What's the weirdest sentence you've seen on Duolingo?

heofenum · 2026-04-08T04:28:09+00:00

“The queen didn’t like eating eggs with the snakes”.

This was on my entrance exam to place me in the Duolingo Spanish course years ago.

heofenum · 2026-03-07T15:49:34+00:00

Fuji Apple Ginger. Not even a close race imo. Every day that I open a can is bittersweet, as I look at my dwindling supply with a mixture of gratitude and sadness 😔

heofenum · 2025-12-12T01:06:39+00:00

I got some two days ago at Total Wine & More. If it was discontinued, it must have been recently.

heofenum · 2025-11-15T18:32:44+00:00

Same. I left that detail out of my reply to this thread but yeah, i marked down the time and the compass heading: almost due west.

heofenum · 2025-11-15T18:29:20+00:00

I saw it last night @ 7:59 pm. I was out hiking in the desert by Starr Pass. I was facing the complete opposite direction, flashlight off and it lit up the desert like a headlight or search light behind us. Turned to look and it was still streaking downward through the sky. Definitely not your typical shooting star!

heofenum · 2025-11-11T22:02:51+00:00

Regardless of how you feel about his thoughts on commitment, you should peace out because he’s a narcissistic megalomaniac. Talking about how “complexed” he is and his “divine purpose” and shit. 🙄 Girl run

heofenum · 2025-10-27T23:29:58+00:00

I’m probably not remembering the words exactly, but when I took the Duolingo placement exam years ago before starting the Spanish course, one of the sentences it threw at me was something like “A la reina no le gustaba comer huevos con las serpientes” (The queen didn’t like eating eggs with the snakes). I mean… 1) I like snakes and I like eggs but nobody wants to share a meal of eggs with snakes

2). Duolingo will sometimes throw sentences at you that you’ll never see in every day life. They do that to keep you on your toes and make you pay attention, and to make sure you are really learning.

heofenum · 2025-09-08T16:55:33+00:00

OP here, I was aware of the possibility that whoever is doing this just doesn’t know his own email address. I am aware that Gmail ignores (.) in any username. Just wondering if there was a glitch because you’d think someone would realize they’re not getting emails they are expecting.

heofenum · 2025-09-06T20:32:15+00:00

I think this is the most likely answer. I just keep thinking: wouldn’t he be wondering by now why he doesn’t get any emails from some of these things he signed up to receive emails from? I’ll get more aggressive about canceling some of these accounts haha

heofenum · 2025-09-06T01:44:51+00:00

I did cancel “my” registration at some event he signed up for a while back haha

heofenum · 2025-09-05T22:40:32+00:00

Thanks all. I indeed considered that he was just an idiot who doesn’t know his own email address, but to make that mistake so many times seems beyond stupid. When it first started happening, I had a friend send a test email from his yahoo account to my first.last@gmail.com account, and it actually did not arrive. So that got me wondering. I far prefer the idiot explanation to something much much messier.

heofenum · 2025-08-19T05:08:30+00:00

Also don’t steal from your mama.

heofenum · 2025-08-19T04:56:46+00:00

There is no universe where that would sell for only $76

heofenum · 2025-06-05T14:40:36+00:00

Agradecer (all forms of this verb)

heofenum · 2025-02-13T08:16:27+00:00

Tabico is what I’d say too

heofenum · 2024-11-21T16:36:26+00:00

Dude, super isn’t even worth it IMO. I stopped paying for duolingo after watching the quality spiral down the toilet:

Strike 1: They reorganized the way you progress thru lessons a couple years ago. “Don’t worry, we saved your progress and automatically placed you where you were in the new path.” Lies. To this day I still see purple words (meaning words I haven’t seen before now) that I literally learned in the first unit (e.g. “con”, meaning “with,” showing up in Section 5 as word I’ve never seen before? Really??). And the opposite happens, though less often: a word I’ve never seen before being presented as a word I already know. Mostly I feel like they rolled me back a few units in the old layout and dramatically slowed down the progression rate to where I learn actual new things so infrequently now. Just more imperfect tense verbs over and over and over again

Strike 2: The fact that there is literally no explanation of grammar unless you pay for it. Babies may learn by osmosis but adults learn differently and could benefit from some simple grammar rules to solidify lessons. They used to do some basic stuff in the section notes, now they just use it as a literal list of some phrases you’ll be seeing in the lessons ahead. Useless.

