Duolingo much better course in some languages

[Phil67b]

Dear all,

I studied English to Romanian for a few month.
Recently I switched to English to Spanish and a saw a huge difference in the course. Everything is better : I need to speak more, there are a few stories I need to listen, the course seems less boring and have some questions with specific pictures.
I am using an iPhone.
So it is like there is a version 2 for a specific couple of courses and this helps a lot to be addictif to the course.
My question : do you have a link explaining all the features of this new version and do you have a link of all the pairs having this huge improvement ?

Thanks

Philippe

[SansEspoir]

Yeah some of the courses are much better than others, anyone who has been on duolingo for a while knows that.
It's because it all used to be built by volunteers, and the effort they put in varied. They had some basic guidelines to follow, but were pretty free to do what they wanted. But some courses, like the spanish one, has been done mainly by Duolingo Staff and have gotten a lot of attention. They were the first to get stories, for instance. Some languages still don't have those.

After duolingo took over the courses, they have stated they want to make it all more similar and CEFR aligned. But still, most of the attention goes to their moneymakes, aka spanish, french and german. And english from spanish, I think it was.

[Corinnebelle]

@Phil67b I would guess the longer the course the better it will be. I know more popular languages will be better.

[Thomas.Heiss]

They have stated they want to make it all more similar and CEFR aligned.
But still, most of the attention goes to their moneymakes, aka Spanish, French and German.
And English from Spanish, I think it was.

• English from Portuguese
  (that tree or path is quite huge too, got aligned with CEFR in 2018/2019; got several incremental updates)

[Thomas.Heiss]

Do you have a link of all the pairs having this huge improvement?

For example: The "Portuguese from English" course is not aligned with CEFR, but also has 25 story sets
(not as many as Spanish or French; all older non-cartoon comic PT stories which had several 4 or 5 parts got deleted, so can only be accessed by the link story collections or LTS story project on the Duome forum).

Portuguese does not have podcasts - that is reserved for Spanish and French or English...or maybe German.

It is the same volunteer course (tree) which last update was in summer 2018 (has 91 skills on the tree).

Here is a summary from me about current issues (path, removed informations) after learning with it for 6.75 years (only using the old tree; I have switched to the old Android app version to stay on the old tree) vs a fresh new Portuguese learner (who starts on the new path design and does not anymore see any of those old web or app tips):

viewtopic.php?t=19866

I'm not sure if and how many PT contractors are working on this one (e.g. cleaning up old backlog of reports).
But in general the state of older sentences is not "that bad". Meaning that the course might have seen more work on it than other almost abandoned courses which nobody has applied any fixes for.
Several things got fixed with the frozen En<->Pt sentences which the crowns update brought back to us in 2018, but not all.

It is safe to assume that several courses (before the shut down of the Incubator, removal of contributors, take over from staff or contractors) may have hundreds of thousands of outstanding reports in the queue (huge backlog).
I only read this about the DE->ES course which Dirk applied as a contributor for and he put a lot of work into it before he got kicked out of the Incubator in April 2022 (or 21) and he seemed to be able to having significantly reduced the backlog of error reports.

They (staff or contractors) only changed Portuguese (from English) to the newer path design but that way removed all useful existing informations
(written Web Tips & Notes by volunteers can be accessed on www.duome.eu/tips/en/pt, mobile tips for each skill published by staff's linguistic team can only be viewed on the old Android app or on external resource web sites; discussion forums with very good detail explanations from native Portuguese speakers and course moderators are gone).

..(...)..

No, this Portuguese - highly grammar focused - course has not all the CEFR features / newer type of exercises from Spanish or French (from English) (reading paragraphs, double cloze deletions,..) which rollouts got started in 2018/19 and have seen a lot of general and restructure work.

But with 4.4 millions of (active) PT learners according to www.duolingo.com/courses/en it is somewhere to be found in the middle of the Non-Cefr volunteer courses and those newer Cefr courses.
It is definitely an exception and got some more care or features than other contributor (or abandoned) courses (once they got released).

Several new PT sentences (from AI tool generation) got also added to the database (which unfortunately now lack several accepted answer alternatives - only thing which we can do is to report alternative answers where they are needed).

Sorry to hear that the Romanian course with 823k users has not seen a lot of work in the last years (e.g. to fix wrong or missing hints, to cleanup sentence user reports, adding alternative answers, fixing translations, unnatural Romanian or English sentences,..).

---

Another good course might be the volunteer French from German tree which has 1.57 mio. active learners.

No, I have no statistics about outstanding sentence reports (backlog queue).
No, it does not have stories or podcasts.

But the former contributor team around Aileme put a lot of work into it including sentence discussions (which are gone now).
With 126 skills and 6 sections that tree is not too short either.

[SweNedGuy]

There are podcasts aimed to Portuguese speakers learning English. The Portuguese narrator describes the story and the (generally American) English protagonist is speaking about the event.

Histórias emocionantes em um Inglês fácil de entender

You can also read the transscript with the fragments of the Brazilian narrator (Helena Fruet.)