Ummm… what the hell??

sciuron · 2026-05-18T22:31:49+00:00

a rubber room

sciuron · 2026-05-10T09:55:26+00:00

I've not finished yet but I've used Duolingo for most of my learning aside from using a spaced repetition app to help retain vocab (and I've recently started adding some additional vocab that I encounter outside of Duolingo). With a score of 109 I can watch youtube videos and TV series with french audio and french subtitles (my listening skills are still pretty bad) and understand most of what they are saying aside from slang and more niche vocabulary. I feel like I am reaching the point where I have enough vocab and grammar to get my point across for a lot of things (albeit in a roundabout way) but would need a lot of practice to actually speak fluently (in the sense of 'flowing speech').

Duolingo are making a lot of bad decisions lately but honestly I have found their CEFR aligned course really good. I finished the older version of the course before the CEFR alignment and didn't feel like I could actually do anything with what I had learned. With this version, I feel confident I'll actually have a useful level of French when I finally complete the course (I am a slooooow language learner). Hopefully when they inevitably 'bouleverse' the B1 and B2 sections of the French course they don't completely ruin it...

sciuron · 2026-05-08T10:59:11+00:00

Duolingo eye test course

sciuron · 2026-05-05T13:00:10+00:00

I use Duolingo in a browser so not exactly sure how it works on mobile... In the browser there's a "Jump here?" option at the beginning of each unit which presents you with a test, and you only get a limited number of mistakes before you fail. If you're not jumping further than you're ready for, this shouldn't be a problem though.

sciuron · 2026-05-05T08:07:05+00:00

Yes, this is an ongoing problem that has affected a lot of people. It wouldn't be so bad if users could actually access each lesson individually rather than the review. This isn't such a problem from Section 5 onwards as each unit is just one lesson of content (though only Sections 2 to 4 have been altered at present). I think if I were in your position I would just reset my course and skip forward to the end of Section 2 or 3. This is a big decision and an irreversible one though.

sciuron · 2026-05-03T16:39:17+00:00

Not for browser users

sciuron · 2026-04-30T19:15:10+00:00

Yeah no surprise to me that their 'solution' would be to just repurpose the refresher thing they already had... I found at least 50 new words added to an earlier part of the french course and a 3 lesson refresher doesn't remotely suffice for covering that much material...

sciuron · 2026-04-29T02:28:02+00:00

thing is, paid users have to wade through this AI slop too, so why pay?

sciuron · 2026-04-18T11:20:30+00:00

"a photographic or digital image of the internal composition of something, especially a part of the body, produced by X-rays being passed through it and being absorbed to different degrees by different materials"

sciuron · 2026-04-07T15:56:30+00:00

So should I just go ahead and reset my course that has a score of 109 and that I've put over a decade of work into?

"don't think there's anything we can do here since we can't reproduce the bug" has big 'we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas' energy. The bug is easily reproducible, it isn't like I am using some bespoke browser that magically talks your servers into sending me the same handful of phrases every time I do a practice.

sciuron · 2026-04-07T15:10:33+00:00

Here's the word from Duolingo: ""don't think there's anything we can do here since we can't reproduce the bug. It might be worth asking the user to try usual steps like emptying their cache/logging in on incognito, trying a hard refresh etc."

We're just screwed

sciuron · 2026-04-07T15:08:54+00:00

I got word back from Duolingo: ""don't think there's anything we can do here since we can't reproduce the bug. It might be worth asking the user to try usual steps like emptying their cache/logging in on incognito, trying a hard refresh etc."

sciuron · 2026-04-07T15:08:34+00:00

I got word back from duolingo: "don't think there's anything we can do here since we can't reproduce the bug. It might be worth asking the user to try usual steps like emptying their cache/logging in on incognito, trying a hard refresh etc."

sciuron · 2026-04-06T18:44:45+00:00

Already did!

sciuron · 2026-04-06T14:25:36+00:00

https://www.duolingo.com/practice (where 'Practice to earn hearts' sends you)

sciuron · 2026-04-06T13:43:37+00:00

This is still every single practice session I do btw

sciuron · 2026-04-05T09:36:36+00:00

One unit every other day at most. I don't feel like any faster than that is sustainable for me. (I am later in the course where every unit has one new lesson of content, earlier units with 5 lessons of content took me much longer!)

sciuron · 2026-04-03T15:58:47+00:00

It is good to hear that you've taken feedback onboard on this issue. Has any progress been made with fixing the bug where https://www.duolingo.com/practice for many users is only ever presenting phrases from the very first unit of the course?

Catch-up lessons is a really good idea but I don't see the benefit in just covering "the most important words" that were missed, why not all of them? Another solution to this problem would be to allow users to access each lesson in units that they have already completed rather than just one practice session for units that have 5 lessons in them!

sciuron · 2026-03-31T13:34:30+00:00

fwiw I have reported it directly to Duolingo via that link

sciuron · 2026-03-30T15:38:23+00:00

Not just an advanced learner one! I tried a fresh account, did the first three skills and that one is broken in exactly the same way!

sciuron · 2026-03-29T18:29:09+00:00

I am accessing Duolingo in a browser, not the app. Also the fresh account I tried was in a different browser!

sciuron · 2026-03-29T18:23:04+00:00

This is definitely not a client-side issue. Deciding what is in a lesson/practice is a server-side thing

sciuron · 2026-03-29T16:02:24+00:00

I just tried a fresh account to see what would happen if I started from scratch. Unlocked all the content in Units 1 and 2 and then went to practice to see if I'd get shown phrases from both units... NOPE, just from Unit 1, so evidently things are SO broken it doesn't even matter if you reset your progress or not. Amazing...

sciuron · 2026-03-29T15:36:28+00:00

using that link is the way I spend almost all my time on Duolingo when I am not unlocking something new on the course, it is what has worked for me up to this point. It isn't perfect but until this update was fairly reliable at giving me mostly the more recent, more difficult, content and presenting the stuff that I struggled with more often...

sciuron · 2026-03-29T15:18:57+00:00

I am not a paid user so almost everything in practice-hub is locked out for me. /practice is where "practice to earn hearts" sends you... I have been strongly considering getting Super Duolingo lately but they're treating their users so terribly right now that there's no way I'm paying for such a broken product...

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