It's Dr.　　　　　　　　 Tim

@wgwgsa

70,000,000,000,000 Free Drum Sample

watergunsky.bandcamp.com/

tedious brown gay in the great white north. hey have you ever listened to Autechre

bandcamp

watergunsky.bandcamp.com/

last.fm

www.last.fm/user/OneSevenNine

rym

rateyourmusic.com/~onesevennine

It's Dr.　　　　　　　　 Tim @wgwgsa8/14/2023, 3:18 AM

duolingo sucks now what the fuck happened

i last used it 6 years ago when beginning to learn french. it was solid. loaded fast. lightweight. seemed nice. had "streaks" and you could buy a thing to keep your streak. i now speak pretty decent conversational french. it was a solid foundation and i enjoyed it.

now i try it again because someone recommended it for learning japanese vocab and it's got pages within tabs and xp and gems and gold coins and currency and hearts?? hearts that penalize making mistakes??? penalize making mistakes in a learning app? watch an ad for a fake mobile game to get a heart so you can take an over-animated zippy little motion so you can learn a language again. 4 interlocking gamified systems. even if i were to pay the monthly sub i wouldn't be able to turn off all this extra bullshit that i don't want to deal with. why does everything end up like this.

(i am using a .pdf of a textbook instead and it's going well actually)

#enshittification #duolingo #language learning

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @wgwgsa's post:

the @teleosaurus8/14/2023, 4:57 AM

i use duolingo and it honestly works for me but i must have outsmarted it somehow. i don't know what you're talking about with the gold coins but yeah there's a lot new terms and things.
basically do not worry or care about any of them. they literally mean nothing.

pages within tabs easy explanation you start at the first tab and work down, once you finish it duolingo will direct you to the next one. to be fair japanese has always had the most confusing layout. so you were kinda thrown in the deep end there.

xp is only there so you can compete with others and you get it from doing lessons. it's not important. gems are good for buy streak protectors and i think that's all they do now. as long as you don't miss a day you should be fine not worrying about them.

in terms of hearts. yeah i found that super discouraging and i was making no progress (but i was learning with my friends so i didn't want to stop and end my streak) a free way to get unlimited hearts is to join a duolingo classroom. you can host a duolingo classroom for free on your regular account but i'm not sure if that gives you unlimited hearts. i just joined a pre-existing classroom i found online to get free hearts but you could even make a second account and join that classroom. otherwise i found that the website doesn't (or at least didn't) have the limited hearts.

i know duolingo is not for everyone and it's great you found another way but i just wanted to try make duolingo seem less daunting. duolingo is useful to maintain movement and encourage daily practice. textbooks tend to require more effort and time but they are usually better for the intense study sessions or education. i hope your learning journey goes well!!

It's Dr.　　　　　　　　 Tim @wgwgsa8/14/2023, 8:55 PM

the lessons are still really good! i'm glad it works for you, it used to work really for me too back when it was a lot simpler, and i'm just upset that the user experience feels compromised at the altar of trying to give me dopamine hits. all the other stuff they've added makes it actively unpleasant to use the app - i'd like to ignore it, but it feels like it's taking me out of the groove every 20 seconds to show me some score increasing or pitch me on spending gems to do something, and i'm like: hey, i'd like to just continue learning.

you're right that it seems like desktop doesn't have hearts though, thanks! gonna use that, i wanted to try learning japanese vocab without having the romaji transcriptions of everything as a crutch, but it means i make too many mistakes for the heart system