Friends don’t make friends read AI-generated texts: A Duolingo Odyssey

I finished the French Duolingo course today!

673 days after I started, and now I sorta can read French. (At least simpler texts, like newspapers and the like.) Duolingo works.

But I rushed through the last units, because I dread what Duolingo is becoming. Two months ago the Duolingo boss said that Duolingo is to become an ‘AI-first’ company, and the initial rollout of that initiative is so demoralising and discouraging that I just wanted to be done with Duolingo.

So this post is yet another of those “I’m so upset! *pout* *stamps foot*” posts that you can find all over the Internet as people are losing faith.

To explain: Duolingo has always been pretty fun all over, but there’s a “story” feature that’s sometimes downright witty: Duolingo has paid people to write kinda funny stories, and reading funny stories is a lot more fun than reading boring stories when you’re learning a new language.

I mean, we’re not talking about hilarious stand up routines, but look at the thing above — Eddy (the father) says that his son loves playing at the playground, but then look at the drawing: His son is on the phone (and in addition, look at the details of the crappy old playground).

An fun artwork in general — note album cover with Eddy as Bowie.

This stuff helps, and altogether makes people very well-disposed to Duolingo — you can forgive a lot if you like something.

But two months ago, Duolingo nuked all the stories and replaced them with AI-generated stories instead.

And they’re pretty bad. While reading them, I find myself going “so what’s the point here?” because they’re structured like the old stories (that used to have a punchline of sorts), but are usually pointless now.

Duolingo has used a pretty good text-to-speech engine for a decade now. Not everybody likes all the voices, but I think it’s fine. It apparently requires a lot of manual mark up to get it to talk properly, and you hear some mistakes here and there, but they’re pretty rare.

The AI-generated stories are not using this system, but are instead using AI-generated voices too, and they’re so much worse. And are inconsistent and downright wrong from time to time.

In addition, I find myself going “I’m not sure I understand what they’re talking about?”, and then I go back to try to re-read, and nope — it just doesn’t make sense.

Some of this is probably because they’re trying to AI generate “fun”, but…

This is just so discouraging — when learning a new language in particular, you have to be confident that what you’re reading actually makes sense. But reading the stories make you feel like you’re experiencing a mild stroke — you’re not sure whether it’s your brain that just stopped working.

I talked about the users’ goodwill earlier and how that has made us continue using Duolingo even if it’s pretty buggy? Yeah, this is the sort of thing that erases all of that:

In addition, they give you questions like this. Maddening.

And they do this often — there’s been no quality control of the AI-generated questions at all, apparently.

This was the first step taken by the newly “AI first” Duolingo company. It’s so bad that it’s made a lot of people angry, but I have no idea whether it’s made people stop using the app. Since the introduction, I’ve come to dread reading the AI-generated stories — it’s hard to disagree with “…generative AI…is an expression of contempt towards people”.

But the rest of the app is the same as before, so the other lessons are as enjoyable as always. Was the “AI first” initiative so badly received that they’re hesitating before converting the rest of the lessons? Or was the initiative just a way to goose the stock price, because investors sure love hearing “AI” from CEO mouths these days.

I just wanted to get Duolingo over with so that I don’t have to care about what horrible thing they’re going to do next.

And now I have.

Uhm… while I’m typing away, perhaps I should say something about why I really liked Duolingo? Sure. I’m good at typing. I should probably edit it down but where did my delete button go?

First of all, I wanted to learn French because I want to read French comics. I don’t really care that much about speaking or listening, and I don’t care at all about writing French — I’m never ever going to write anything in French. But writing is the best way to actually make your brain remember words, so it’s all valuable. In any case, reading is my priority.

And I used the paid version, and not the cheap paid version, but the expensive one — Max. People do have legitimate complaints about the free version of Duolingo — it apparently used to be fun and all, but there’s been a real emphasis on getting people over to a paid plan to an extent that it’s pretty abusive these days. There an “energy” thing, and after you’ve done a few lessons, you run out of “energy” and you’re not allowed to do more lessons. In addition, they pepper you with ads, apparently.

