is dying, apparently:

[elilla@transmom.love]

is dying, apparently:

DUOL shares have fallen more than 78% from their May 2025 high, and that’s before its nearly 25% fall in premarket trading today.

I've said before that one of the very few good things generative "AI" may do to the world is accelerating the enshittification cycle so much that it kills stuff that was already terrible and a drain on society (social media; platformization; curation algorithms…). Speaking as a linguist who speaks 4 languages and has read the literature on second language acquisition, it has always been my position that the Duolingo method is useless—it feels like you are learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours with it and gold a full tree and you'll still get nowhere, and if you put a fraction of the time in about any other method, including doing pen-and-paper drills with old-fashioned paper-based textbooks, you'd have progressed much faster.

And old-fashioned grammar drills suck, too. It's just that Duolingo really, really sucks.

(Methods that work better: 1) Find an intensive "conversation"-type course, or anything that is labelled as "natural" or "immersion" or "storytelling" methods; or get tandem partners; or online coaches such as in italki; failing that, join a conventional language course, the more "intensive" the better; work on these until you absorb basic grammar and vocabulary, focusing on spoken language not writing; 2) Once this bootstrap period is over, start talking to people, watching media, or reading stuf that interests you, in large quantities and every day; do not wait until you're "good" to move into the input stage, start actually using the language for things you wanted it for, as soon as possible, which is sooner than you think; partial comprehension is fine.)

Of course I hope Duolingo dies horribly in a fire after it backstabbed its workers with the "AI memo", but even if it didn't, the world is better off without it.

One lesson we can get from this: Consider that overnight 25% drop in investment, which may well prove to be the coup the grâce. It was not caused by Duo losing users or enshittifying with "AI", but by the opposite: investors mass panicked at the company setting its target revenue too low, as in a mere… 1.22 billion, rather than the 1.26 billion the investors wanted. Now the reason Duolingo is not chasing that higher goal is that they're seeing the writing on the wall, and went into damage control mode: they're pulling down a bit on squeezing their current paying users and trying to improve the experience of the free tier, in an attempt to reverse the bleed and bring in more customers.

In other words, Duolingo tried to slow down the slightest tiny bit on enshittification—3% less cash—and this already got swift punishment from the market gods. With capitalism, there is no long-term thinking: you're expected to provide the richest people on Earth with infinite growth of their ever-increasing profits squeezed from customers paying every month more and more, now and forever, or you'll be taken out and replaced by someone willing to try.

[enby_of_the_apocalypse@social.treehouse.systems]

@elilla that reminds me of how the first book i ever read in english (by my own choice) was one of the warrior cats books. I was absolutely obsessed with those books as a teenager and i had read through all those that had been translated to german, and i was impatient enough to continue reading that i convinced my parents to order me the next one in english. I used a dictionary to look up some words that i didn’t know, but mostly i just tried to get the meaning of things i didn’t understand based on context. I was already kind of ahead of my classmates in english class when i did that (because i occasionally watched english fandubbed anime on youtube) but ever since that i was ahead of my classmates to the point where i got bad grades because i was just too bored to participate in class, all because of stories about cats (and anime)

[whatanerd@social.treehouse.systems]

@elilla I will be so happy when Duolingo falls. While they could have made a somewhat useful vocabulary training app that would've worked alongside other strategies, even with the goofy-as-fuck sentences (oh yes, lesson one: La tua anatra e la mia cena... very helpful in any situation).

But it was also fucking obnoxious how it'd just be like "No, this isn't how these people speak." Even if you knew that a) that is how they spoke and b) that there was more than one way to write a sentence of the same meaning (dialect/geography, different word choice). So you constantly got punished for it in the gamified setting, including being forced to go in and debate people on why something should exist. (Around the time I stopped using it, I was constantly marked down on using 'Yeah' instead of 'Yes' when translating to English. Even though I rarely use 'yes', and they have the same meaning.) It really brought out both an internal language prescriptivism and the language prescriptivists in its userbase.

Like, if I wanted to go do courses that were forcing me into the already bullshit CEFR and the horrible class structures those lessons have, I could go do that... pretty much anywhere. I didn't need an app for that.

