PhiMarHal
@phimarhal
In today's episode of PhiMarHal discovers things 10 years after everyone else, I've been enjoying Duolingo lately. They got the visual and sound design right, the gameplay loop is tight, you stay on the treadmill painlessly. Oh, and it's fluid on my mid-range phone (so many apps fail this part). The most common criticism I've read is that it doesn't scale beyond teaching some vocabulary. I guess I have to go further and see. As someone for whom vocabulary is always the prime obstacle while grammar can be inferred, the value is fantastic in any case. It solves the cold start problem.
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GUNBOATs 🎩🇵🇸
@gunboats
Duolingo has the same incentive problem with dating apps that reaching the goal would lose the customer lol
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PhiMarHal
@phimarhal
I wonder. I think no matter what, the learning process for any language is a multi-years endeavor. Whereas with dating you could find lifelong love in 5 minutes. So I see much better incentive alignment here. One could argue they're incentivised to make you feel like you're learning while not learning. But that seems comically evil if simply doing your mission as stated gets you multi-years subs, and surely there must be *some* level of real learning to keep the user invested enough they'd sub. Anyway, maybe I'm fanboying hard. I'll see how well this sticks. I've never been able to graduate beyond bilingual (if we assume my English qualifies) in many attempts over the years, and here at least I feel like their engagement loops are working well enough to keep me moving.
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