It's a bad idea to imitate Duolingo, which has become VC without a purpose.
The gimmick behind Duolingo was that there were so many things online and in the world that needed to be translated, so training people to learn languages while translating them was a win-win. We don't really need humans to translate written material anymore (esp with AI advances), and they never seemed to find a business model for that anyway.
Since the gimmick is gone, it's just a generic language learning app with unimpressive results. And that still uses primitive spaced repetition algorithms. The bottom fell out. But since Duolingo had attracted a ton of cash on their founders rep from reCaptcha, it zombies on.
I've had my account since the beta, and while I think it's good because it exposes people to a ton of words and utterances in their target language which they will hopefully roll around in their mouths, that's like step 1 in learning a language. Anecdotally, I had to abandon Duolingo entirely in order to learn Spanish; and not for a class or tutoring, but for their competitors both online and traditional.
Techniques in language learning seem to be advancing quickly (like with spaced repetition, TPRS, and Krashen-inspired stuff), but Duolingo seems to be studiously ignoring them all, and plowing on doing the same thing. I think they should ditch everything but the cartoons, which are cute. But their base gets outraged whenever they change anything because Duolingo's changes were made in order to shift to getting revenue from the users rather than from "translation," so the users do not trust them.
So Duolingo really have nothing but cute cartoons and a brand name. LibreLingo looks like they have cartoons, too. Other than those, there's nothing to distinguish Librelingo from any other Spanish-learning website.
The gimmick behind Duolingo was that there were so many things online and in the world that needed to be translated, so training people to learn languages while translating them was a win-win. We don't really need humans to translate written material anymore (esp with AI advances), and they never seemed to find a business model for that anyway.
Since the gimmick is gone, it's just a generic language learning app with unimpressive results. And that still uses primitive spaced repetition algorithms. The bottom fell out. But since Duolingo had attracted a ton of cash on their founders rep from reCaptcha, it zombies on.
I've had my account since the beta, and while I think it's good because it exposes people to a ton of words and utterances in their target language which they will hopefully roll around in their mouths, that's like step 1 in learning a language. Anecdotally, I had to abandon Duolingo entirely in order to learn Spanish; and not for a class or tutoring, but for their competitors both online and traditional.
Techniques in language learning seem to be advancing quickly (like with spaced repetition, TPRS, and Krashen-inspired stuff), but Duolingo seems to be studiously ignoring them all, and plowing on doing the same thing. I think they should ditch everything but the cartoons, which are cute. But their base gets outraged whenever they change anything because Duolingo's changes were made in order to shift to getting revenue from the users rather than from "translation," so the users do not trust them.
So Duolingo really have nothing but cute cartoons and a brand name. LibreLingo looks like they have cartoons, too. Other than those, there's nothing to distinguish Librelingo from any other Spanish-learning website.