In the “Super” paid version, you avoid all that nonsense, but you still have to submit to Duolingo’s educational approach, which is “don’t talk about grammar”. It just shows you examples, and you’re supposed to get it from that. That is, it shows you “ce film” (this movie) and “cet abricot” (this apricot), and does not tell you at all why there’s a “t” at the end of “ce” in the latter case. After being subjected to this for a while, you’re likely to start shouting at your phone “BUT TELL ME WHY, BY EVERYTHING THAT”S SACRED”. It starts feeling abusive.

But there’s another paid level, “Max”. It has an “explain my answer” feature, which is AI driven, and it’s a good use of AI: When you type something wrong (or right, even), you can ask it, and after a couple seconds it’ll tell you that it’s “cet” because “abricot” starts with a vowel sound.

Perfection!

Here’s a typical Max explanation, and it’s nice.

I wouldn’t use Duolingo without a Max subscription, but it’s a shame that the only way they’ve trying to monetise the app is by abusing the lower tier users.

So I’m only talking about Duolingo Max, and why I’ve loved using it for almost two years.

In addition to adding AI grammar explanations, Max also adds lessons like talking to Lily (seen above — she’s seldom impressed), and this is good usage of AI.

There’s also written AI roleplay, and of course, it’s AI, so it’ll say… stuff…

But you couldn’t do stuff like this without AI.

The non-Max Duolingo also never explains idioms. Yes, it’s vital to know what a set expression means, but it’s so much easier to remember them and understand them if you’re told what the individual words mean separately.

I’ve tried other apps. Perhaps half a dozen? And they’re all so annoying. Like Busuu — it seemed OK, and I had already signed up for a year’s subscription when I discovered that you can’t switch off that annoying “ding” sound after every lesson. I know that some people have a Pavlovian reward reaction to those “ding”s, but it drives me nuts. Duolingo is good about letting you disable annoyances like that, and I’ve switched all that nonsense off:

So I cancelled the Busuu subscription tout de suite. How stubborn is it possible for app makers to be? People have apparently been asking for this for years, and it’d be trivial to implement, but they prefer to lose money rather than give in?

Duolingo isn’t like that, and allows people to shape their own experiences to a great deal. People complain about the gaming aspects of it (there’s “XP”, leagues, etc), but you can switch that off if you want — you’re in control of how you want to learn. I find the gaming aspects to be moderately entertaining, but I don’t take it seriously. It’s just another way of getting slightly more motivated.

I’ve tried learning French many times before, but 1) I’m not motivated enough to actually go to language school, and 2) if I start reading some French language course, I fall off after three days, because I just get bored.

Duolingo har kept me at it for almost two years:

OK, not every day, but most days. I think I’ve probably worked at my French for 90% of the days or something, and that’s fantastic — Duolingo is fun, so I’m looking forward to spending some time with it when I have time.

And it’s not like I just do one lesson and I’m bored — no, I had to set a one hour time limit on my Iphone to stop me from getting ouchy thumbs.

I don’t use an Iphone as my phone — but the Iphone Duolingo app is much better than the Android Duolingo app. In addition, the Iphone Pro Max 16 size is just perfect — you have to change between typing and tapping stuff on the screen all the time, so finding the ideal way to position your hands is important to keep the speed up:

And I added a Pop Socket to the Iphone to make it even more comfortable. I’ve gotten really good at thumbing at an Iphone keyboard, but if I have to thumb on my (smaller) Android keyboard, I make 10x as many errors.

Oh, what was I talking about… yeah, about doing Duolingo the way you want to.

People have really different approaches. I pop in to the Duolingo reddit now and then to see what’s happening, and I’ve registered that some people are really afraid of making errors. For instance, in many lessons, you can tap on the words like this:

I never do that, because I find that if I see a word without thinking of it myself, it seems to go from my eyes to my fingers without hitting any significant portion of the brain. So the only thing that helps with is training my thumbs to type even faster.

Some people seem to take this to extremes, even googling things to get it right before typing it in. Some of this may be down to the way the free Duolingo works — if you have too many errors, you get to do even fewer lessons, but it doesn’t seem to account for all of these people. I’ve also seen people restart their courses because they feel stupid from making too many errors or something.

I see errors as a positive, really. If I’m getting everything right, I’m not learning much. Every error is a chance to learn something new.

