alt Hacker News>We didn’t want to focus too much on gamification.
Thank you so much for this. Duolingo is literally unbearable because it's so gamified. I'll try it out later. I've seen a few of these apps, can I seamlessly go between my native language and the language I'm trying to learn? If I am trying to learn Hindi, can I ask a question in English in the middle of a conversation?
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mariano54 • last Thursday at 3:14 PM
Yes, we've spent a lot of time getting the STT and TTS to work seamlessly in multilingual, it works pretty well!
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The app is optimized on the whole population, not on individual level. They even publish papers on global optimization.
These kinds of learning apps are destined to become mediocre over time.
The learning metric is so easy to capture, the learning content so easy to produce, yet no one has an individualized loop to make learning work well.
For example, I'd press "Training" on Duolingo, and would get nowhere. Same lessons all of the time. Bread and water.