#duolingo welsh course

[allinllachuteruteru]

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.

#duolingo #langblr #huge language rant feel free to skip #evolution of duolingo #luis von ahn #duolingo welsh course #language learning

[karmagotme]

It's been announced that DuoLingo will stop updating Welsh courses. They've always championed endangered languages in the past but articles say they want to focus more on popular languages like Spanish and French. The following is a link to a petition to get the First Minister of Wales to work with the DuoLingo CEO and get them to save the course.

As someone who is learning Welsh, it's devastating news. Yes, there is still Say Something in Welsh and other methods, but DuoLingo is also extremely helpfull, especially for anyone who may not be able to afford all of the later courses in SSIW.

So please, signage would be most appreciated.

EDIT: Please don't think you have to live in Wales to sign this! I signed and I live in Australia. Share this with your language-learning friends around the world!

#DuoLingo #Welsh #Petition to save Welsh course in DuoLingo #I thought DuoLingo was supposed to champion dying languages #cymraeg #Dysgu #dysgu Cymraeg

[alice-makes-things]

Withnail & I (1987)

#duolingo #Welsh #withnail and i #stop asking him if he’s the farmer #of course he’s the fucking farmer

[cloud-based-and-rainpilled]

My Mom got legitimately angry at me for trying to learn Welsh because it “will never be useful/l, can’t learn without immersion and/or being a child, won’t help me get a job/learn for my career” so if you’re ever wondering why non-colonialist languages die not being able to commodify them is exactly why

#granted less than the population of my high school speaks welsh in my country #and i’m desperately behind on new tech and bad at the tech i’m supposed to be an ‘expert’ at #and i should really brush up my spanish #but she even agreed it’s sad we can’t learn something for the love of it & it’s like?? you just said it’s useless tho! #i’m not even welsh #lmao #i just want to sing songs properly and conquer my fucking auditory processing disorder #but welsh grammar is awful and i hate mutations hate it so had #not conversational welsh but still #been doing duolingo (sorry streak too bomb) for 2 1/2 months minimum but it’s so poor and the voices are so bad and it doesn’t show you #BASICS #like i’m learning more thru other apps and yt vids and moving onto c4c soon #it’s dire #welsh #cymraeg #cymru #duolingo #<- evil etc. but also bad course #also apparently the welsh govt is discriminatory and funnels money to language programs that fail (which is bad) #but straight up hating ‘non viable’ languages is so fuckin weird to me #endangered languages #welsh independence #<- let them out lmao #michael sheen #<- thank you good omens brainrot for forcing me into a new useless hyperfixation i will thusly abandon #language learning #memrise #say something #commodification #capitalist dystopia

[yogurthoviz]

Silly concept: i think trc squad would have a duolingo family plan to learn welsh (it was ganseys idea)(ronan obviously never does his lessons)(due to being a ghost noah would just do his lessons with blue)

#the raven cycle #i still didnt start the trilogy #im gonna cry myself #gangsey #gansey #ronan lynch #adam parrish #blue sargent #noah czerny #trc #richard gansey iii #duolingo #its a self insert because i started welsh on duolingo with my sister #(of course its in case we stumble upon an ancient welsh king duh)

[tadeadshihamurder]

I logged into memrise for the first time since ~2016–2017 recently and found that they're basically trying to remove the community-made courses and promoting their own generic, structureless, auto-generated courses and filling the interface with irrelevant ads and videos.

and while duolingo's decline hasn't been as steeply dramatic, their removal of discussion forums and relevant grammar notes along with the removal of the incubator has really disappointed me. also, I'd made it pretty far in my Japanese course a few years ago when it was still linear, but I'd returned recently to find that they reset all my progress when they overturned the course structure and now, I've been stuck relearning the words "hotel" and "convenience store" for weeks.

it's not a great time for language self-study enthusiasts right now :(

#citrustalk #the memrise community courses were really good bc ppl would make them to align with other resources #like textbooks and podcasts and stuff #so it would give you a place to quiz yourself on the vocab after going through the content #but no. that's useless obviously. give me the generic auto-generated lessons #that force me to translate 'hi how are you' 50 million times without explaining any of the grammar #and Duolingo...has just been steadily disappointing me over the years #when I saw that they're removing the Welsh course I was like wait. this is so stupid #I'd accepted that they reduced all their courses to a snail's pace until now #but it's actually really frustrating on top of all the other frustrating changes they've been implementing

[aleximedicus]

guess who’s got free weekly welsh lessons next year 

#( * ooc. ) #did not?? know they were free tbh??? #the course was on sale for £45 for the full year so i was like yeah why not that's a great price for weekly lessons #signed up and the site was like oh you're in the 18-25 range so you can get it for free #good thing i decided on doing this before my 26th birthday jdlskjfsdfsdf #but i'm!! excited!! i've learned a bit through duolingo but i find it hard to keep up w that so #online classes :) north welsh dialect for lewis ofc

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

So this is a weird ask but I figured an Actual Welsh Person would be the person to go to, and you've been pretty gung-ho about the language thing. So I hope I'm not bothering you with this.

