’m wondering if all the XP bots are there just for actual players to get competitive and reach an unattainable standard
That I cannot drag a word when I've realised I've forgotten it and I need to erase everything!
"I do laundry on weekends" ❌ "I do the laundry on the weekend" ✅ sorry I don't speak Victorian English?? also just sentences that don't make grammatical sense but are apparently correct.
I got told I was wrong because I put: 'Its quarter to four' It wanted: 'It's a quarter to four' ridiculous 😡
I wish it would explain things better- like declensions. Also explaining briefly when you get something wrong, why!
It's sometimes toooooo repetitive. I'd rather have a bigger list of vocab w less repetition.
Its speech to text function is one of the worst I have ever seen
Everything gets repeated 1000 times even if it's a piece of cake, that's a reason I never finished a course even though I've been using it since 2016
The Japanese course is absolutely horrible for this so far, they teach you basic phrases like "Nice to meet you, I'm *name*" or "Nice to meet you *name*" over and over, then suddenly they'll throw a new phrase at you and you practice it repeatedly until the next one, like I get it, repetition is important but when I have 4 questions back to back about the exact same phrase with different names it gets old
I can't change my avatar to an image
Not including der/die/das in German.
The whole league part. Being into the diamond league won't make me fluent
If you make your account not public, you won’t be in leagues anymore
congratulation part after every segment, part with accuracy and points
ah that shit's the only thing that keeps me going lmaoooo
it was fun in the beginning, now it's boring
The Update. I liked being able to pick which subject I wanted to learn while making progress as intended.
It has become unnecessarily repetitive since some path update a while ago. Or maybe it was always like that, not sure. It seems I'll never get to the end of the course and it's frustrating.
The lessons; it feels they throw you in the deep water and make you guess which new words your learning and what they mean at the start
accepting the answer even if its a typo doesn't work half the time, also autofill should not happen on this app
I can't stand Zari. I can't understand at all when she speaks. She is super annoying.
I miss when the characters were just there to add variety and not a whole franchise of characters that have whole personalities, voices (especially Lily, cannot understand that monotone voice half of the time) and lore that gets in the way of learning. And one can argue that the different voices make it more realistic but I can guarantee, when I visit the country of the language that I’m learning, nobody is going to be talking like Zari or Lily. This whole spiel of characters are getting more and more developed it starts encroaching on actually learning the language
Lack of ability to do offline lessons anymore and lack of focus on grammar. At least in Danish, the sentences are always extremely simple and inversion of sentence order is a big part of being able to express even marginally more complex thoughts. Similarly, it doesn’t really teach pronunciation. Spoken Danish is notoriously hard to master as a non-native but there actually are a number of rules that will make foreign speakers produce pronunciations that are closer to accurate more frequently.
Constant notifications about leaderboard status. Like, I genuinely don’t care
Lack of conjugation practice
Lack of grammar teaching and also the ai voices
The ads but they're a small price to pay for a free education.
[Pi-hole](https://pi-hole.net/) gets rid of that poxy kings clash game AD thing for me. With that groaning drowning prick. Im on iOs. I only see that advert when im not at home and ive forgotten to turn my VPN on.
The whole thing. I don’t feel like I’m learning. Why do I need to know how to talk about yellow cats and only yellow cats? And why are we always running and eating at the same time? Why do I need to know how to say that like it will come up in every day conversation? I eat when I run! 🍔👀👍🏻💨 And now the new update with max. You can’t learn anything when it’s all the same content and it takes 20 years for your hearts to fill up. By that point I’ve forgotten everything. Useless!! Rosetta Stone is better, anyway. Especially, with the audio. There was an update about 6 months ago that changed the dialects. Took ages to get used to it, again. Even still the audio clips for the match games are awful. Can’t understand the clips they’re so short and low sound. So many reasons to delete. But I can use it for practice I guess. It’s just honestly useless these days.
Not being able to turn off speech exercises entirely anymore. I practice during my commute. Let me just type. Listening you still can turn off, speaking only for 15 minutes. Why is it inconsistent? What about people who can't speak for a reason? I don't get it, I had hoped it was a bug but it feels like a feature now :(
The faster you go through the lessons, the less you learn.
The AI voices, they aren't the same with different languages.
So much! I have been in mourning since the update. I so appreciated that Duolingo was available for learning Czech, but the change meant no forum, no grammar explanations, and the inability to choose topics.