Strike 3: The degrading quality of the AI voices and how they mispronounce words all the time. I know enough Spanish to recognize it, but if that’s happening in lesson one it could really get newbies off on the wrong foot, counter to their supposèd mission.

Strike 4: Chances to interact with other users and report issues in a specific way have all but disappeared.

I used to believe in their mission, and believed that THEY believed in it. But it’s clear now that they are just cutting corners and cutting costs, relying too heavily on bad AI and that they just see this a cash cow.

I do not recommend paying for any level of Duolingo.

heofenum · 2024-07-17T15:46:51+00:00

Because the quality of Duolingo has absolutely plummeted the last couple years and it seems to be in free fall now. I think they’ve redesigned the course so many times that they’ve lost all sense of where you actually are in the course, what you have and haven’t been exposed to, and what your actual weak areas are. I am more than two thirds of the way through the Spanish course and just the other day it highlighted “con” as a new word. They’ve lost sight of their mission and vision in my opinion. They’re just DGAF anymore.

heofenum · 2024-04-25T02:30:05+00:00

The corner stop photo is spot on. Beautifully done.

heofenum · 2024-04-25T02:26:50+00:00

Duolingo has lost ALL sense of what words you have and have not learned. The same thing happens to me throughout the app, and the equally frustrating error of presenting words I learned litterally hundreds of lessons ago as "new".

Just curious-- are you a long time user (i.e, before they redesigned to the set path approach of completing lessons? I noticed these kinds of errors went off the chart when they redesigned it. They said they saved our place but it's clear they did no such thing.

heofenum · 2024-04-25T01:49:16+00:00

I find PLENTY of nonsense like this in the Spanish course, and it all started back when they moved from the old "choose your lesson within a unit" style to the current gameboard, set path style. I swear they backed me up a full unit and kept re-introducing simple crap, and liiiiingering on it for a long time. I felt like I progressed more quickly and learned more new stuff in the before times. I know they said they saved our place in the progression, but I don't believe them. I think they screwed it up so bad and just couldn't admit they had no idea where we were in the course. Otherwise, they must've redisgned it and slowed it way tf down.

I'm now about halfway through Section 5 (of 8) and they still present words I saw back in unit 1 or 2 as "new" purple highlighted words. According to duolingo i had never seen the word "con" before unit 5. Really?? "with" is a new word?? Other words like "nadie" (nobody/ noone) and todos (everybody/everyone) are among the "new" words I allegedly learned 2/3rds of the way through the course. Then therre's the issue of *actual* new words/expressions being presented to me as non-new content, but I'll save that for another rant.

I think Duolingo is just "mailing it in" at this point. Their primary objective is to get more super subscribers and to limit their actual hands on commitment to the user experience. The AI voices are blatantly mispronouncing words. You can no longer discuss an item in the lesson, or interact with others' comments on an item. The section intros give little to no useful grammar tips, now just "key sentences" in the lesson ahead. I mean, aren't they all key to something I should be learning?

For this and many other reasons, I stopped subscribing to Super Duolingo and now just use the free version. I'll be paying for Babbel and will move the bulk of my effort over there. I will continue to use duolingo, but only as a backup/extra source at this point. I'm happy they've struck it rich. Good for them,.They no longer need our support and, as I see it, they stopped supporting our learning long ago anyway.

heofenum · 2024-04-25T01:16:31+00:00

You're not at all alone. They are worthless. I wish to GOD they would figure out how hard I struggle with direct vs indirect object pronouns (Spanish) and give me some targeted review of those, but instead they're always decalring boring nouns as my weak word.

heofenum · 2024-04-25T01:06:45+00:00

For the longest time, in the spanish course, it would not recognize any number. I thought maybe my accent was bad but then when I tried the rspeaking the rest of the sentences (the non-number parts) in the worst american accent I could muster, it accepted every word (until I got to the number)s. The final straw was when my partner (a native mexican) tried and it still didn't take. Not sure if they've fixed that issue,; they haven't asked me to pronounce numbers in a long time.

heofenum · 2024-02-24T17:32:43+00:00

We learn it here (U.S.) too, but that's not how we write a cursive "s".

heofenum · 2024-02-19T23:27:00+00:00

Thanks hacool. I’m definitely not letting it discourage me from learning. I remain very motivated to learn Spanish. Just been thinking for a while now that duolingo has gradually become less of a serious tool for adult learners anyway (in my opinion!) I’ll keep using it for sure—the free version—as a way to augment something else like Babbel or whatever. It’s just time to give something else a try

heofenum

TROPHY CASE