So here’s my daily routine:

1) First I do the mistakes from the day before. (There’s a convenient tab for that.) If I didn’t know a thing yesterday, I could probably do with a refresh today (even if I did eventually learn that thing yesterday, too). This usually takes about ten minutes and involves a lot of typing, because it’s typically longer sentences that I have to write all by myself that I’ve gotten wrong.

2) Then I follow the main programme: I do new lessons for about twenty minutes to half an hour.

3) And finally, I do “legendary” lessons from the previous section. The previous section is something I’d typically had done a couple months earlier, so this allows me to refresh the stuff I learned two months earlier, and I find that this helps enormously. (And besides, the “legendary” versions of the lessons are usually a bit harder than the original ones were.) And I do this until the Iphone tells me that my thumbs are too sore, or I get bored, whichever comes first.

But what on Earth is Duolingo doing right so that somebody as lazy as me will willingly spend an hour on it per day? For two years? And what’s changed now?

Learning a new language in itself is fun, of course. And Duolingo teaches you a new language without getting in your way (if you’ve switched off animations, sounds and motivational messages, that is). You can just blaze ahead — and the speed is one of the major advantages Duolingo has. I’ve tried other apps, and they randomly add pause of several seconds between things you do. It’s just so annoying. Duolingo makes you feel like

The other thing is, and here I’m finally kinda sorta getting to the point of this super duper long blog post, is that Duolingo is amusing.

Yes, some of the amusement comes from the way (especially at the start) it’s using a very limited vocabulary to teach you stuff, so you end up with somewhat nonsensical sentences like “The owl is on the fridge”. This annoys some people, but I think it’s fun.

The fun aspects give Duolingo a lot of goodwill, so we forgive the bugs and annoyance. And there’s a lot to forgive, because Duolingo is incomprehensibly buggy.

I’m not talking about lessons that aren’t quite right:

“Notre” means “our”, not “my”. Because of course stuff like this will happen when you have a gazillion sentences to translate — that’s just human nature. Some people get upset about these things, too, but I suspect those are the people who abhor making errors.

And of course there’s bugs like this.

And just oddly phrased translations.

For the last year, half the time it’s doing a “matching pair” lesson, it uses the same four words every time: “dessin animé”, “promener”, “bonne affaire” and “détruire”. (With one different fifth word mixed in each time.)

I did some screenshots over a few days just to capture a few of these… *sigh*

So there’s a lot of bugs in Duolingo — it sometimes forgets that you’ve done a lesson, so you have to do it again (“eventual consistency” database?), and it crashes sometimes, and and and. But Duolingo has so much goodwill that we, the users, are willing to accept all this.

Also amusingly, Duolingo is pretty gender neutral, which has led some conservative people to try to arrange a boycott, but it doesn’t really seem to have taken off.

And some bikers don’t like Duolingo either.

Another thing I like about Duolingo is that they keep adding stuff. Over the two years I’ve used it, they’ve not only added a lot of new lessons, but also new types of lessons (“podcasts”, for instance), and that’s fun. (Other people loathe it and have tried to disable all updates.)

While I’m whingeing about stuff, I might as well also roll my eyes at the “Screen Time” thing Iphone has:

Sometimes it’ll just do this — and I did not use the phone for almost 14 hours.

It’s also very slow to update — here it says that I’ve done 30 minutes…

But if I tap it, it might say 40m instead, or require me to reload it, or whatever.

C’mon Apple. You’ve got some people employed that can fix bugs, right?

Even on Max, Duolingo can’t help nagging people — I have reminders switched off, of course, so it nags me every 20 lesson, and then at one point pasted that blue thing up there on my screen for about two weeks, and there was nothing I could do to get rid of it. They also updated the menu line at the bottom (and hid the “practice” button I used every day), just because they wanted to add the AI chat here, too (for some reason), and the running owl icon is an upsell to the family plan. *sigh*

By the way, the lessons in the final unit were amusing:

Mostly just variations on how using Duolingo is good, and that we’re going to continue:

OK, here’s Duo going overboard:

I still have a lot of “legendary” lessons from the previous section to do, and I’m going to do them — but, of course, skipping all the stories this time around, because I don’t want to subject myself
to that.

And perhaps I should just buy myself a French grammar book or something? I’ve had this for years:

But I never got past the first couple chapters, because it’s pretty boring.

In any case, I’ll continue reading French comics, which was the point, after all.

À la prochaine.