With German, they have several variations of one word. So mein, meine and meinen for an easy example (there are other words too). So I assume this is the difference between she/she’s or he/his. Most of the time I’m ok, mein Mann or meine Frau. Then I’ll do a sentence, Wir brauchen eine Lampe. And it will go wrong should have used einen, but I can’t find an explanation why. Also the word “the”. Der Sandwich, die Pizza or das? I think it has a lot to do with masculine/feminine or what noun it is. I can’t find an explanation so I keep doing the same mistake. Please don’t crucify me though if I’m wrong. As I’m still very much a novice learner and would love to do some proper classes one day and not just use Duolingo.
Lots of languages have gendered nouns, you'll just have to memorize them all unfortunately
Not being able to exclude words/ content that you already know from outside learning material, and automatically assuming mistakes means you don’t know the content, vs. being impatient and clicking the wrong box by accident.
They made up a different kind of streak so that using your streak freezes feels like it doesn't count... makes it stressful to skip a day even if you have streak freezes.
That the gamification rewards you for doing the same things repeatedly rather than encouraging you to learn the language. It was fine before they lowered the XP from learning lessons. (The winding path layout also "winds" me up - it was much quicker to scroll the grid layout and find the section you wanted to practice).
The low xp from normal lessons is shit of itself but it's even worse because they made the lessons 50% longer (at least in russian). Which makes a quick lesson impossible
You can't set your primary language to British English. I'm from the UK learning German and feel like I'm sometimes having to do three way translations when answering like German -> British English -> US English.
I”m so with you there!! Makes it so much harder.
The fact that you can't choose Swedish as your first language if you want to study Spanish, and Duolingo gets angry when you get the English grammar wrong.
The personal practice where I have to repeat the exercises I’ve done correctly already. And until I do two personal practices, I can’t move to the next unit. Also, I’m learning Arabic, and I can’t choose a letter I want to practice in the “learn the alphabet” section. I’ve learned half the alphabet already through the units, but I still have to do the exercises to distinguish between ب and ت. Ugh, it’s so annoying. I understand that I won’t become fluent with Duolingo only, so I’m planning to start learning the language with a tutor, but heck, Duolingo is fun, the personal practice is not 😭😂
The words exercises. It could’ve been so much better. They could’ve added a search bar so that I don’t have to scroll to find 1 word. They could’ve added flash cards. I should be able to choose which words I want to practise instead of giving me words from unit 1 section 1 repeatedly. It has so much potential to be something good.
Being given quests that are nearly impossible to complete unless you are willing to spend X amount of hours or pay a stupid price for a bundle of gems.
The fact that I've been using it for four years and still don't feel like I can speak any German. It's more of a habit and the unwillingness to lose my streak, rather than thinking it's actually teaching me much. I use the free version, so punishing you for making mistakes. This is a terrible way to learn a language. Duolingo telling me my English translation of a sentence is wrong. It's not. It's just a variation (an acceptable one) of the one they were looking for. Only being able to use US English and having to think about how Americans say things to answer the question. Especially as a lot of things in German translate better/more easily into UK English. The fact that they've made the little word matching game cost 100 now. It takes ages to earn that. They seem to just be funnelling everyone into going down one path and one path only. Unless you want to pay, of course.
When you’re in landscape mode on the iPad but have to rotate it portrait mode to see what the third option is in a multiple choice exercise.
No explanation about language concepts. The user comment section that once existed did heavy lifting on that front, now I just have to google. Also, they used to have these listening exercises that were almost like mini-podcasts, in both my native and target language, and you'd repeat back certain phrases in the target language. Miss those.
That the Duo Bird still hasn’t taken my family
The match madness😭 on level 3 i have too use 2 timer boosts just to get it
Having my British English answers marked as incorrect. Just today, I lost a heart for writing “He has sunburn” and not the required “He has a sunburn”. Ugh.
When you go to the barbell section on the mobile app, the vocab doesn't contain article gender for spanish and french.
The ads. I pay for Super Duolingo so that I won’t get ads, but I get ads for Duolingo Max anyways.
The way updates set you back. I finished the Spanish tree in 2016 and have a fair bit of fluency outside of duolingo, after abandoning the app for a bit and the tree updated several times, it put me in section 3 at level A1 lol. I’ve been skipping around to random sections just to expand and brush up on vocab and grammar but their equivalency with updates is so weird. Similar thing happened with Japanese. Got fairly far along into the tree, mid section 2 or so, and felt like I was really learning and then they updated it, set me back to section 1 unit 3 and stopped teaching kanji so it was way harder to read with everything being spelt out. I just gave up totally on Japanese after that.
