[wahnfrieden]

I have friends and family who earnestly desire to learn a language, and ask me what to use. They often end up choosing Duolingo and make no progress toward fluency in the subsequent years. The criticism is that it subverts their goal, preventing their success by replacing learning with addictive behaviors that don't educate (like someone wanting to enter a new field and getting hooked on "educational" YouTube Shorts podcast clips). It also spoils their ability to focus on alternative learning methods as none deliver as much of an immediate dopamine rush as Duolingo. These alternatives could do better at that, sure, but it doesn't change that Duolingo fries their brains preventing them from adopting productive methods without therapeutic interventions.

That's why people advocate against it and advocate for alternatives.

Their goal wasn't to defeat doomscrolling, it was to learn a language!

[bigfishrunning]

I've been doing "Dreaming Spanish", which is a comprehensible input service, and using Duolingo as a self-test of sorts. Watching a lot of curated spanish-language content is very engaging, and I believe this method will work (for some definition of work), but it is nice to have duolingo as a fancy flash card system. I think duolingo by itself probably isn't very effective, but it serves as a motivator and i think it's useful as part of a more complete language learning strategy.

[throaway5445454]

Yes and mine say things like "why pay 500 for a language course when I can do this?" Of course they ignore me when I say language meetups are free, because "im not at that level yet." It's usually anxiety.