[elilla@transmom.love]

edit: Cleaned up edition of this thread as a more readable blog post:

https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-1-the-binge

@enby_of_the_apocalypse that is one of the most experimentally proven, supported by evidence language learning methods! it's called "comprehensive voluntary reading", which is academese for "you got really into some series and binged volume after volume, not caring that you didn't quite know the language yet". that's how our brains acquire language, not by abstractly analysing how the grammar works, but by using the language as a tool for something you're after. your case with Warrior Cats is entirely typical of what's been studied by S.D. Krashen and others.

notice how this goes against the common sense that you should learn "useful" or "pratical" "real-life situations" like "asking for directions" or "at the post" etc. the main problem with that is quantity; you can only learn a language if you get what is technically called a fuckton of input, and laboriously studying how to ask where's the farmacy, hour after dreary hour, makes that impossible.

and the common sense about "weird language" is misguided, too. consider the following passage from Warrior Cats:

Gray Wing pushed himself onto his paws, his legs trembling. "Kill me," he rasped at Clear Sky. "Kill me and live with the memory. Then tell the stars you won."

now the incorrect opinion is like this: "it is extremely unlikely you'll ever talk with a brother who's about to kill you and dare him to do it, and people in real life aren't named things like Gray Wing, and cats don't talk—why are you learning this instead of learning language you can use?"

but even leaving aside the fact that "reading fantasy novels" is as important use of language as any other, from this passage alone kid you could learn, without thinking and purely by osmosis:

• The syntax of English (subject verb object, but verb object subject for imperatives, and the subject can be ommited in appositional clauses with 'and' or 'then' but, unlike Portuguese or Japanese, not in cases like 'he rasped at').
• Imperative, perfect, present.
• That the perfect is used for narration.
• Which prepositions are used with which verbs in which contexts, one of the hardest things for foreign learners (pushed onto, rasped at, live with)
• How English does medial voice with pronouns (he pushed himself)
• How quotations are marked (through punctuation but not, say, with a particle as in Japanese or a preposition as in Sinhala).
• Places where "that" can be dropped ("tell the stars you won")
• Places where "the" does and does not occur, which is maddeningly difficult for speakers of languages without articles ("with the memory" but not "*at the Clear Sky")
• Norms of orthography (personal names are capitalised but, unlike German, not common nouns, e.g. Clear Sky vs. clear sky; the language-specific placement of commas, etc.)
• how to sound literary, epic, medieval fantasy-y (transparent personal names, "tell the stars").

all of this is directly usable in real life contexts, too, and that's just off the top of my head—I could go on and on with all the Language contained in any random passage like this. the difference between the weirdest niche genre and small talk at the office is extremely superficial. 99% of linguistic structure is always the same; that's just not obvious to people because all this structure is instinctive and unconscious for native speakers. but if you get the 99% structure from Warrior Cats, it's trivial for you to adapt to the 1% extra you'll need to speak fluent office-talk.

and there's a second, deeper issue with established common sense about repetitive vocabulary drills, which we call the "first few pages problem". [continued below]

[elilla@transmom.love]

@enby_of_the_apocalypse

if you ask someone like you who read an entire series in a second language about their experience, chances are they'll say, "yeah the first few pages were kind of a drag, but once I got into it I was just devouring the thing". this is because so much of language hinges on context—like you can only get all the lessons I said above from this single passage because you *know* that Clear Sky is Grey Wing's own brother, still grieving over the loss of his mate, which made him paranoid in a position of power, and has already bloodied his paws, and you *know* the deep relationship between the two, which makes it obvious to you that "tell the stars that you've won" is meant as sarcasm, it's daring him to do something he knows he'll regret.

after you get the story going, you know what to expect from each character, you know the structure of stories, you have a reasonable expectation of what things mean even if you don't know the words yet. "After the roaring lion and the sharp-eyed jay, peace will come on dove's gentle wing, says the Omen of the Stars prophecy". you don't know what's a "jay" but your subconscious is taking notes, building connections—it has sharp eyes; it's probably a type of animal; it's the type of animal that may be used symbolically in prophecies… the longer you stay with the same story (or author, or genre, or conversation partner or special interest etc.), the more context you build, the easier it is for you to acquire language from the input.

the common sense but misguided approach would be to try to cram all the important vocabulary contexts one after the other, changing them serially like zapping TV channels; for example, the ubiquitous textbook structure that goes, lesson 1, "introducing yourself"; lesson 2, "asking for directions"; lesson 3, "at the doctor", etc. or maybe they'll want to give you short and simple stories in a graded reader, so you can finish them quick and feel accomplished. the consequence of this is that you're constantly losing the all-important context every lesson, and the context is exactly what you need to achieve partial comprehension when lacking vocabulary, which is what you need to read in enough quantities to get the rest of the vocabulary in the first place.

that is, by constantly flip situations you get stuck in the "first few pages effect", forever.

it works much better to do what you did and pick 1 thing that deeply interests you, that you feel as compelling—compulsive, even—and then binge on it start to end.

