Loss of Progress

[nerogarden]

How come in the past two months my unit progress has been lost twice? Its only me? Why does this keep happening?

[John Little]

It could be because they have updated your course and added some units. That has happened to me a few times (edit: twice*). Can you explain further?

• The first time when i had finished the old "tree" I was placed further back along the new "path". The second time was recently when, having completed the "path" I was put further back following the latest course update.

[dramadr]

This has happened to me at least three times! I am in section 5 of my course, with 200 units complete all of them legendary. Then they make a change to the course, and I lose legendary levels. I go back and repeat them and get them all to legendary again and they make another change, and I lose my progress again.

I spent the past month repeating lessons I had already completed, to get them all to legendary again. They just made a change to the course again. I logged in and over 100 units lost their legendary status . . . AGAIN!

Duolingo needs to fix this immediately!! Once you reach legendary, you should never loose it again. Even if they make a change to the course!

[Thomas.Heiss]

They've been pushing out their B1 and B2 course updates.

Even the last 1-2 French path updates changed something; in a comparison table I furthermore see added units in the earlier A1 and A2 sections.
Edit: Edit the longest Chinese path also got more units in the first four sections.

As we all know Duolingo has been relying on AI usage to generate the content.
I'm not so sure if there's someone to polish the content and to do the necessary QC.
As they were sooo fast to add all this brand new course content it wouldn't surprise me if maybe takes years to clean up all the first drafted mess which got auto generated.

Other European courses (based on Latin writing) and main languages (German, Italian,..) don't seem to use natural wordings anymore.
Or the created DE sentences don't make much sense or use incorrect grammar or accept the wrong alternative answers (there are examples out there that the auto-generated list accepts sentences which make no sense at all!! – I mean not for Chinese).
Users have been joking about courses with German as the base/source language how bad they've become in our own native language...

May I ask how do you want to use an Asian course with a very different writing system like Hanzi?

How will you want to check if the given sentence translation is correct, if the generated Chinese makes any sense or if any of those accepted answer alternatives in the DB are valid or not (for Chinese)?

Playing around with new course content (I don't believe there were clear alpha/beta testing phases because of the tight deadlines) is like fire.
You might burn your hands, both!

Especially with the hearts being in place on the web portal or with Energy on the newer mobile apps when your valid answers and word synonyms suddenly aren't accepted and you lose some.

Those Romance and Germanic languages already are a challenge for a learner in those higher sections.
Even our better volunteer EN->PT tree had several missing accepted answers for a long time (crowns introduction was one reason because some sentences got flagged for errors so many had to be suspended).
Only way was to check the "sentence discussions" in the lessons to see if anyone else reported something or to ask natives and advanced learners why your own answer was wrong or if it was actually OK (so you could report it again).

You can't do this anymore with Duolingo.

Now you have to only rely on asking AI about your given answers and mistakes.
The "Explain my mistakes" feature from Duolingo might not get it what the real issue was or what you had a personal problem with understanding a target language and grammar concept.
I even had to stop doing the older volunteer DE->FR tree with all the valuable discussions and course moderator tips missing.

Last thing what I would want to do is alpha-/beta testing of new (auto generated) content, finding obvious erros and continuously having to report your findings and corrections with lost hearts.

Something very new but untested, not verified & pre-approved by native speakers (as alpha-/beta testers), can't be really relayed on....if you ask me.
I wouldn't trust it, especially not in foreign Asian scripts.

[Thomas.Heiss]

Speaking about your lost Legendary levels:

Are you getting free text field typing exercises in the target language?
Or does Duolingo disallow this nowadays on the web portal or the mobile app?

Especially in a language like Chinese?

Or do they again force you using more of those back translation into English?
I heard from other users that Legendary levels got dumbed down again?!?

Testing new course content without a longer QC period could be a real pain for:

• free typing (no word banks)
• Chinese as the target language

Instead of you might see:

• a lot of multiple-choice questions (like the app is usually doing it since 2019)
• cloze-deletions (fill the blank) and
• forced word banks

In this case testing of an brand-new course content (auto generated by AI) might not be that risky as it is with free typing.

[Thomas.Heiss]

Wouldn't it make a bit more sense to focus more on the usage of commercial Chinese learning apps which have a clearer Asian focus and where content is carefully crafted by language specialists?

HelloChinese, LingoDeer, ChineseSkill come to my mind (a few got recommend on the /r/Duolingo Subreddit).
As I'm not a big fan of yearly subscriptions so finding one might not be that easy.

This means taking their time to review and double check the translations before they roll them out and not to focus on AI auto creation that much?

Especially for those higher levels Duolingo has been adding so quickly?!

It wouldn't hurt either to demonstrate the learner a different pedagogical learning approach one needs to take for Asian languages and Chinese in particular.
Hard to imagine that Duolingo is good for them all.

[Thomas.Heiss]

I know that WaniKani and Bunpro (grammar) exists for Japanese.

On Reddit I stumbled across an four years old tip for "Immersive Chinese" and other mentioned resources like Scritter.