allinllachuteruteru - Tumblr blog

allinllachuteruteru · 4 months

Text

I’m so pissed at how they destroyed the Irish course too because there was SO MUCH drama on the voice recordings and which dialects to use when it was first being released. Because of that they originally did all of the recordings themselves (the volunteer team) and they were great. I went to Ireland in 2016 and even the farmers in the middle of the rural country understood me and vice versa and legit got excited that someone who had no Irish heritage was learning the language. Then recently they changed it to TTS and took out the notes (as if anyone could just figure out lenition and eclipsis by blind immersion). It’s been godawful ever since.

Duolingo is NOT what it used to be.

“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.

~End rant.

17K notes · View notes

allinllachuteruteru · 6 months

Text

One of my best friends who happens to be a language learning prodigy video called me last night and apparently now we’re learning Persian together…..

…..I’m behind my language learning schedule by like fOUR LANGUAGES HELP

#langblr #i literally have an italki lesson tomorrow for another language i cannot be language cheating rn #persian

12 notes · View notes

allinllachuteruteru · 6 months

Note

Duolingo is really only good for MAYBE learning the alphabet of a language but that's really about it tbh. I fully agree with you

It’s become so hard to use for learning languages especially from scratch 🥲 I’m using it right now for alphabets too though! For Hebrew and Arabic

#ask #also hi your aura feels so calm and beautiful i had to follow you

4 notes · View notes

allinllachuteruteru · 6 months

Text

I went to college. I hate how there’s this culture in the US amongst college graduates that you MUST be in the corporate world working full time to be successful in life, otherwise you’re looked down on with pity.

Every time someone tries to catch up and asks me how I’m doing and I tell them how I left the corporate world, or if I say I’m a barista (I used to be, I’m now a librarian assistant) they go “oh.. 😬 damn well just keep your head up bro”.

Meanwhile what I don’t say is “yea I’m doing fine despite working less than 30 hours a week, I have four digits in savings compared to your $50 required savings deposit, I don’t pay rent or utilities like your mindboggling $1800 a month for one bedroom, and I read as many books as I possibly can for free. But oh.. 😬 you’re exhausted from corporate burnout and rent takes up 45% of your net paycheck? Damn, just keep your head up bro”.

#personal rant #not languages #stop judging people based off of how much they work or what they do jfc

2 notes · View notes

allinllachuteruteru · 6 months

Text

public libraries in the usa offering free digital library cards to people not in their areas (as of october 2023):

brooklyn (13-21yo us residents)

seattle (13-26yo us residents)

boston (13-26yo us residents)

los angeles (13-18yo california residents)

san diego (12-26yo us residents, not the whole collection just commonly banned books)

these cards (part of the books unbanned initiative) get you access to each library's complete libby/overdrive collection (unless otherwise mentioned), no hoopla/kanopy/physical copies included.

ebook collections are expensive to maintain (many american libraries have annual fees for non-residents because of this) but because of an uptick in book banning (particularly brutal in mississippi last summer) larger libraries have opened their doors more, which is very kind of them!

i've used my seattle card for the last several months and their libby collection has about three times the books that my local library does, which is wonderful for accessing more niche titles or skipping a waiting list. would love to hear of similar ebook initiatives internationally!

i use library extension (firefox/safari/chrome compatible) to check all my collections (+ the internet archive) at once, works for several different countries highly recommend it.

spotify seems to be offering 15hrs/month of audiobook listening to premium subscribers and while that does seem useful if you're already paying and are after a new release with a long library waitlist, libraries are better for everything else.

32K notes · View notes

allinllachuteruteru · 6 months

Text

99 legal sites to download literature

The Classics

Browse works by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and other famous authors here.

Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.

The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.

Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.

Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.

Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.

Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.

Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.

Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Lawrence to Joseph Conrad.

The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.

Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.

Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.

Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.

Fiction.us: Fiction.us has a huge selection of novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Flaubert, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Free Classic Literature: Find British authors like Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus other authors like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and more.

Textbooks

If you don’t absolutely need to pay for your textbooks, save yourself a few hundred dollars by reviewing these sites.

Textbook Revolution: Find biology, business, engineering, mathematics and world history textbooks here.

Wikibooks: From cookbooks to the computing department, find instructional and educational materials here.

KnowThis Free Online Textbooks: Get directed to stats textbooks and more.

Online Medical Textbooks: Find books about plastic surgery, anatomy and more here.

Online Science and Math Textbooks: Access biochemistry, chemistry, aeronautics, medical manuals and other textbooks here.

MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Find free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.

Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.

Free Business Textbooks: Find free books to go along with accounting, economics and other business classes.

Light and Matter: Here you can access open source physics textbooks.

eMedicine: This project from WebMD is continuously updated and has articles and references on surgery, pediatrics and more.

104K notes · View notes

allinllachuteruteru · 6 months

Text

On This Day In History

October 27th, 2017: Catalonia declares independence from Spain. The Spanish government responded by imprisoning several Catalonian leaders (later pardoned) and enforcing stricter rule on the region.

56 notes · View notes

allinllachuteruteru · 6 months

Text

Help save the Yiddish Translation Fellowship Program

I wanted to ask my followers and fellow language enthusiasts to donate to the Yiddish Book Center so that they can continue to train translators and make Yiddish literature accessible (or at least share this post if possible) 🐐

#yiddish

4K notes · View notes

allinllachuteruteru · 6 months

Text

I…. Now that’s art.