---

and to emphasise: no matter how funny or dorky the niche language may feel, all this context *matters*, it tells you in which kind of situations that kind of expression is used.

> Gray Wing pushed himself onto his paws, his legs trembling. "Kill me," he rasped at Clear Sky. "Kill me and live with the memory. Then tell the stars you won."

maybe ten years later you're in a parallel, if much less dramatic, situation. maybe your friend is about to get a job at an unethical company, and after a long argument you're exasperated, and in the throes of emotion, without any conscious thought, you blurt it out: "OK, whatever, do it. Do it, then tell yourself that it's fine."

and you won't even realise that this extremely sophisticate, native-like use of English pragmatics originally came from Warrior Cats. that's how language learning works; it's instinctive, unconscious, and always rooted in social contexts and specific situations.

[mair@lethallava.land]

@elilla@transmom.love @enby_of_the_apocalypse@social.treehouse.systems it's difficult to find the motivation to learn a second language as a native English speaker when so often things are just translated for you, and they're the easiest way to ingest that media

[elilla@transmom.love]

@ein_wesen @enby_of_the_apocalypse yeah totally, that's one of the signs that it's working :)

some signs that your Language Acquisition Device is fully engaged:

- you're spontaneously making up sentences in the target syntax (the "babbling" you mentioned).
- binge behaviour. you feel annoyed at having to stop your book (or TV series, visual novel, flirting with your crush etc.), you resent having to go make food, you want to go back and see what happens.
- short exclamations, complex verb conjugations and other spontaneous pieces of vocabulary pop on your tongue faster than you can second-guess them, so afterwards you feel like, "wait, does this word *really* mean this thing?" you have no idea where did you learn this grammar from, or whether it actually can be used in this context like this. (it totally can, btw. your subconscious knows it better than you.)
- you don't even notice the vocabulary you don't know anymore, you're too focused to stress over details. to paraphrase polyglot Kató Lomb, when the detective hides behind a hawthorn bush you don't care about what the fuck is a hawthorn, you want to watch what happens when she jumps on the suspect.
- you're so interested in your series that at some point you realise you've forgotten it was in another language. you started it as language practice, but that has became a secondary consideration.
- you find yourself with a certain crave for the language itself, for more input, kinda the way one craves a particular type of cooking.

[elilla@transmom.love]

@Mair that's the single major reason why English is such an easy language for everyone else to learn, and why it's hard to learn other languages once you know English. it comes with the territory of being a lingua franca, natürlich. you have to kinda trick yourself and engineer a situation where you're engaging with the other languages anyway; this is often easier said than done.

[mair@lethallava.land]

@elilla@transmom.love I guess I want to learn a second language for cultural, rather than practical reasons. I feel like it's quite presumptive of me to expect everyone else in the world to cater to my linguistic needs just because my ancestors were good at bullying people into getting what they wanted.
I only ended up learning German because I have German friends and even then they all just speak good English XD

[elilla@transmom.love]

edit: Cleaned up version of this thread: https://wordsmith.social/overthinking-the-apocalypse/language-learning-methods-that-actually-work-2-you-show-me-yours-and-ill

in the context of the discussion above, someone asked me how they could best teach their friend some English, when the friend doesn't have the time or opportunity to be immersed in it all the time. this was my answer:

Since you're also trying to learn their language, and as you've noticed, Duolingo has gotten you nowhere (and yeah, it's not just you, that's how it is)—you should look into tandem methods. This is when you sit with someone to try each other's languages for a set period—say 25 minutes English, 25 minutes Spanish. Here’s a couple quick links to learn more about it:

• https://www.sprachenzentrum.fu-berlin.de/en/slz/tandem/tipps/index.html
• https://tandem.net/pages/ultimate-guide-language-exchange

Starting from zero, you should rely heavily on body language, context, mimicry, pointing, facial expressions, intonation, props like drawings and physical objects etc. With these non-linguistic means, is quite doable to communicate with someone even if you don't have a single word in common, and from there build up linguistic knowledge starting from pointing at things and asking how they're called (linguistic anthropologists do this all the time in fieldwork).

Never correct your language partner directly, unless they ask for feedback explicitly. You want to keep sessions fluid and enjoyable like friendly conversations; you don't want the heavy feel of a "language lesson". You can try to work the correct form naturally into the conversation (they: “The my mother is María”, You: “Oh, your mother’s name is María? [smiling with a thumbs up:] That’s a pretty name! My mother’s name is Elizabeth…”) But you can also just gloss over it; errors will iron out naturally over time.

