[salimmadjd]

With GPT-4, I'm thinking if Duolingo has fundamentally been reduced to a game.

The key network effect left is pretty much a leaderboard that fuels their daily retention. So any existing game company could potentially create another gamified learning app as part of their game pools.

[bayesian_horse]

There are lots of educational games or apps around language learning. Nobody is as successful as Duolingo. Or as useful as Duolingo, at least in whatever Duolingo chooses to do.

I don't even think they think being compared to a game is a bad thing. What makes Duolingo the best in its field is the content and the varied exercises with a high quality.

[ted_bunny]

Yes, the gamification is the major positive feature that gets people to stick to it.

But the exercises aren't varied or high quality. Try drilling a particular skill and you'll soon memorize all their sentences, to a degree that it trivializes the practice. Not to mention they're absolutely riddled with errors that strongly imply they don't even run the translations by a native English speaker. Voice exercises with numbers are simply broken in Russian. And all the comments are locked, with many of the complaints ignored.

[bayesian_horse]

I never run into those issues. I use about 6 courses, and the English sentences have always been grammatically correct.

There's nothing wrong with memorizing example sentences. Your brain is not a digital memory bank, memorizing is impossible without forming some deeper understanding on the fly.

[ted_bunny]

What I mean is, DL refuses to teach that deeper understanding. You have to beg in the comments to identify a declension.

And the memory thing - I don't have to think about what a sentence means. This is phrasebook teaching, a piss-poor method.