Duolingo is an odd mix of excellence and complete idiocy. The whole point of an automated app is that you can adaptively drill on just what you don't know. Sometimes, it works. Duolingo in French has taught me better grammar than I ever learned in high school, and has drilled on vocabulary. It definitely has helped me in french and Portuguese. I knew some french, and knew no portuguese. In Hebrew I know the characters and it was fine, but in Japanese, the odd focus on written forms means that you need to know all the hiragana. In chinese, emphasis on the written means endless drilling in writing just a few chinese characters.At its best, Duolingo makes it more fun to drill and you can learn vocabulary. But it doesn't move on. Maybe it's intended for really poor language learners. I know some who are using the app. But a program that is adaptive should be capable of recognizing what I already know, and STOP ASKING. At this point, my french vocabulary is probably approaching 2000 words, yet they keep harping on the same words over and over. Smoking=fume, trip=trajet.Then, there are the stupid sentences. I know when you first start out, you are limited, and in Greek, they are teaching me letters, not knowing that I know the letters.So first of all, they should find out and then STOP DRILLING. Second, the sentences are idiocy:Anna the carrot, Mark the carrot?How about Hello, goodbye, basic vocabulary I want as a tourist? I'm sure they have some educational philosophy, but I'm not going to be able to wade through their crap in time to learn something useful to go to greece in a week. So the problem is that they don't deliver what an average language learner wants to start with, and I find them highly frustrating. There are many mistakes, and they don't seem to fix them. Everything is automated. For $119 I don't expect personal attention, but I do expect that they can review their questions (the course isn't that big) and FIX the problems. They claim that their sentences are randomly generated and that they use AI and that's why they can't manually fix the course. That might be true for the free-form answers, but for questions that are poorly worded, confusingly constructed, they should be editing the questions themselves to make the product better.Other people have written about their annoying habit of harrassing you to practice. It can be mostly turned off. In the end, I am renewing Duolingo for a second year, but I don't think I will keep it longterm. I think we will find something better unless they put some work into it.