Tandem methods have many good features that aren't immediately obvious, based on building rapport with one another and expectations of what the other person will say, of your mental model of them and of the context you share together. One of the many hidden advantages is confidence: The other person gets to be the instructor, the expert, for half of every session. They’re not just "studying", they’re offering you a precious treasure that you're after (=their own native-level fluency, something exceptionally hard for you to do). This helps them feel like they’re contributing something; they’re not just reliving school trauma and trying to pass a test before an authority, they’re wanted in the sessions.

I have had good experiences with iTalki coaches, who are like, actual human beings you can interact with on live video, and whose hourly rates for trial periods can be very affordable. You might try talking with a couple experienced language coaches to get a few for how the pros do it.

English is a language with a relatively simple grammar, but it has tricky phonetics for foreigners, and the convoluted orthography doesn’t help. While normally I advocate acquiring language intuitively through use, this is one of those exceptions where I think it pays off to study the details explicitly, for a while at least. Geoff Lindsey on Youtube has some excellent videos about this which will help you understand the parts of English phonetics that are fully unconscious for you, but hard for foreigners to reproduce: https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey/playlists

Pay special attention to vowels; schwa; weak forms; contractions; aspiration; deaccenting. Once your language partner has at least a little bit of English, as soon as they can more or less make sense of videos like these, you can recommend them to check out the channel by themselves, too.

[enby_of_the_apocalypse@social.treehouse.systems]

@ein_wesen @elilla this whole conversation has made me realize that i don’t actually know what kind of bird a jay is, or what kind of bush a hawthorn is. Because i never actually looked those words up in a dictionary, i never learnt them from the vocabulary section of a school book, i learnt that those are a kind of bird and a kind of bush from context while consuming media (very much possible that it might’ve actually been a warrior cats book, idk).

[ein_wesen@social.raccoon.college]

@enby_of_the_apocalypse @elilla I'm pretty sure Hawthorne is Hagedorn (= Hagebutte?)

[enby_of_the_apocalypse@social.treehouse.systems]

@ein_wesen @elilla but hagebutte is rosehip…

[maestrafenix@chaos.social]

@elilla +1 about recommending tandems to learn other languages

They helped me a lot to learn German as a newcomer here, and it also helps to make friends in new places

Usually, there are tandem clubs/groups on each city that meet weekly, where you can go to one table with a flag and speak in that language
Check around FB groups and other social media for events related to this

[fishidwardrobe@mastodon.me.uk]

@elilla as an auDHD person the *only* way i can learn random, illogical rulesets (like a language) is by repeatedly doing tests.

this may be just me.

on the other hand, I *also* need deep dives into the structure of the grammar, which Duolingo completely fail to provide.

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@elilla @enby_of_the_apocalypse drilling the same few sentences also has the issue that you're not practicing to get things from context, context is provided and you are missing out on there being lots of different ways to say things. maybe you learned to ask "where can I find the toilet?" and then someone asks "where's the loo?" in a dialect you aren't familiar with, obviously using weak forms cause that's just how first language speakers of English talk, and you're now struggling cause there's a word you never learned, you have no context to guess it, and worst case if you haven't learned to recognize weak forms and haven't heard different dialects this might literally not even parse to you as an English sentence.
in real conversation you encounter lots of random shit that isn't gonna be in your textbook. having both the ability to generalize and adapt to new contexts and lots of vocabulary that might not seem that important is actually super useful. being able to get things from context breaks down if you don't have enough context. maybe there is none cause people just assume you'd understand a common, short sentence. maybe different pronunciation makes it harder. maybe there's several words that you don't know. reading long form texts, watching a series you like etc. you get a lot of that variety that you need to be able to cope with those situations where people don't just speak one or two dialects, clearly enunciated with a limited vocabulary.

[poljack@dice.camp]

@elilla So Tandem Language Learning is basically mutual aid language learning? Fuck yeah, that's awesome!

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@elilla @Mair maybe if we wanna learn Spanish again we could rewatch something we have watched with English subtitles before with Spanish ones instead. once we know enough to be able to parse things more or less. that way we will remember a lot of context.

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@elilla @Mair and there's at least two series we watched in Spanish before and one of them we actually would like to watch more of, we just haven't cause we cancelled our Netflix subscription in like 2018 or something.

[gurwinner@piaille.fr]

@elilla thank you ! With these messages you explained to me better than I could've think why my attempts to get back to learning Chinese all failed.
I've had courses during high school about it, and the teacher was so passionating I still now think fondly of the language.
However to get back at learning it has joined the "side-projects I've failed each time I try to do it" box. Your advices gave me food for thought for the next time I light up the spark of motivation needed to try Chinese again. Thanks !