They're killing the site as we loved it and are not respecting long-term users and their wishes, especially not for laddering- and reverse trees.
I wrote multiple times in their "What changes would you like to see?" threads not to forget about these power/Duome users.
So I paid 40EUR for a Busuu PremiumPlus member subscription (one year access to all courses, exams, grammar quizzes, formal grammar introduction, etc.) as other content is available.
Now I paid 99EUR+Vat to Mosalingua for a "Language lifetime bundle" (all languages, Dialogues, TravelStories, all modules incl. MosaTraining, MosaStories, MosaSpeak,..) on a BlackFriday deal.
It's not the question if I pay to Duolingo but WHY and what is contained in a Plus/Super/Gold membership.
I would donate money to the Portuguese contributor team with no hesitation for using their well-constructed course and getting sentence discussion and forum support. I really have been enjoying being part of this community and reading through the written Web Tips&Notes and detailed SD's by the PT moderator team and they did a really good job for so long.
Now Duolingo has locked all of the sentences. Can't even suggest to put some advanced comments to the T&N which go greatly into more detail about new concepts.
See my other comment here: viewtopic.php?p=36978-giving-up-on-duolingo#p36978
I doubt many adult long-term users will pay next New Year's sales for a Super memberhip as the direction from management and developers is set and clear.
Once you paid, the next things are getting removed...
An own user opinion and endless of change requests or signed "Change Petition: Duolingo Revert Path update -
Reverse newest update" https://chng.it/TfWYqMtqn5 does not count a single thing!
Instead of the HQ in Pittsburgh knows everything better how we want to learn/practice and enforces everything onto our heads (alle Lernende über nur einen Kamm scheren - eigene Benutzeroptionen für einen bestimmten Lernstil gibt es nicht und gab es noch nie, stattdessen mußte man sich lange versuchen mit Tampermonkey UserScripts über Wasser zu halten).
The last bit of flexibility is getting cut out of this software so it now truly fits a 6-9 years old child or younger.
No idea if a 2-4 years kid shall use it or not (who can't write or read).
Overfilling the screen with cartoon characters and wasting empty space doesn't count.
Word banks often don't fit the bottom and prefill the solution into the answer fully or partly.
But a professional website and usable screen area for sentences and words is not that important.
Haven't used the website that much lately but I do see my days counted to really make use of Duolingo for reverse-/laddering trees and to start learning French here.
Their linear path doesn't match if I learned French for one year somewhere else.
The Busuu Android app screen/UI gave me a relaxing time....no cartoons, no wrong TTS voices, nice colours, no animations, no cut back "simple route" logic.
It's a shame how many bug reports I have to submit as "wrong audio" and "Other error occured" detailed text description as the new TTS Pt-Br voices drop a lot of consonants. A beginner will just be confused, like I'm as a long-term learner.
My impression is not that technical staff is able to catch up and finally fix the broken Pt-Br rules engines or that the vendor is able to fix their voice library.
Was a nice refresher in 2022 to use something different than Duolingo alone
Well, okay, I NEVER liked the brainwashing (just one learning resource) so I always used Memrise, Mondly, 50languages in parallel to Duolingo and I still believe that Duolingo alone is not enough.
The SRS lacked. Compare the cycles to Memrise and you'll know why you hardly had remembers new words here.
I still like the Mondly UI but the word banks on the mobile app (and website) there are hardly toleratable on the advanced level settings for the Portuguese language. Pearson seems to have bought Mondly but my detailed feature requests from 1.5-2+ years ago were not realized yet. I want 100% free typing, no cloze-deletions or word banks.
Hopefully Duolingo will add some features to Plus/Super in the future which are really usable.
They should ask who is going to pay if the leave the old tree design with 5 crowns and Legendary
Or to rollout story functions like listening comprehension and speaking to EVERYONE as an option.
Not that I'm keen seeing all the chartoon characters in stories, not at all, so usually I don't do them in those languages I know already.
But I didn't continue with the nice old (but complicated) Portuguese stories. Hadn't known all vocabulary.
2-3 years later and we still can't save weak/difficult words to a MyVocabulary tab and expert from there to .CSV and professional SRS software.
So that's all not included with Duolingo. Why should I pay? For what now?
Also can I please get the old website layout back from 2016/17?
If I shall pay for Duolingo I should be able to decide what I want to have in my account and what custom settings I want to turn On or Off.
Next stop: One month of Pimsleur Premium (app) and playing around with Mosalingua.
Best regards from Germany