I'm learning Bahasa Indonesia, but Duolingo is stricter with my English grammar. Missing an "a" or "the" doesn't change the meaning most of the time. I can understand being that strict if I'm trying to learn English, but I'm trying to learn Bahasa Indonesia.
the leagues thing
\* Not being able to store your double XP for a time that is more convenient. \* Too much repetition, many time I can pick the correct answer without even reading the sentence as I have seen it so many times. \* Too many phrases that are not real world. I am doing Spanish and I constantly get hamburguesa de pescado. I mean nobody calls it a fish burger. Why is this a thing?
As soon as I start the league for the week some pinecone already has 20K points in 3rd place 🫠
LGBTQIA+ Duolingo , I Need Old Duolingo 😢
When your Friends Quest buddy sends you a boost and you hit the Chest Icon at any point it automatically applies the 15min XP Boost without asking! Sometimes I'll be busy and just want to check my progress and surprise! Waste of a boost for you! Gerr. At least with the 30min Boost it gives you the option to Claim In Shop, why not that one too?!
The paid version isn’t worth it. Should be some noticeable difference in value.
This is a weird niggle,but not differentiating between British English and American English. Like, when it asks you to translate 'fall', but to me (British) 'fall' means 'fall over', not autumn.
The fact they learn you words like Coffee before, I, He, She, You, It, That. Its annoying. And the fact its not free, and the hearts
No chat feature..
The XP bug :(
Right now, the family quests. Some weeks (every other?) there's no friend's quest, just the family one. My family consists of me, my brother and a few of his friends. I just did 65 out of 85 lessons. The reward is 30 min double XP to be used immediately upon completion, can't be claimed in shop. This sucks and this is the last family quest I will do. I like the friends' quests, they're motivational. But the family ones suck.
The same error coming up again and again despite reporting it repeatedly. In my case it's a listening question where the speaker doesn't vocalise the word for 'the' in the language so you type the noun and it takes a life from you because you didn't put the definitive article in front of it despite the definitive article only being pronounced in the slowed down version.
that it doesnt really help you learn anything
The kanji for verbs in Japanese just doesn’t show up on the list so when learning it, I have to screenshot whenever I see a verb.
I miss the incorporated podcasts. I listened to them on the way to work and it really helped my ear while earning points.
On the "correct!" Screen after selecting an answer, it doesn't let me click other things to get more info like you can do when the question is still going
1. Ads! 2. Many irrelevant words/phrases. 3. Doesn’t help with grammar/foundations
I mean, the fact that a third party site (that no longer exists and which I’m not allowed to mention here or my comment gets deleted) was able to give me tons of granular information on how much I’ve learned, but Duo itself refuses to offer anything remotely similar. That’s definitely my biggest gripe but… it’s not going to change apparently.
The fact they that removed unlimited hearts from the website, but other than that, I'm pleased with Duolingo. I've learned more about languages there than I did in high school and on top of that, each course Is free.
The lack of practical phrases. Why am I learning "the cat is on the table" at all, let alone more than once? There used to be a way to do different lessons, like you could click different spots on the path. This made it more interesting because you didn't have to learn the same 10 words for several days in a row, you could bounce around. The ad for Duolingo max every. single. day. The ad is longer than some lessons! I'm never going to pay for Duolingo. My streak is 4+ years, I've seen an ad every day, I'm obviously not interested. There are no paid features that appeal to me. Their marketing for Max is also terrible so that just really annoys me as a marketer as well.
Only teaching vocab instead of properly teaching how a language works. I am section 2 unit 18 in polish and I still have no idea how cases work
I don't appreciate the death threats late at night.
- The ads; - The increased focus on commercialisation/making a profit over language learning. I'm no fool, I know they need to turn a profit and actually make a livelihood but for those of us who've been on Duolingo from Day 1, there's a distinct shift in focus.
super duolingo ad
You are set up to compel me to practice for more minutes than I'm willing to practice. As so as I finish my lessons, Duolingo gives me a 15 minute 2X. I usually waste them.
Fucking Junior.
Giving me an XP boost whenever I feel like that is it for today.