Why are there no Stories?

[Dingbat]

Hi
My son is learning French and I am learning Swedish and it's different. I don't get 'stories' and I only have one speaker whereas my son has a few different voices.
We're both paying so I'd like to know why he gets a better experience.
I have tried several times to reach out to Duoling and I find it appalling that there is no response to paying customers.

[Explorer]

Welcome to Duome @Dingbat!

Not all Duolingo courses are the same. Some courses are longer, have more content, and are updated more frequently, while others haven't changed in years. Some languages, like French, are very popular and have much larger user bases. This means they often have more features, like stories, multiple voices, etc.

[Thomas.Heiss]

Swedish was a volunteer contributor course.

French and Spanish (both from English) have been taken over by staff (their linguistic team), aligned with CEFR, and have been actively re-developed since 2018 (first rollouts of A/B tests).

That's six!!! years of heavy restructurings and extensions.

AFAIK all of the ACTIVE development (e.g. new features/challenges, reading exercises, lomger paragraphs,..) mainly goes into these two CEFR courses.

Especially if you do them on an iOS device.

The old French / Spanish and Portuguese TTS voices got replaced by Azure AI voices incl. matching characters, mouth movements.

It doesn't matter really if you pay or not.
The content stays the same.

Furthermore Super gives you access to the Practice hub: https://www.duolingo.com/practice-hub

English from xyz has been staff's second most priority for several base/source languages to bring them up to CEFR B2 standard.

Most Ex-volunteer courses have stayed in their current form (e.g. Portuguese) but got changed a bit for the new path overlay UI.

I occasionally see NEW sentences are getting added to the Portuguese course, with the help of AI generation, but with several missin answer alternatives (e.g. optional pronouns or Tu forms - the new sentences require one form and mostly disallow the other valid answer(s)).

[Thomas.Heiss]

For the French stories:

This is probably temporarily, maybe a new bug, some maintenance update, etc.

I'm not aware of any official announcement by staff or on the /r/Duolingo Reddit channel.

viewtopic.php?t=31123-duolingo-stories- ... nch-course

The Tampermonkey Userscript (old website code, the nice tree design) still has the separate Stories Tab:

viewtopic.php?t=24395-userscript-to-res ... lingo-tree

I could open 1-2 stories that way with the direct Web Url links (referenced from the dedicated stories tab which got removed on the path - both for the new Web and mobile app).

[Thomas.Heiss]

How about this community project:

https://duostories.org/sv-en

I am learning Swedish and it's different.
I don't get 'stories'.

While your Swedish course has 2.25 millions of ACTIVE learners (at least one lesson per year) there is always the hope that they will catch up at some point.

Portuguese has stories too, if you're maybe interested (less than French or Spanish).

The new DE->ITA course only has 1.46 million of learners while the EN->ITA version has 12.3 million.
I'm not sure if they got stories or not.

What about Norwegian/Bokmal?

..(...)..

There is a YouTube channel of someone mainly learning Swedish and he has given up / paused the French progress to focus on the SV speaking side.

Maybe I'll find his channel again...I have not taken a closer look what other resources he's suggesting.

The product "Ouino languages" I heard about from him is reserved for the other languages like French or Spanish (or German).

[Thomas.Heiss]

French Stories are back, both on the Web portal and the Android app.