American-British RU-vidr living in London. If you're new to my channel and videos, hi! I'm Evan Edinger, and I upload videos every Sunday evening. As an American (now Brit) living in London I love noticing the funny differences between the cultures and one of my most popular video series is my British VS American one. I'm also known for making terrible puns, learning German and Spanish on Duolingo, making reddit videos, as well as making photography / studio content (moreso on my second channel). I really love including you guys in my content so I try to make a few community videos with your comments on recent videos on Thursdays or Fridays. Hope to see you around, and I'll see you next Sunday! :)
I do get little extra XP all the time too, but I just started a month ago (Dutch) I just thought it was trying to get me on the paid plan at first, but it hasn't stopped yet after 30+ days
Ok admission time. I used to live on the European mainland and whenever we visited England we'd bring an empty suitcase with us to buy some food we were missing. We'd already found a shop abroad that sold PG Tipps. Marmite and Colman's mustard, so the things we brought back were a bit more "out there"... like swedes. I don't know why, but we could NEVER find swedes in Europe! I'm permanently grateful we never got stopped at the border and had to explain why we had a suitcase full of smuggled swedes.
1. I was/am skeptical of the news that Duolingo was letting go of some staff and were gonna lean in on "AI" but seeing these use cases..... im way more optimistic now. Just hope theyre still using real people to provide translations and lessons. 2. I love ur Spanish, Evan. You have a delightful accent in the outro and its way more neutral than when u play up the gringo accent to jokingly say your Spanish isnt that good. Thats insane you have like, comedic chops in a language u havent even mastered. ❤ love ur channel, man.
Out of all the implications of ai into things, this one actually seems like the most practical without being a privacy, security or theft nightmare. I'm actually interested in this. My only disappointment is that there's still no real fix for the privacy nightmare that is the public leaderboards. That's what lead to me, my brothers and friends, and even Markiplier to leave the app since you can't opt out of it without privating your whole account and losing the ability to compare scores with your actual friends. Mark left because of being bombarded by friend requests and messages every time he would do a lesson (deleted his account live during an episode of his podcast), and even though I wouldn't have that issue to that extent, clubs was a far superior feature in that regard since the "leaderboard" was literally just me and my friends and family as we learned German. Public and global leaderboards were optional, and you could have your account info privatized to anyone who wasn't in your friend's list. I can't stand the all or nothing mentality with the current setup, which leads me to chose nothing and just not use the app.
Beats living in an old broken down bus fetching water down the street and hand dumping liquid in the storm drain. I miss showering. Wipes just aren't the same.
I personally really wish this app gave a option to choose Spanish from Spain or Latin America. I wanted to learn Spanish, Castilian. But only to find out what I had been learning on this app was Latin American Spanish. Maybe there has been a update where you can choose? But I dropped it because I couldn’t choose
I’ve noticed the XP boost too. I’ve never understood why the practice lessons (like speaking or listening) would give you more XP than completing the lessons on your course, and since I’m XP driven I had found myself doing the practices rather than the lessons. It’s nice having progress rewarded better than it has been
I had the same thing, waited 7hrs in a&e before seeing someone. By which the pain had pretty much gone. But they kept me in for 3 days. Decided i had an injection which had inflamed the lymphnodes in my stomach that had caused severe ibs. And they a couple of weeks later sent me for a colonoscopy to double check things. Wierd, but thsnkfully i've not had it again. But previously i'd had servere abdo pain and that was my gallbladder which they removed 🤷♀️
Do we know if this video call feature is also available on android? Because I can't seem to find any in my path (and I'm learning spanish in english, so it's not because it's a less developed course).
are you paying for max for this video call feature? i just saw some games appear on my french timeline, but scrolling around there are no vdeo chats. (iphone 13 here) the only thing i've noticed change is advertisements for max after every question ('explain my answer!')
The core of the problem is just too many people. The more people you have, the less space a person can have. I suppose you could build upward and have 300 floor apartments but that still means ridiculously crowded streets. Traditionally Europe has fixed this problem by having a great big war to get rid of the excess people, but that is a bit immoral if you can avoid it. I recommend against it. Best to promote birth control. But instead you guys are importing even more people from all over the world for some reason. Insane. As long as you do these things expect the housing crisis to get worse.
Not only is it highly discouraging to find out the language(s) you are learning (or trying to, anyhow) are basically added in as afterthoughts and incomplete, but that if you want to actually have a complete learning experience you need to open the app on PC for the tips section because it is not included on mobile. I had gotten to the point in over three languages where I could not progress and the discussions remarked that if we were confused or stuck, the lesson tips had everything we needed (or external sites, in the case of Irish)... but we had to log in from the PC to see it. Until they fix that, I see no reason to go back. I got a plethora of other things to learn.
