> I remember trying Plimsleur CDs for Spanish but they only had one that used a dialect calling the word for the language "castellano" instead of "español".

Which dialect of Spanish doesn't call it castellano? It's how you distinguish from catalan.

They made the new courses with AI.

That does not mean you talk to an AI.

It is cartoon based, voice recognizing, whole word clicking to make sentences etc.

It is actually quite fun to use. I only use the cost free version to freshen up my Japanese.

Lets see if they have Thai now ?

That said, I remember trying Plimsleur CDs for Spanish but they only had one that used a dialect calling the word for the language "castellano" instead of "español".

Because in Spain they speak about 10 languages, and Cestell

I remember doing a few Pimsleur courses, I really enjoyed their intuitive way of getting you to "feel" the language.

> I'm curious and hopeful about this, if it could make it inexpensive to learn (skeptical about that part). However, I spent years in language labs learning Japanese with a Tandberg cassette tape recorder. It had a dual volume control so you could match your voice to the speaker's which was fabulous and was especially effective interspersed with summer work overseas, I remember one student in 4th year unfortunately ended up sounding like a tape recorder to us. Another student sounded like a charismatic NHK news announcer somehow! We were just kind of in awe. ;) I haven't used Duolingo and this might be a good learning tool, but I'd caution the student to combine it with talking to actual live humans in any way possible, lest you somehow learn a pronunciation, inflection or (shudder) hallucinated idiom from generative AI. I'd say I am fluent but even so, Japanese movies are difficult to understand for me so your mileage may vary. Well, I have trouble with English song lyrics too so could be a me problem. That said, I remember trying Plimsleur CDs for Spanish but they only had one that used a dialect calling the word for the language "castellano" instead of "español". I tried learning Chinese from phone app briefly, so if you like learning languages this could be a lot of fun. I would be very interested in having an app that could produce a subtitle overlay based on AI's understanding of the text as opposed to the shortened subtitles you often get. All these things sound great but also not sure if this will lose people jobs or create false "imagined" language artifacts that ickily make their way from genai into popular discourse.

Why bother adding dozens of languages when it can't even get the basics right.

I tried using Duolingo to supplement actual face to face lessons when learning Spanish (as an English L1 speaker) and even from a very early point I was able to spot that "no, you don't speak Spanish like that". It was often completely wrong, even accounting for dialects (I.E. Basque, Mexican, latino and suramericano) or even a more formal form. It's almost as if a human wasn't reviewing the lessons 10 years ago when I was trying.

Apparently it's gotten worse these days according to friends.

Lessons were complete pants, it didn't teach you how or when to use words, conjugation, articles, et al. It was marginally useful for learning vocabulary and only marginally. Less so than a WOTD calendar

The worst part was the gamification. They added it in the worst way to try to force you to use the app every day. If you took a few days off because yano... you had a life or something your progress was reset so you ended up doing the same things you did a week ago.

I can imagine it being used by millions of Indians and Chinese and making English standards even worse than they currently are.

The best tool I used was Italki, it would connect you to actual tutors, both professional and community. You'd do a bit of shopping around to find a decent one but it was relatively inexpensive for one on one sessions with someone who actually spoke the language. The big caveat was, sometimes they weren't that good at speaking your language but this is where you need to have a good grasp of your native language to compensate (and if you do, it is no issue at all). The only reason I stopped using it was because they made it too difficult for me to pay... Seems crazy they wouldn't take my credit card and wanted me to buy "money" from a 3rd party (skrill or something)... Maybe they have sorted their shit out in the last 10 years.

Español is like saying "Chinese", and castellano is like saying "mandarin". Castellano is the actual name for the Spanish language, and Español is a very ambiguous way of referring to Castellano, which defaults to Castellano as it is the official language of the Kingdom of Spain (but there are more Spanish languages in the Iberian peninsula, like Catalan, Gallego, Basque, Asturloense, etc...) So for all practical purposes, in everyday parlance, Español AND Castillan are ref

You must speak to people, and listen, to fully learn a language.

Duolingo is great to start building vocabulary and basic pronunciation. It's not the end of the journey, it doesn't ever claim that.

IDK, I thought it went without saying, like you can learn to ride a bike from a book, but ... you also can't learn to ride a bike from a book.

The voices have been machine generated for years already? How long has it been?

These changes are about them already having Spanish for English speakers, and automatically making Spanish for German speakers, Spanish for French, etc. all the other X for Y combos. So they can focus on a Spanish course and not a bunch of different permutations of one. Not the voices, they have that taken care of already, the translations of the content.

and translated into multiple languages: [1]The Hungarian Phrasebook sketch [omniglot.com]

[1] https://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm

Monty Python, a, classic.

I also think there are mistakes in Japanese!

And the notorious: "Where are you from?" versus "Where are you living?" mix ups. My Japanese might be rusty: but I can read the difference.

> I've been running the english->japanese "course" for a bit less than two years now. It barely held itself together; weird english phrasing (maybe also weird japanese phrasing, but I have no frame of reference for that); broken audio on the regular, mistranslations, inconsistencies, false negative/false positive in valid answers, etc. It's not completely unusable, but it clearly needed a ton of improvements to be called decent.

> And now they're likely to push out the door some automated second-rate translations, with even less oversight, and call it a win.

> When they first announced this move months ago, I set my subscription to not automatically renew. I'd rather pay people that actually care, especially since Duolingo never goes past basic vocabulary building anyway.

They can't even get English to Spanish right... what chance have they got for anything as different as Japanese?

I suspect the only thing keeping them in business is teaching terrible English to countries popular with outsourcing firms. "yes I fluent speak english" means "I did a few lessons on Duolingo".

Exactly, the very thing that empowers them to get rid of staff also empowers you not to need them anymore. This will apply to many industries thinking they can reap the rewards of AI in some kind of isolation.