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godelskiHNSource authorApr 22, 2023

Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

At this point there isn't an excuse to hire top tier language teachers and have them generate …

… At this point there isn't an excuse to hire top tier language teachers and have them generate material for the app. They ask for $7/mo and I'll admit I'm impressed that 25% of their daily active users (6.5% of monthly) subscribe when the main selling point is no ads. I'd put money down betting that there's a low renewal rate in subscriptions (probably why the ads have become so much more annoying). Annoying your users with ads is not a successful business model (disclaimer: I haven't started a company and am not a successful entrepreneur while the Duolingo founders are billionaires. So I could be way off base). I've paid for other learning apps, such as Hello Chinese, because those give you more tools and resources. Apps I have paid give you more material (and remove ads) for the service and I'm even willing to pay more for this. I think there's very good reasons why apps like Hello Chinese are more well loved than Duolingo. In comparison, look at Scritter[0]. …

Original discussionHow Much Can Duolingo Teach Us?331 source comments · at import

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rcarrHNApr 22, 2023

I agree that the fact it only asks you to draw the character once isn’t great. At the same time, I do wonder how much drawing with your finger is going to translate into remembering how to do the same thing when you’re holding a pen (although I suppose you could do the same thing using a pen if you were on iPad or an Android device). As for the learning notes, they are more thorough on French and Spanish and they could definitely be better. I believe the other languages are still using the original crowdsourced content and that is a major limitation to the app that I have a tendency to forget about (I’m leaning Spanish). I wouldn’t recommend the app for more than the very basics if you’re learning something other than French, Spanish or German. My hunch from reading the blog posts they put out is that they’re using Spanish and French to try things out and perfect the course structure and…

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rcarrHNApr 23, 2023

> Honestly, the app does not seem significantly better than when I first used it in 2013/2014. I disagree with this. I have also been using it since this time frame and believe it is significantly better than it used to be, at least in Spanish and French. I do agree however that I think they should have covered more ground in ten years than what they have done and that they should have better coverage for other languages. > I think there's very good reasons why apps like Hello Chinese are more well loved than Duolingo. In comparison, look at Scritter[0]. This is the go to app for Chinese and Japanese, costs $100/yr ($14/mo; frequent discounts of 50% fwiw) and has significantly better learning outcomes while having under 10 employees. Do you have resources to back these claims up because they’re pretty bold. I imagine that if they are dedicated solely to Japanese and Chinese then they pro…

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nemoHNApr 23, 2023

>also surprising to me is that there are things like Duolingo podcast, but that this is not accessible in-app It's worse. It used to be that the iOS app, at least, had podcasts in it, and you could listen to them to get points. It was great, though they only added a limited number, and eventually just dropped it. I'm a fan of immersive learning, and they _removed_ out an immersive learning tool that was actually pretty effective.

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