Duolingo: “JKR is mean”

[SidewaysOtter]

https://x.com/seeredwoman1/status/1957902960148771303?s=46

Jesus, is nowhere safe from this shit?

I hope JKR’s lawyers are cracking our their very best “terse letter” pens this morning.

Just deleted the app. Despite my 1800+ streak I’d become weary of the preachy nagging and this is the final straw.

Left 1* review and deleted. Couldn't cope with the endless notifications anyway.

Article in the Times:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/ead5c197-243b-4e42-b742-c6f17f209f85?shareToken=aaf7e0b6e2c000e657eed5446d5797a7

Good on Gaby Koppel though.

Deleted my Duolingo too. Finished Ukrainian which was bad anyway but I won't put up with this anti JKR stuff . Gods am wondering if their Hebrew app says unpleasant things now...

I'm on a very long Duolingo streak (French, and nearly completed the course).

There have been a handful of times when I thought the content was ill-advised. One unit had stuff about gender and sentences along the lines of there are many genders, etc. I can't remember it all now but I remember finding it annoying. Every now and then there is definitely some "pointed" content.

Nothing as bad as the JKR thing, though.

Hilariously, a TRA old acquaintance of mine just posted that he would be deleting Duolingo because they've apologised and removed this content. Very funny that they could lose customers from both sides because of this!

Amazing that he is complaining because he WANTS a language app to have controversial political statements for no reason (of course as long as they reflect HIS increasingly niche views).

I wouldn't say I've found lots of political content on Duolingo, but occasionally something pops up that's a bit jarring - something the developers thought was completely uncontroversial, and didn't realise not everyone shares their sensibilities.

The Gaelic course is pretty good, though there are others out there.

As always with commercial entities, Michael Jordan's statement that "Republicans buy sneakers too" is worth bearing in mind.

Ffs. Duolingo is my daily bit of fun with ds and I’m on a 1068 day streak. I don’t pay for it, just the free version but I’ve enjoyed learning different languages to a very, very basic level. Why do so many companies feel the need to stick their nose into political issues. Ffs.

Language Transfer is absolutely brilliant, they’re podcasts (5-10 mins each episode) which really teach you how a language works. Totally free although they appreciate donations! https://www.languagetransfer.org/

Lingodear (not free, but not too expensive) is better than Duolingo for Mandarin.

Cantonese is hard to get hold of anything good.

You do know, I presume, that Duolingo has a Cantonese course that you can only access via Mandarin. I raced through the whole course at speed to refresh my half-forgotten Cantonese when it became clear that Duolingo was going to change their 'tree' to the present crappy system.

Apart from that there are various things to help learn Cantonese that people have uploaded onto the community pages of Memrise. (Memrise has made those pages very hard to find, but they do still exist so far.)

Well, goodness me, thank you for that. Perfect.

You do understand that it is insulting and provocative? There is nothing wrong with content such as "My ex-husband is mean," or "My neighbour is mean," but naming real individuals or real groups is altogether different. How would you feel about content such as, "Muslims are terrorists," or "Brexiteers are stupid"? Some people think this, and they may say it too, but it would be very unprofessional to include it in a language learning app.

I've been struggling with the Gaeilge course on Duolingo (I can't maintain interest in the content for some reason) and I would love to take up online live language learning with a Gaeilgeoir except I fear that in this day and age they'd be likely to be even more woke than Duolingo. I fear I might have to drag my old Progress in Irish textbook out of a press and dust off the cobwebs 😖

This targeted negative description of JKR by Duolingo is mindbogglingly infantile behaviour. I'm glad they've removed it and I hope they have learned that people want to learn languages with them not politics.

I tried one called Busuu as an adjunct to Duo to learn French. You could use a free version with some functions disabled, regular pleading to upgrade and, I think, ad interruptions. You got feedback from other users. It had a set of exercises centered around real llife murders of children. One was a little boy. He was abducted and his body was found tied up and dumped in a river. I told them what I thought of them, in bad French, and haven't used it since. I'm getting angry all over again thinking about it. The other crime used as an example was worse.

@IcakethereforeIam wow, that is just horrendous.

OMG that’s awful.

My suspicion is that no human being ever conceived, wrote, or allowed this into DuoLingo. I don't work for DL, but suspect that a lot of these phrases are creeping in because they are trending online. JKR is widely considered - outside of small echo chambers - to be a repulsive human being so that trends across the internet which is (probably) then scraped up by DL bots and ends up in their app.

Also, for the record, I'd absolutely steer clear on the simplistic, gamified pile of steaming proverbial that is DuoLingo. Far, far better apps for languages exist.

Are you American, by any chance?

Loud and proud, honey 😀🇺🇲

Edit: And no, I'm not a follower of POTUS if that's what you were asking. The man has no honor.

Yeah, I thought so.

The view that JK Rowling is "a repulsive human being" might be mainstream among Democrat voting Americans who don't have a Scooby Doo about anything that goes on outside their borders, but it's not the same in other countries.

In the UK it really is just people in trans activist echo chambers who consume too much American nonsense who hold that view. Most people either wholeheartedly agree with her or don't give a shit either way.

Ugh I was just talking to someone this week and saying I wanted to pick Duolingo back up - used it extensively in the past. Not an option for me now

JKR is widely considered - outside of small echo chambers - to be a repulsive human being

Nice attempt to come in here an “educate” us but you’ve only got to look at Twitter, newspaper comments sections or indeed JKR’s book sales/popularity of Hogwarts Legacy (despite an attempted boycott) to see that this simply isn’t true.

It might be you that’s in the “small echo chamber”.

So I've now been Duolingo free for about a week with zero regrets.

For the last few months I've been getting to 10pm and reluctantly doing my Duolingo lessons after a panicked/wheedling notification from Duolingo about my bloody streak.

Now I'm winding down before bed with a bit of piano practice instead, which is a much better use of my time.