| I'm a linguaphile with a lot of experience with Duolingo. I've joined
in the very first months of Duolingo. There are many problems with it: * First and foremost, Duolingo isn't a product, it's a series of
products, which all have different characteristics. A person using
Duolingo on Android will have an experience completely different from
the experience of someone who uses iOS. And the difference is even more
drastic when comparing mobile with the desktop version. The desktop
version is sometimes three or four time more challenging. * Even within one platform, the A/B testing has become so large-scale
that even two Android users might see a completely different product. * Courses for “popular” languages get way more attention than the
“unpopular” ones. And the quality varies greatly. * The ads they show are sometimes loud and obnoxious, NSFW, or straight
up scams. That doesn't happen that often, thankfully, but I've had my
portion of loud-as-hell game ads and borderline pornographic hentai game
ads. And before you say what people always say when it comes to NSFW
ads, Duolingo says that ads aren't personalised, so no, my search
history has nothing to do with them. * Finally, it is indeed a good way to learn some basics and acquire
some basic vocabulary, but there is no way you'll get fluent with it.
A friend of mine has summed Duolingo up very well: it gives you
a feeling that you learn something, even if you don't progress at all. That's just the stuff I could remember off the top of my head. It's
still nice to have it, but we still should remember that the service has
lots of issues, some of which could be eliminated, if the management
wanted to do so. |