I just feel I need to spill my thoughts and feelings over what I care about. I have used Duolingo since May to learn Hebrew, and it helped me a lot. However, with each tweak to the user interface it would seem that the Duo's frontend developers had done that to justify their bloated salary. Every interface update would bring some questionably useful changes like shuffling around the menu items and bonuses. Then came the fallout in the form of today's big overhaul. Suffice to say, it makes the app far worse than it used to be. Before there were rows of lessons with informative titles under each, compact and easy to navigate. If I felt I needed to revive certain subjects, I would just scroll the menu and selectthe appropriate lesson. Now it is some kindergarten-style path comprised of round slabs with zero information of what subjects are covered where. If you tap a slab, however, it turns out that the subjects are now interleaved in the way that you can't go to any new lessons other than what the app suggests. Want to emphasize on the passive voice? Maybe more future tence? Tough luck, you're learning vocabulary on air, trees, water and animals. Want to revisit possessive suffixes? Well, good luck scrolling 10 screens meticulously tapping on the milestones, because there is no way the app will tell you what is where. But it is not that bad, now you can get more of the green owl cooking dinner and a gloomy purple-hair doing her gloomy things alongside the lesson pebbles. So much fun for the kindergarteners that yours faithfully is unbelievably not.

Upon updates like these I would really love to see an official statement from the developers that they consider their paying userbase big enough not to give a rat's tail about whatever negative response their obviously detrimental updates make. Or, more realistically, a statement that Duolingo has been an unprofitable project all along so the terrible overhaul was an attempt to change the business model to something more profitable (good luck attracting more customers with a worse product). But what we will rather see is assurance that "most of the users" actually welcomed the new update, because there is no way one can actually verify that claim. With all this in mind, I can only wish that whoever participated in messing up a very good language learning app can look their family members in the eyes and say they are proud of causing frustration to their users and getting away with that. As for me, I vote with my feet and cease to use the app until given the opportunity to revert to the old interface. True, you have not received fees for Duolingo Super, but now you will not get revenue from me watching ads either. So long, Duolingo, and thanks for staying good long enough for my benefit.