never give a corporation your labour for free.
People should have known this from the beginning.
These volunteers didn’t think about it in these terms.
They gave away their work for free to help people learn languages, and for a long time Duolingo seemed like the best platform for that.Starting your own platform is much more difficult than contributing to an existing one that seems to be operated with some amount of goodwill…
I understand that. Unfortunately, though, one has to expect always the worst from Corps, no matter how “good” they appear to be at the beginning.
Poor computer literacy is really biting people in the ass. Quotes like this really stand out to me:
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company.
Did you not know that they would be able to do this from the start? Or perhaps you knew and were just being extremely naïve? Either way, not being aware of what kinds of control other parties have when you share data with them is something that’s all too common these days. I really wish people would consider the ramifications of what companies can do when you give information like this to them.
Like giving your phone number away for no reason. The moment you share it, you give companies all they need to start spamming the shit out of you (or giving it away to other companies that will happily do it instead). How is a concept like this so hard to understand?
It’s not that they didn’t know that they could. It’s that they didn’t think they would.
Because—and I say this as a user of Duolingo who first started using it after the old comments were made read-only, but before they were removed entirely—it’s fucking insane that they did. Those comments were so useful to the user. I don’t know how many times I went to them to have some aspect of the lesson explained to me because the app itself doesn’t actually do any real “teaching”, it just tells you that you got it wrong and what the right answer is. The comments from users helped explain the nuance in word meaning, or the relevant grammar rule, helping add enormous value. By removing them they are literally making their product worse for no gain.
People thinking that they’d act rationally wouldn’t expect that.
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but what if they give you cool digital gems
Yeah, that’s an offer a man can’t refuse.
woo, shiny. my preciousss
Seriously. I don’t know what outcome people expected. Duolingo is not a non-profit, or a community project like Anki. I hope everybody who is surprised by this is receptive to the lesson.
While it is true that corporations are terrible and will do anything in the name of profit, what you guys are saying is “they got fucked and it’s their fault.” It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are. They are formed by people who choose to fuck other people over for their own benefit. Fuck off with your victim blaming.
they got fucked and it’s their fault
That’s not at all what I’m saying. What I’m saying is people can choose to participate in a community that is controlled by a for-profit company if they want to, but they should temper their expectations accordingly.
It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are.
That’s exactly what they are. They are composed of people only to the extent that a car is composed of wheels.
If it’s otherwise in working order, a flat tire will be replaced and the car will be going wherever it’s meant to go. Profit city is where all roads lead to, and a flat tire (or four) can only delay for so long.
If you want to hold corporations to moral standards, you have to change the incentives (destinations) and restructure corporations to be actually owned and controlled by people who are then held to those moral standards (put more of the car into the wheels).
Corporations don’t exist in a vacuum. They need to fuck people over or they’ll get outcompeted.
Thieves don’t exist in a vacuum either. So what you’re saying is a thief should rob more, or else other thieves will take what he could have stolen instead, and then he’ll be out of the thieving business? What kind of fucked up bullshit logic is that?
I know corporations are part of reality, but that doesn’t mean they should be excused for profiting on volunteer work. But my point is that the volunteers are being blamed as if they fucked around and now they’re in the stages of finding out, as if they’ve done something so stupid no one would have ever done. Unfortunately, part of reality too is that unless one of these volunteers has sufficient power and money to fight them, corporations like Duo will go on with impunity and they’ll keep fucking people over and others will keep not only justifying them, but also supporting them by buying their products, because it’s just easier to be spineless.
Why do you believe non profits are immune to this? They’re still incentivized to produce value. Maybe we just don’t mock volunteers for doing a good thing and instead shame the people taking advantage of them?
I didn’t say nonprofits are immune to it. I essentially said for-profit companies are for-profit. That says nothing about non-profits.
Same for people contributing to google maps
Or Instagram, Facebook, reddit… Lemmy. I guess Lemmy isn’t a company so we have that going but if it’s not your own instance you are technically doing work for someone else.
Lemmy is more akin to helping out a community open-source project than helping out a company
At least Lemmy data is public for anyone to read. I don’t care that much if random groups are sucking up all this data for themselves - it’s worth it in my opinion because it means good actors can use it for good too. If it were all going to one company, I would be less happy about the fact that they could just black hole it all for nobody’s benefit but their own.
I mean, I do that for me. If I’m going to a road I want the name and address to be right. I use g maps a ton.
