Yeah, Duolingo has been resting a bit too much on its past accomplishments and still high popularity lately.
This feature is basically exactly what I would have expected them to offer me by now in return for the money I pay them each month.
Unfortunately Google is not an alternative for me, but I already have switched some of my learning to LLM chats elsewhere.
I am curious if Duolingo will be able to keep up again with the development in the long run…IDK exactly what Duolingo is, but it sounds like this new product gives you practice with spoken conversations? I’m unexcited by the idea of doing that with a computer but still, spoken language learning is completely different from written language.
The best thing for spoken language acquisition from my perspective has simply been listening a lot to live human speakers of the language, in person. That means either take a class with a human instructor, or travel to wherever they use that language. It’s ok to start with very limited ability. Bring a dictionary things will sink in over time.
Well, an AI is incredibly patient and you can toy around with the language freely without perhaps feeling embarrassed. That alone lowers the entry bar (especially for slightly awkward persons like myself…) considerably.
On top of that AI is dirt cheap compared to a personal tutor or traveling around the world.
So it would open effective language learning to a much broader audience than before, which undoubtedly is a good thing!
