Back using Duolingo after a month break. The gamification is so annoyingly lopsided on the side of clicking chests and unlocking prizes. Also looking at Babbel.

@manton I’ve had good results with Seedlang (German in my case but they’ve Spanish and French too). It has elements of gamification but not nearly as grotesque

@manton the web ui is thick with that and the iOS/Android version is 10x that 😬

@manton Maybe try Mango Languages?

@manton I found Memrise pretty good as an alternative in the past, especially when it comes to practicing understanding native speakers, and Pimsleur is great, too, though that works quite differently.

@manton have you checken out https://morpheem.org One Person project. No gamifiction. Relies heavily on AI. Good explanations, You can feed real world articles into it.

@manton FWIW, I used Duolingo for several months before moving to Sweden. It helped for basic vocabulary, but for overall language comprehension, the over-gamification didn’t really help me. And the whole leader board thing stressed me out 😅 Babel was better for me…

@manton Welcome back after the break! The best tool is the one you keep coming back to, so it’s great you’re trying both. Hope one gives you the right rhythm.

@manton yeah I wish I had the ability to opt out of some of these parts of the app. It can be too much sometimes.

@manton I often wonder how long Duolingo can continue as they are. Seems like a ripe market for a personalized AI tutor.

@manton Once I paid for Duolingo I began liking it. 1300 consecutive days now, did all available Spanish and some chess, and looking at refreshing German and or French too