Never ever ever ever ever give your work for free to a startup unless it’s running under an open source model that guarantees even if they do go public, all that work remains openly available to everyone!
Nonprofits FTW
Oh, there are plenty of counter examples, unfortunately.
Prominent ones?
Same for everything, including open source models
St Jude’s Children Hospital and Goodwill off the top of my head.
I can’t find anything wrong about St. Jude’s.
Everything is bound to have some bad examples. OpenAI and RedHat were also under open source models.
You keep bringing up open source, why? All I did was say that being a non profit isn’t as good an indicator as you might think. How does open source factor in it?
I would not do any unpaid work for anything that was not straight up copyleft.
♥️
That’s right, never trust a private company that might go public in the future.
That’s why you should build your communities on Discord instead. 🤡
That shit is the most infuriating thing ever to me. It seems like so many technical discussions and communities are going to Discord now where that information is not indexed or preserved. How many issues have I had where the answer was sitting on a Discord server that will never appear in any general search result?
I’ve tried to use discord before but it seems just kinda… awful. It’s essentially a single uninterrupted, general purpose comment chain about a singular topic. It’s a forum meet twitter but worse than either?
Yea that’s cause originally it was just meant to be gamer friends voice chatting and text chatting with each other. They build all the other features on top of what they had originally so it’s terrible as a reddit/social media alternative.
Yeah. I’ve come to believe the problem isn’t Discord itself but how people use it. But I totally get your point. So many niche communities. I had to make a Discord account and then someone just fucking answers “!faq” and a bot pastes the answer. Why was that not on their GitHub page? It is what it is.
A Discord server can be created in seconds and can easily have everything they need. I get why they turn to it but it sucks.
Discord is the same thing as technical slack threads, or IRC chat. People try and use it as a reddit replacement when it really truly is not.
Forget reddit replacement, people try to use it as a wiki/documentation replacement.
Deranged behaviour.
Unfortunately, I feel forum communities have themselves to blame for a lot of people not wanting to interact with their forums.
Essentially, there’s a level of gatekeeping that existed where if you didn’t ask questions the ‘right way’ or even ask the ‘right questions’, you would be flamed and potentially have your post deleted. Some of these people actually believe that if they can’t answer a question, then it’s the fault of the asker and not their own.
Why go through the effort if that’s how the community is going to behave? Sometimes, it’s more fruitful to say nothing than to tear someone down or give wrong information just so you can contribute something.
Discord is nice because of how informal it is, although it’s also getting corrupted by the same autists who need to have everything ‘just’ their way. (referring to things like forcing people to start threads instead of an open room for questions.)
Well modded discord servers for popular topics will have forum channels that behave exactly as you would expect them to. Sure they’re not indexed on search engines, that much is true, but discord isn’t the “blink and you’ll miss it” live chat client that it once was.
Why discord? Everything on it will be lost without exception. Fuck discord.
It’s why they put the clown face emoji at the end. Discord sucks so hard for finding information. The number of interesting projects that exclusively use Discord for their documentation is astounding and frustrating as hell.
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Mozilla is a non profit foundation, the corporation is owned by the non profit and exists for tax reasons only. They’re different than a regular corp.
The NFL was a non-profit until 2015.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a non-profit that stopped the free distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Non-profit status doesn’t automatically equal good but Mozilla has been good so far…for the most part. It has had its own controversies.
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Well fuck, I guess enshittification is universal. The only safe space is community foss/libre projects I guess
And only as safe as the audit it gets
I’m all in on Matrix. After hearing the words, “Nobody uses IRC anymore, everyone uses Discord now”, I knew we were in trouble.
Anyone who has a passion for open source and wants to learn Spanish should check out LibreLingo! It’s also a nice project for people who want to contribute to something that is not owned by a company, though it’s a bit too early for contributors who have language skills but no coding experience.
Fantastic recommendation, thank you
Thank you for this!
New life lesson: never volunteer for a for-profit company.
But then how would spez ever be able to take Reddit public?!
This baffles me. We’ve seen time and time again that for-profit will fuck you over any chance they get over a dollar if they must, and people still volunteers for them.
I guess that’s the difference between normal people and capitalists.
Make sure to put anything you want public under the correct license. If a platform doesn’t support CC or GPL or MIT, then leave.