Is there a cultural consensus on foreigners learning Welsh? I'm American and I don't have a single shred of Welsh ancestry. My family is historically German, and we've been here since the English Colony days, so it honestly seems really weird even to try to claim some tie to German heritage.

Anyway, my point is, I have absolutely zero legitimate claim to the Welsh language. I don't plan to travel to Wales in the foreseeable future. I have no reason to learn Welsh except that it sounds pretty and I enjoy a challenge.

Putting aside the issue of "lmao it's gonna be stupid difficult to learn an endangered language if you don't have anyone to speak it with" (I have a loose plan for dealing with that, and the experience of learning two languages to "can read most novels without needing the dictionary" level without anyone to speak them with in person already) entirely, do you reckon it's okay for me to study Welsh? I know Americans are really, really bad about just kinda assuming the whole world belongs to us, and I'm trying not to do that here. Especially because Welsh IS endangered.

I imagine your average Welsh person probably doesn't care what some random American does. But like, for people who care about the language...Would it be considered disrespectful or overstepping for me to study it? I don't expect you to speak for the entire country, of course, but I respect your opinion and I feel like you'd have a grasp on what the general feeling towards a foreigner like me might be.

Thanks for your time.

I honestly, truly, do not understand how the discussion around cultural appropriation has been twisted in the cultural zeitgeist to such an extent that people now feel anxiety about learning other languages.

This is not a personal attack on you, Anon - the gods only know that you clearly care and want to do the right thing, and that's beautiful and wonderful and also I will come back to extolling your personal virtues at the end of this post, so stay tuned. But I do want to take a moment here to talk about the broader issue at play, which I have seen echoed multiple times elsewhere, because fuck me what are we doing to ourselves.

Learn. Languages.

That is what languages are for! To be used for communication. If you don't learn languages, you are forcing everyone else to use yours. How have we somehow, as a culture, twisted that into being the less selfish option? How have we done that? I posted my favourite Welsh idiom recently, and someone reblogged it and wrote in the tags that they loved the idiom and would start using it, but they would do so in English because their "Welsh pronunciation would make their Welsh grandmother spin in her grave."

What kind of mental gymnastics is that?

How the fuck do you twist it so badly that you think taking a Welsh idiom for your own and exclusively using it in English is less offensive than saying it in Welsh but maybe a bit wrong? I've literally had people proclaim to me that they're learning Welsh on Duolingo but they never speak it because they're too self-conscious, and they tell me this not to highlight a massive flaw in themselves that they need to work on, but as though I'm supposed to pat them on the head and thank them for... still making me speak English to them.

There was that post where a Deaf blogger received an anonymous ask saying learning sign language is cultural appropriation, as though Deaf people haven't been calling for Sign to be taught in schools. As though a Deaf person being entirely isolated in everyday hearing society unless they have an interpreter with them is less offensive than a hearing person being able to use BSL.

Like, these are not sacred or religious languages. The purpose of Welsh or BSL or what have you is not to perform the Eleusinian mysteries. It's a living everyday language, same as English -

Except it's not the same as English. As Anon here so rightly points out, Welsh is endangered. That means we are desperate for people to learn it. That's how it will survive. That's how we reversed it from 'dying language' to 'living language', in fact - we managed to get lots of people to learn it. You know what is a threat, though? People not learning it because, like poor Anon here, they've been somehow convinced by Western society that you're only allowed to learn languages if you personally have a historic or cultural connection to them that you can prove via six forms of ID and a letter of recommendation from a druid. Or people never using it because they're too embarrassed to try and risk losing face by getting it wrong, or maybe sounding a bit silly, and thus forcing us to use English anyway. Those are threats.

Anon. Listen to me, feel the sincerity of my words: we adore you. We adore you. You cannot imagine how appreciated it is when someone learns Welsh. You cannot imagine how touched we are that you wanted to, that you tried, that you respected us enough and considered us valid enough that you made the effort. Our closest neighbours are the very people who are still trying to stamp out Welsh to this very day. Do you know the number 1 reaction I get, by a country mile, when I tell English people that I speak Welsh? It's some variant on a scoff, and the sentiment "Why? What's the point? Bit useless, isn't it?"