That's most of Duolingo unfortunately. Languages, features, even some settings are exclusive to the pc/web version. Very sad when most people, and their huge push is to be used on mobile and on the go.
I started watching your videos a couple years after my son died. I ran across you accidentally and something about you reminds me of him. He was about your age. I like to see what someone your age is up to, as I’ve lost contact with all his friends as they moved away from our small town over the years and became busy building their own lives. I don’t watch all the time but love to check up on what you’re up every once in a while.
I'd wonder if it's limited due to cost. While this is a great feature, is it free? Either it'll be free for a limited time, OR it'll be free along the path and repeatable for upgraded members. That's where I can the future of this tech. Get you to try it out and then have a tab for "Try again with Bird Pro" or whatever they call it now.
I'm at 519 days right now myself doing Japanese, but I don't see any of those icons on my path in section 3. I'm guessing it isn't as much of a prioritized language as larger ones like Spanish or English, but hopefully it will be added in time :)
I'm almost finished with the Scottish Gaelic course. It does not have the possibility to check pronunciation - which is likely a good thing. I was not asleep in the field. Cha robh mi nam chadal anns an achadh. Sounds like an elderly cat drowning in porridge.
I’m a little over halfway through level 4 in Spanish and haven’t seen the video call options yet. I’m looking forward to it. I’m glad to have the writing piece back, at least. Like someone else said, I do wish the conversation piece were back. I was on Duolingo back in 2018 mainly doing Russian. I just came back in March to do the Spanish. I was surprised at all the changes!
I’m generally pretty skeptical of the usefulness of AI in lots of situations, but this is one where it not only seems useful, but even magical, as you put it. Clearly a lot of thought went into this and “AI” wasn’t just slapped on to please investors or something. This is how it should be done.
Until they turn off leagues while keeping your friend updates, I won’t be able to use this app again. Leagues infuriate and stress me out because I can’t just ignore them, but also friends are always always ALWAYS what get me to pick Duo back up again for another try. And then I get exhausted trying not to drop out of my current league full of xp grinders, and their ads and idiosyncrasies piss me off again and I drop it. And so the cycle continues…
Man I don't have a lot of hope for these rolling out to Japanese, but I sure wish they'd roll out one feature I saw in one of your previous videos: The ability to re-order words in your answer. That's not a thing in Japanese on Android, which is a real bummer because sentence construction in Japanese is radically different than English so sometimes you realize you forgot a "now" or "today" or "at 3:00 p.m." at the beginning and your only option is to /remove every word from your answer/ and start over again.
The AI seems like an impressive, good use of the technology, but I think the rollout of it will probably depend on availability of human quality assurance staff that specialize in that language just because since AI can learn, you want to make sure over time it doesn't learn mistakes from the user base. Like you want to make sure it understands users, but the language the AI uses should always be correct. So someone probably has to check conversations it has with users to help maintain quality and make sure the AI is actually learning things that are helpful. Like we've heard about chatbots that have been out online and other places that learned horrible things from the internet. This is on more of a micro scale, but similar could happen where the AI learns something not good that diminishes the experience for all so you need a human to tweak it periodically.
The video call feature reminds me of an activity from my college classes in VHLcentral. Except those use standardized questions and responses that don't change based on my answer, then my answer is manually graded by my professor. I think this does bring duolingo slightly closer to the quality of my college online classes. I wish they hadn't removed the more in-depth grammer explanations, though. Honestly, I still think they're overusing AI. It's great to use it as a tool for new features, but the AI explanations don't adequetely replace the discussion forums, and the AI translations don't allow for the level of nuance and understanding that human translators and language experts give. Especially for languages that aren't widely discussed on the internet, like Welsh.
I’m not seeing the call feature ☹️ I don’t expect to see it in my Italian course (it’s usually pretty behind), but I don’t see it in my Spanish course either (I’m far along in Spanish, in the B2 section). I also don’t get the little animations. :(
For simplicity's sake Americans can think of 100 km/h as 60 mph and 110 km/h as 70 mph. In the case of the former it is slightly more and in the latter it is slightly less. Won't change the speed limit you would have to abide by in w rental car obviously, but at least you would have more of an idea how fast you are going in a unit of speed you know.
I quit Duolingo over a year ago because of a combination of frustration with the changes to the app and dealing with the death of my mom and it's aftermath. It left me sad to have quit my language learning. These updates sound exciting. I might just have to give it a try again. Thank you for making the video about it.
This is the whole point of AI. It's supposed to be a learning tool. Also, I'm glad they're working on listening now. I can read nearly B2 but my speaking and listening are only B1ish