EDIT: Or Apache, or IDGAF, of course. ;) But what I would really want is a license that forces your content to remain free, even if used in something else. Basically copyleft: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.html
People who keep trying to do Socialism in a Capitalist system are doomed to fail, because Socialism produces enormous surpluses and Capitalists love to just gobble that shit up.
I would argue the traditional family structure is a micro-socialism state.
That depends heavily on how the family operates.
Historically speaking, the male head-of-household had dictatorial control over the ownership and expenditures within the household. Only in the last two generations have western women gained the right to hold down jobs and assume credit for large purchases, to own their own homes, and to take full custody of their children. The idea of emancipated minors, civil rights for children, and labor protections for young people are even newer. And there are plenty of reactionary political attitudes in the country that would see these reforms rolled back.
A family certainly can operate in a socialist capacity, when productive property and its surplus is shared equitably. But there are plenty of instances in which the head-of-house is functionally no different than a landlord, demanding the rest of the family live contribute surplus labor while existing in relative poverty.
“If peoples basic needs were met nobody would work!”
People “work” all the time of their own accord, we just call it volunteering instead of “work.” People love saying “I don’t want to work,” but really what they mean is “I don’t want my economic output stolen from me by my employer while what’s left is stolen by ever increasing prices with no wage adjustment to compensate.”
People “work” all the time of their own accord, we just call it volunteering instead of “work.”
Never even mind volunteering. $50B/year in wage theft in this country. People contract to do labor and then their bosses simply short them. Back in 2019 a coal company attempted to close a mine without paying over $1M in back wages. The workers shut down the rail out of the money and seized the coal until they were made whole.
Wish more folks who got fleeced by DuoLingo had the gumption to do something similar.
It’s harder to protest and make demands when most volunteers don’t even know where the fuck Duolingo’s HQ is, much mess live anywhere near it.
Agitate on the forums. Let other people know about open-source alternatives. Organize other power users to submit bad data in protest.
This has been going on for decades. CDDB, IMDB, Redhat.
Anything you volunteer for will be monetized and you will get cut off from your own contributions.
Even here on Lemmy people post Twitter images and Reddit reader apps which only helps those platforms retain mindshare even if they aren’t directly profiting with ads.
Google has a volunteer program to make their AI better. Fucking one of the biggest corporations in the world asking for free labor and apparently people do it?
You were/are doing it every time you solved a Captcha to prove you aren’t a robot.
Google banned 4chan from using recaptcha at the time because everyone was just typing swear words in place of the scanned word that Google couldn’t OCR
Where did you hear about that? It sounds odd, because surely Google could’ve filtered out the swearwords, and at the end of the day users still had to solve the captcha correctly sooner or later if they wanted to post.
The old two word captchas were one word that Google knows in order to test if you’re human, and one word scanned from Google’s book scanning program that their algorithms failed to properly OCR, meaning for the second word you could type in whatever you wanted and you would pass the captcha
Sites were allowed to use recaptcha for free because their users were actually doing work training neural nets to read books better, if a large percentage of their users are saying every unknown scan is the n-word, I could see why Google wouldn’t want them having access to it
Long live 4chan
Yeah but this is in the area of unpaid labor. You “had to” solve a captcha in order they let you use another service. You are not visiting a page with the sole purpose of voluntarily solving captchas
Hashicorp recently commandeered its community built products from thousands of contributors by changing open source projects to an ambiguous if not hostile BSL. Opentofu for any current terraform users out there.
Previously named OpenTF, OpenTofu is a fork of Terraform…
🤭 LOL @ the name change.
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Definitely in two minds on Hashicorp’s license change. I understand why they did it, even if I don’t agree. Other for-profit companies were screwing them and the community over by taking, competing, and seldom contributing.
I have heard this point of view and truly don’t understand it. There were companies making money with an open source tool. That’s what some companies do, and the license allowed for that. They weren’t taking; they were using a tool, and providing a service upon it. If anybody is taking, it is Hashicorp from their own community that contributed thousands of hours to their business for free.
And those companies you refer to tried often to push upstream but Hashicorp just refused contribution time after time.
That said I understand it too. Insofar as capital investment demanded the cornering of a market and miscalculated the likelihood of a well backed fork. As a result I think, they probably sealed their fate even if it takes many years. How many people remember Hudson?