By a country mile. That's the reaction I expect, and brace for, and is overwhelmingly what I get.

So when someone who isn't Welsh actually chooses to learn Welsh?

Imagine what that feels like! To go from not-even-hidden disgust, from outright mockery and often active suppression campaigns, to a foreigner earnestly telling me that they love and respect my language so much they're trying to learn it. Imagine how that feels.

Please learn Welsh. Please learn it. We will love you for it. We will build you a statue. We will bake little Welshcakes with your face on in icing sugar. We will write you poems in complex rhyme. We'll name an Eisteddfod prize after you. We'll name at least, like, three sheep after you. Thank you, thank you so much for even wanting to learn. You're a delight and a marvel and a wonder. Your hair looks great today, as it does all days. You're a strong, independent human being of immense wisdom and compassion. If this were a Welsh myth you'd be a wise salmon the heroes came to for advice. What a fantastic human.

The welcome awaits if you choose to learn

#linguistics #asks #long post

[angiethewitch]

hey what hell man, theyre "pausing" the welsh course on duolingo and it won't get any more updates. a lot of welsh people who don't have welsh as their first language really relied on duolingo. it was a struggle to get the North walian dialect on there, and they still haven't got regional dialects there. how disappointing.

#angie talks #wales #cymru

[ruhua-langblr]

how does duolingo suck?

I'm going to assume this is a genuine question in good faith!

In general, I do not think that DL is effective for achieving linguistic fluency. However, fluency is not everything and is not everyone's end goal! It can be a great introduction to many languages and get people fired up about starting to learn a new language—all which are good things. Before I address the recent problematic changes to the app that make it "suck", I want to be clear that even before it really wasn't that great. It had a good UI, constant expansion, and a very enthusiastic marketing team, but none of those are really important to actual language learning. Outside of popular European languages (Spanish/French/German) the quality is incredibly hit or miss. When I started learning Chinese I checked out DL and it was just not good! It's pretty common knowledge that DL is not good for learning non-latin based languages. Not to mention that the levels in those languages do not get you far. I was able to do speed runs of the Chinese course for fun early on in learning Chinese because it tops out at about HSK 3. (If you're unfamiliar with the HSK system, real Chinese "fluency" is HSK 6+ depending on if you're going by HSK 3.0 or not.)

The reason the post I made took off now is a combination of profit-driven decisions made by DL in the past year, culminating with laying off actual translators—a field I happen to be in!

The major decisions I'm referring to above are the following:

The "pausing" of the Welsh course and ending the partnership with the Welsh government. The National Centre for Learning Welsh did wish to continue the partnership, stating "Should Duolingo change its policy the centre would be happy to help with the work of developing the Welsh course,". Languages that offer business partnerships, like High Valyrian, don't get paused.

Removal of Forums and Sentence Discussions. Because DL never truly "teaches" you grammar, you are expected to pick it up from pattern association and repetition. This would work fine if languages weren't complex and notorious for having exceptions. These spaces were places for people to better understand the language, but that's not a profitable thing! It's more profitable to charge people to have an AI "explain" a sentence. Also people liked DL for the community aspects! Native speakers could answer your questions and you could joke about how wacky a sentence was.

Final nail in the coffin:

Pivot to AI and laying off translators. For the record, I don't think AI is innately evil. I think in moderation it can be helpful and if an app's upgraded tier is just AI chat then whatever. However, as a translator, I can tell you that it just doesn't work well. Having done post-editing of AI translations, it just sucks. It makes mistakes humans would never make and trying to unravel them is a pain. When I edit a human's translation, I can figure out what they were thinking and how they got it from the text. AI translations frequently just... skip parts that don't make sense to it. DL had already integrated AI into the app on a premium content basis, but now it's fully hit users that never asked for it. I've seen a lot of people talking about how their language is having mistakes now. People want to use DL to learn a language, and if the app is teaching them the language wrong that is a huge problem. It is unlikely that DL will be satisfied with this, but rather continue to replace as much of its workforce as possible with AI.

In short: Duolingo's first priority is bringing profits and shiny objects like AI to dangle in front of its shareholders. That is what makes Duolingo suck.

#duolingo #langblr #language learning #question

[allinllachuteruteru]

I didn't realize how much my Duolingo rant would strike a similar nerve with so many people... it's honestly inspiring me to make some language resource master posts of my own to share with everyone? I saw in the tags people definitely wanting Welsh resources and one call for Japanese.

