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A road name and a sign that says “the same in swedish”.

“Duolingo is ‘sunsetting the development of the Welsh course’ (and many others)”.

I’ve used Duolingo since 2013. It used to be about genuinely learning languages and preserving endangered ones. It used to have a vibrant community and forum where users were listened to. It used to have volunteers that dedicated countless hours and even years to making the best courses they could while also trying to explain extremely nuanced and complex grammar in simple terms.

In the past two years it feels like Von Ahn let the money talk instead of focusing on the original goal.

No one truly had a humongous problem with the subscription tier for SuperDuolingo. We understood it: if you can afford to pay, help keep Duolingo free for those who couldn’t.

It started when the company went public. Volunteers were leaving courses they created because they warned of differing longterm goals compared to Duolingo’s as a company; not long after it was announced that the incubator (how volunteers were able to make courses in the first place) would be shut down. A year goes by and the forums—the voice of the users and the way people were able to share tips and explanations—is discontinued. A year or two later, Duolingo gets a completely new makeover—the Tree is gone and you don’t control what lesson you start with. With the disappearance of the Tree, all grammar notes and explanations for courses not in the Big 8 (consisting of the courses made before the incubator like Spanish/French/German/etc. and of the most popular courses like Japanese/Korean/Chinese/etc.) are removed with it. Were you learning Vietnamese and have no idea how honorifics work without the grammar notes? Shit outta luck bud. Were you learning Polish and have absolutely no clue how one of the declensions newly thrown at you functions? Suck it up. In a Reddit AMA, Von Ahn claims that the new design resulted in more users utilizing the app/site. How he claims that statistic? By counting how many people log into their Duolingo account, as if an entire app renovation wouldn’t cause an uptick in numbers to even see what the fuck just happened to the courses.

Von Ahn announces next in a Reddit AMA that no more language courses will be added from what there already is available. His reasoning? No one uses the unpopular language courses — along with how Duolingo will now be doing upkeep with the courses already in place. And here I am, currently looking on the Duolingo website how there are 1.8 million active learners for Irish, 284 thousand active learners for Navajo, and even 934 thousand active learners for fucking High Valyrian. But yea, no one uses them. Not like the entire Navajo Nation population is 399k members or anything, or like 1.8 million people isn’t 36% of the entire population of Ireland or anything.

And now this. What happened to the upkeep of current courses? Oh, Von Ahn only meant the popular ones that already have infinite resources. Got it. Duolingo used to be a serious foundational resource for languages with little resources while also adding the relief of gamification.

It pisses me off. It really does. This was not what Duolingo started out as. And yea, maybe I shouldn’t get invested in a dingy little app. But as someone who spent most of her adolescence immersed in language learning to the point where it was literally keeping me alive at one point, to the point where languages felt like my only friend as a tween, and to the point where friendships on the Duolingo forums with likeminded individuals my age and other enthusiasts who even sent me books in other languages for free because they wanted people to learn it, the evolution of Duolingo hits a bitter nerve within me.

I'm definitely not a fluent speaker, so I could be wrong, but here's how I got there:

In Spanish, some (informal, I think?) commands are formed by dropping the "r" from the end of an infinitive verb. (Every infinitive verb in Spanish ends in r.) For example, "to run" is "correr." If you want to tell someone to run, it's "corre." If you want to tell someone to do something to something/someone, you append a little pronoun thing to the end. From "besar" (to kiss) we get "bésame" (kiss me). From "cocinar" (to cook) we get "cocínalo" (cook it). From "callar" (to silence) we get "cállate" (silence yourself/shut up).

My confusion stemmed from never having heard the word gamba before. To my knowledge the word for shrimp is camarón

That's exactly how many Spanish people see it, it's a shame but your story doesn't surprise me. When I was a teenager I went for a few days to do a thing with other teenagers in Madrid and they reacted in a mix of disgust and offence when they heard me speak to my parents in Catalan on the phone. And I've heard quite a lot of other people explain very similar situations. It also reminds me of a video I shared a while ago (post here) where Judit Mascó explains that when she's working in Madrid and she answers the phone to her mother or friends calling, her co-workers told her it bothers them that she speaks in Catalan to other people, when she's not even talking to them.

Many Spanish people just can't understand that Catalan people would like to continue speaking our language, period. They are so convinced that Spanish is superior, that they believe that for our own good we should want to abandon our language and assimilate to theirs, and if we don't, well, then the only possible reason is that we're doing it for the sole purpose of excluding them, as if they were the centre of our lives.

They can see how they use their own language (Spanish) for their family, friends and the rest of their lives, but they can't give us the same amount of humanity and respect to imagine that we can want to speak our own language for the same purposes as they want to speak theirs. No, according to them, we must do it for bad faith proposes.

And let me say: you are doing very well in learning Catalan for your boyfriend. If your boyfriend speaks Catalan, I assume it's most likely that his family and friends speak in Catalan too, it's normal that you'd want to learn the language they use. This will bring you closer to his heart, because you can understand the words with which he has grown up and that are around him, it strengthens your bond. And it gives you the opportunity to communicate with other people around him and participate in conversation. Why would you not want to learn the language? Why would you, instead, want to learn a different language, and does that Spanish person expect you police what your boyfriend and his family/friends speak so not to exclude you (when you would have been the one to decide not to integrate)? It's just such a self-centered way of thinking from them.

I Can Eat Glass was a linguistic project documented on the early Web by then-Harvard student Ethan Mollick. The objective was to provide speakers with translations of the phrase "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me" from a wide variety of languages; the phrase was chosen because of its unorthodox nature. Mollick's original page disappeared in or about June 2004.

We distinguish between temporary and permanent and habitual forms of being, even in English. The only other place I know that does this is AAVE. Marcus be playing the drums; aye lads, he surely does be playing them.

Us: speak only limited German

Lady: barely speaks English

Us:

Lady:

Lady: Czech? Slovak?

Us: Czech

Lady, to herself: Czech, that's a Slavic language right

Lady: understand Yugoslavian?

Us:

Waiter: Germany?

Me: No, Czechia.

Reminds me of the time when we were in Poland and I tried to order a burger using a truly unholy mix of Slovak, Russian and Ostrava dialect (which in itself is like an unholy mix of Czech and Polish).

*Each of us talking in their mother tongue*

Me: Bla bla bla.

Russian: I don’t know this “bla”.

Czech: Oh, we have “bla”! We also call it “that”!

Russian: Oh I know “that”! It’s a very old version of “this”.

Me: Oh, we have “this” too, but it means something slightly different.

[ID: youtube comment from Hal Sawyer:

My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word "the" used in phrases like: "the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or "the bigger they come, the harder they fall". This "the" is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English "þā", pronounced "tha" which means either "when" or "then". Back in early Middle English the structure "if - then" had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said "þā whatever, þā whatever", meaning "when such-and- such, then such-and-such". "þā" sounds almost the same as "the" and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. "the more, the merrier" literally means "when more, then merrier" or "if more, then merrier'; same as centuries ago.

end ID]