This is a bit of “no true Scotsman” fallacy. If something you volunteer for hasn’t been monetized you can always say ‘yet’
FOSS is something people volunteer for and it mostly doesn’t get monetized and cut off. Sometimes this means that the original is cut off but a fork lives on, so I would rather say that volunteering for a closed product is dangerous in that regard, not volunteering forany product
Good callout. Even Twitter images shouldn’t be hot linked but copied and pasted for preservation purposes; if a copyright takedown happens, then it happens. But at least we don’t risk having access cut because of a corporate killswitch.
It never stops shocking me that people think they can trust corporations which are run by upper middle class entitled business bros who never worked an honest day in their lives.
Yea it’s become highly enshittified and actively punishes users that don’t subscribe. Fuckers.
Can’t speak for the entshitification but actively punished unsubscribed users?
I’ve been using it for two months, learning Germans, I just use Firefox in android instead of the app and I get no ads, only 5 failures but I rarely reach that on a daily basis (I don’t want to burnout and I’m pretty sure it’s better for learning to not go too fast) and if I ever reach it, I currently have 1k gems. I’m actually surprised at how little use I’d get out of the subscription.
I used Duo pretty solid for two or three years - ended up subscribing to it.
The benefits were negligible - the biggest thing for me was offline play. I used to do a lot of air travel, so the ability to cover a subject or two was super helpful.
The streak freeze was the only other real “bonus” for those who game a shit about it. I started to get quite protective of it when it reached four figures, but I kicked it into touch when I wasn’t learning much more than vocabulary. Duo is fantastic for getting a foothold on a language, but it only gets you through the first two or three exchanges of a conversation.
I enjoyed my time with the owl though.
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Yeah, I did a good three-quarters of the French course too. I distinctly remember the lessons about plays and stage work being an absolute bastard, not that I’d ever use it in my line of work.
I’ve started watching a bit more French media with the French equivalent of “received pronunciation” - such as watching the FR edition of Euronews or France24, plus watching kids shows like Hey Duggee or Paw Patrol is unusually handy, though it does give you some funny looks if you don’t already have kids!
Unfortunately, there’s no substitute for immersion - even on a short break to Paris, my confidence in using the language shot up from being able to just about converse in the language - but more importantly, getting utterly stuck and failing at something where you have to think a bit faster and get your point across anyway.
I should get back into it really.
You get streak freezes for free now (through quests), relatively often even, I generally get them back in two days if I use both of them in a weekend because I’m busy.
I really considered subscribing until I started using it on Firefox because of the ads, without the ads it’s a great free experience imo
I used it to learn German almost ten years ago and it was fantastic. When I started out you had a limited number of lives, but they realized this was not good for learning and removed it. This lead to me learning German on Duolingo very successfully - my approach was to aim over my competence level, do difficult challenges, and keep at them until I managed to do it right. High paced, challenging, generally fun, and extremely educational.
Then they re-implemented the limited number of lives not to increase educational value, but to punish non-paying users. This means that I have to do the lessons slow, even honest typos are punished so I have to read and re-read whatever I write before I can jump to the next challenge, and I cannot ever challenge myself by going beyond my skill level.
I paid for a year of Duolingo, but it’s very expensive, the whole user experience is more annoying to me even for paid users now than it was as a free user in the past, and I don’t like the direction the company has taken and I don’t want to encourage them by paying for they enshittified service. Had they kept trying to make it better for everyone I would have been happy to pay €5, possibly €10, per month for a few extra premium features.
Right now it does really feel to me like they are punishing their users and creating a bad user experience on purpose.
No, they don’t punish typos, to the point I sometimes have mistakes counted as typos (I distinctly remember typing Schwimmt instead of schwimmst the other day and it said Be careful typos, but counted it right, end up having to check with my gf in those cases)
I don’t know why the experience seems so different between people, maybe it actually is, maybe it’s expectations. All in all it’s free, I don’t forget that and through Firefox android I get a very good experience.
There’s pretty odd because it definitely punishes me for typos in french
It was quite lenient with my error-prone French.
That said, Duo is well known for A/B testing so no doubt we were just using different feature sets.
In my experience the typo-tolerance is not very flexible. I write using Dvarok instead of QWERTY, so the typos I make don’t always follow regular patterns. On my phone I use a swipe keyboard, so sometimes a typo comes out as a different word entirely. No matter what I don’t want to be punished for my mistakes, even if they are real mistakes. I just want to keep on learning without the tool I’m using intentionally trying to make that harder for me.