Can yall either reply to or reblog this with the language that you're desperately needing resources for? I'll try my best to put together a list here (similar to my Quechua masterpost).

#no sillies ofc i have nothing better to do i work at a library ffs #im also just seriously passionate about languages #duolingo #language learning #language masterpost #duolingo welsh course #japanese resources

[fayrobertsuk]

Mount Snowdon's name is officially changed after 5,000 sign petition - Mirror Online

I went on Google for something completely different, but this made me punch the air in jubilation, so you might be interested to see it too.

In case you're not familiar with the background, this is important because, despite rallying massively over the last 70 years or so, Welsh is still very much a language at risk. And when I say "at risk", I mean "subject to a campaign to drive it into extinction that very nearly worked and still might". Welsh speakers of my grandmother's generation and earlier were subjected to corporal punishment and shame tactics (see The Welsh Knot for one particularly notorious example), and workers to disciplinary action for speaking Welsh in school or workplace. In Wales.

And since tourism has been a huge source of income for the country (increasingly important, arguably, since so many coalmines and steelworks were shut down), using English placenames to be, I guess, less off-putting for visitors, has been increasingly the norm. Which means that the arguably far more beautiful (in Welsh or more directly translated into English) names are dying out, as locals forget them too.

One of the reasons I get quite passionate about this, is that I'm the last person in my family to speak Welsh much beyond the usual "good morning", "exit", and "welcome to Wales", and I'm a second language speaker at that, horrendously rusty. Another is, I guess, the guilt of the voluntary exile – what can I do but shout about it from far away and make occasional forays back to Duolingo's Welsh course?

Anyway, it's no longer Snowdon but Yr Wyddfa (Uhrr Wuthvah - th hard like though or that) and not Snowdonia but Eryri (Err-urree), emphasis always on the penultimate syllable (Yr WYTHfa, ErYri).

#fay speaks #welsh #welsh language #snowdonia #eryri #yr wyddfa #mount snowdon #I love that the welsh tags were there already! #welsh langblr #hwre #llongyfarchiadau #cue queue

[crynwr-drwg]

Apparently Duolingo is killing the support for Welsh Duolingo course? It's what I've been seeing all over FB, anyway. If so, definitely seems like Memrise will be the way to go in the future.

#wales #welsh #cymraeg #Cymreig #duolingo

[cloud-based-and-rainpilled]

Somehow I left Welsh subtitles on so YouTube decided to translate English > Welsh for Bar Rescue compilations and honestly I feel so Seen ™

#i have no idea how accurate it is but the tiniest bit I know it seems kinda right #is it auto translated or ai like??? #this is so dumb but i'm obsessed lmao #special thanks to noted bisexual disaster michael sheen for getting me interested in trying to learn welsh (mostly duolingo tbh) #the duolingo welsh course is ass btw like. use youtube videos or memrise is a'ight idk it's dire out here #official resources are all in *full* welsh or it's like 'come to the UK to study!!' like bruh i'm not travelling the planet. sorry #today's been awful so at least this is something. ofnadwy! #it's hysterical too every resource teaches you how to say 'terrible' first like. y'all a'ight there wales #personal #find this later miracle aligner #duolingo #duolingo alternatives #bar rescue #john taffer is an absolute nightmare of a person but i love this show lmao #cymraeg #welsh #i'm not even welsh lmao

[ayeforscotland]

I used to use duolingo, but honestly...it's rubbish; I'm learning Welsh and duolingo is dreadful when it comes to explaining the mutations, so randomly letters would change. I've made more progress learning with an online welsh group than I have with that stupid green owl in ages...not to mention they're no longer updating the Welsh course :( (Plus the Welsh Language Course is free for 18 to 25 year olds, like hell yeah, no adverts, full language course with face-to-face groups, are you kidding me? Yeah, punting the owl into the sun for real).

Yeah, Duolingo has never been great for learning grammar. I've seen quite a few people argue it's supposed to be supplementary but that's not what Duolingo advertises itself as. Also over time the actual courses have stripped away any sort of focus. When I first started using Duolingo there were forums that I read regularly about regional changes and other wee linguistic gems that were super interesting. They either binned that feature entirely or made it impossible to find.

[petite-gloom]

Do you have a commonplace / journal solely for welsh?

no, because im not fluent! i was keeping language/vocabulary notes for a while but as i progress through the duolingo course (1000+ day streak!) i find im memorising more and understanding less. it's not really enough. when we move i'll take in-person lessons at a welsh school

#answers #cymru/cymraeg