Anyway, if anyone sees this who's looking for an alternative, try your library. Some libraries offer Mango, which is dry but seems solid and it offers over 70 languages. Lingodeer keeps getting recommended to me, so I'll probably try that to scratch that language gacha game itch.

/9

The frustrating part is that I think Duolingo helped me improve my Japanese, and I'm going to miss it when I uninstall it. I don't think I would've taken the JLPT if not for Duolingo. Doing a bad lesson every day is miles ahead of not doing any lesson at all.

/8

But even beyond that, it's still so damn buggy. The app crashes often, it sends me notifications for things that didn't happen, it drops points or adds points or gives points but doesn't advance the lesson... Pure enshittification.

/7

Then they removed the forums. The forums were a good source of info. They were the only way to get any detailed info about a lesson, which feels insane when I type it out. Imagine a platform for learning that doesn't let you ask questions.

/6

It is impossible for AI to replace this kind of thing. LLMs don't understand context, and even if they could make references, they wouldn't know whether a reference was helpful or benign or offensive or nonsensical. Even the bespoke references were often duds. Not everybody is in on the jokes.

/5

That's neat, and thoughtful. You don't need to know the reference to learn grammar and vocab, but if you do, it's nice. There are a lot of little things like that.

/4

Sometimes, lessons had fun references to pop-culture. One set of lessons referenced a brother who has a Canadian husband. I'm sure these were a nod to a manga called Otouto no Otto.

/3

But the Japanese program did improve somewhat, at least for a while. They improved the voices, and added more lessons, including simple reading and writing lessons. Not great, or arguably even sufficient, but it was something. The problems also felt more forgivable before they went public.

/2