Sure, the punishment for running out of hearts is they send you to rudimentary prison to repeat disheartening lessons.
I haven’t figured out the heart refresh - do they give you 5 new ones each day?
The ads are loud and awful and start before you can mute them. Can only skip the last few seconds. It’s engineered to be very obnoxious.
They could just have a value added premium but instead they choose to punish.
But good to hear you have managed to mitigate that. Gives me some hope to stick with it, thx.
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DNS based ad blocking my friend. System wide
It stopped working. They figured out a way around it 😢 Fortunately I found a cracked version of the premium APK so now I get ad free and unlimited hearts without paying a dime (I didn’t necessarily care about the unlimited hearts but the ads were fucking obnoxious). I might still look into another system though because they keep reshuffling the format, and I don’t feel like I’m progressing.
And I’m not using anything not available to app users, unless you’re using IOS but at this point, I think you have others problems to worry about experience wise overall
There’s a loud ad for “Duolingo super” that has a high chance of showing up after every lesson. Also using Firefox with Ublock installed, and it’s still here.
Privacy Badger and ublock origin here, never ever got an ad on Firefox
I’ll try out Privacy Badger. I never got an ad on Firefox except for this one.
Fun fact, if you want to bypass the hearts system you can go to Duolingo For Schools and create a classroom with only yourself in it. There is zero verification.
It affects the desktop and mobile app. I think it might also hide ads but I’m not 100% sure about that, it’s been awhile since I’ve used it.
I still had the app installed on my iPhone because I wanted to learn a new language a few years back. Just recently checked their App Store page and saw extensive data collection, monthly subscriptions and some kind of “gem” currency. Immediately deleted.
They tried to gamify the process, you use gems to buy an off day for a streak
Nothing against gamification, but when they added lives about two years after they said they never will I lost any and all trust I had in them.
lol learning a new language needs gems. Jesus fucking christ
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I just don’t know how I could ever accomplish anything in my life without the totally benign and helpful motivation provided by Gems™. They’re gamerrific! ^Buy some today.^
Next is they’ll hide half the sentence unless you pay 5 gems.
The gems aren’t as predatory as they seem.
They still seem like unnecessary garbage though.
The only truly useful thing you get from them is streak freezes (basically to keep your streak if you miss a day). I think they’re fine.
It’s a for-profit company. The monthly subscriptions are so that the company makes money. The subscription gives you some extra features and removes ads. Seems pretty reasonable.
As for the gems, that’s part of the gamification. You get gems just from doing lessons. You can spend gems on cosmetic things or on buying a “streak freeze” that lets you avoid losing your “learn every day” streak if you forget or otherwise can’t use the app one day. Maybe you can buy gems too, I don’t know, but they don’t seem that awful. They’re just nudges to try to keep using the app every day, and if your goal is to learn a language that’s a good thing, right?
IMO gamification is good. Learning a language can be boring, especially when it comes to grammar lessons. Making it more entertaining means you’re more likely to want to do it, so you’re more likely to achieve your goal of learning another language.
Having said that, there is definitely enshittification going on. It used to be that the most of the program was available to people without a subscription, and only a few things were “paywalled”. Now only the main path of the main course is not paywalled. It used to be that if you got bored with the lessons you were doing, you had alternative things you could do. Even the main lesson plan used to have optional paths. Now, unless you’re subscribed the only two options are “stories” or the next lesson in the chain.
Since you took the time to leave such a lengthy response I’m going to reply, although the discussion here is pretty much over.
It’s not the single parts but the culmination of all three points; data harvesting, subscription and paid gems (yes you can buy more). Everyone has to make their own decision but for me it justifies never wanting to have anything to do with a company.
And here I am just pissed that Duolingo keeps overhauling their whole program. Like, in less than 2 years time, they’ve had 3 different versions of the website and of course it wipes out all of your progress and approximates where you may be in their new system. Except the latest. The latest update just wipes all your shit out and says “good luck fuckface!” I’ve become less and less a fan of Duo over the last 4 years and yeah, not gonna do the AI thing with it anymore. Sari can go on vacation with my one-eyed dog named Max and eat cheese sandwiches for all I care.
Yeah, very annoying to be told a word is “new” when I know it well, and vice-versa be expected to have done whole lessons on other words that I’ve never seen before. That said, not many options for Hungarian, I’ve only seen Drops as an alternative daily app.
I’m still mad I bought the super duo costume which they then completely removed from the app
I just wish there were foss alternatives to Duolingo
Anki is the best language app I’ve yet encountered including non-foss alternatives, but I needed to watch their tutorial video to understand the ui. Also it is only a flip-card app, so you might want to complement it with something else.
Try Language Transfer. It’s free and different in how it teaches.
They exist, but they often lack the front end polish and they never get the kind of publicity enjoyed by their for-profit peers.
10,000 sentences and OpenWords are others to consider.
And the product now is traaaash.
I used to use duolingo to learn every language whenever I visited a country, and I can’t use it at all anymore.
As someone who is a current user and unaware of superior options but is curious, what would you recommend?
I’ve been having better luck with Babbel lately since it actually teaches ya stuff rather than throwing vocabulary at ya. I’ve learned more grammar in 2 weeks of Babbel than an entire 10 months learning Dutch on duo
I likes busuu a lot, felt a lot like old Duolingo, but with more relevant lessons. Duo can introduce potentially unhelpful vocabulary and grammar very early on, and now with the crown system every lesson just feels like pedantic repetition, busuu is fun, properly leveled, and has native speakers, with the Chinese course at least.
I’d be curious to hear which language you try and how it turns out for you since I’ve only done Chinese so far.
Never heard of busuu before, but tried it now and am enjoying it a lot. Thank you!
It’s also worth giving a shout-out to LibreLingo, which aims to be an open source version of Duolingo. For now it’s only Spanish though, and as I’m not interested in learning Spanish at the moment I haven’t gotten any real use out of it.
Oh awesome, I appreciate the rec, I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Why would you give away your production value to a capitalist for free?
It’s literally the only power you hold in the labour market, and it’s your own fault if you give it away for nothing.
Yes, how dare you contribute to a community effort.
Wait, isn’t the post you just made doing just that?
You missed the word “capitalist”
If it’s a for profit organization then ask for a salary or don’t help them.
Has shitjust.works paid you for your commentary here? If they decide to become a for profit company in 14 years, are they going to pay you back salary? What about all those people that ever posted to reddit? Is the world a better place if they never did it? Does reddit owe each of them a salary?
Sometimes you contribute to something because it makes the world a little better place.
Maybe now that we’ve seen it done and people know how to contribute, we could make a free and open version of duolingo.
There’s a difference between participating the way most users do (using the service) and participating the way this post is talking about (keeping the service running). Funny you should use Reddit as an example considering how pissed the admins were when they finally realized they were doing slave labor for a bunch rich tech guys.
I’m not doing this to make the world a better place, God damn it.
I’m here because I want to feel validated about my opinions!
I wasn’t aware that Lemmy is a for-profit enterprise.
Plus, my getting use out of a product and simply by doing so helping the company make money (say by increasing engagement or such), is extremely different to somebody going out of their way to produce work for that company in a way that doesn’t directly benefit the producer at all.
Put another way - Am I helping keep my local supermarket in business simply by shopping there? Sure. Would I offer my free time to help clean their store?
Hell. No.
In 2009 Duolingo was originally funded by the NSF. Their motto was free education will change the world.
In the 14 years since, they became something else. All those crowd sourced comments from a good upstanding project require the project and it’s data not to become evil.
not everyone started as an epic lemmy leftist
Any advice for an alternative for Japanese learning? I am on a two week streak and getting ready to give up because it’s super repetitive.
Busuu is fantastic. Gets you to think through the words and gets your feet wet with hiragana/ katakana right away.
Take a look at this guide, it’s what I’ve been following https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/
Essentially, use Anki to study vocabulary in bulk, and use grammar guides like Tae Kim’s. And spend a lot of time reading and listening to real native content
It’s worth noting that Duolingo has always been considered.very bad by most of the Japanese learning community.
Renshuu is Japanese specific and has been really enjoyable for me. Has a community of people contributing fun mnemonics (eg. “WArio’s big fat dumpy” for the hiragana of Wa) and a clearly caring developer.
Assimil courses are always a good choice
I used Wanikani to learn most kanji… textbooks and actually talking and listening to Japanese ppl for the rest… still not that good but can converse. Much better at reading. Recommend watching japanese shows w japanese subs once you get to that level.
Just use anki.
DuoLingo imo is kinda crappy anyway. Boring, repetitive, and terrible at teaching listening comprehension.
I can give it credit for getting people interested in language learning in an approachable way, but that’s about it.
