Can confirm Duolingo’s poor decision practice. They advertised their Duolingo Super subscription with a discounted price, it popped on the island bar. After I was done with what I was doing, I launched the app and disabled all notifications. As I should’ve done weeks ago when gave it a go.
About Duolingo being a bad language teacher, there is only so much they can do. Limited to formal rules and oblivious, for multiple reasons, of how a language evolves and is different in regions, sometimes inside the same country. As a non-native English speaker, I learned English by the books. Teachers followed the proper grammar, rules, pronunciation, you name it. When I started watching movies in English language, I noticed things don’t exactly follow these rules - and a ton of slangs and regionalisms only used at certain locations. Decades later I had my first experience coming to America. It was quite a shock how different English was from the one I was taught. Fast forward another decade and I find myself living in Baltimore - and hearing folks talking to me as if I am in a rap lyric. And don’t get me wrong, I still remember me proudly watching Call of the Wildman, listening and comprehending the Turtle Men guy without subtitles.
All that to say Duolingo is not a terrible tool. It gives you directions, but it is up to you to experience the real deal after you are way more than certain you can take the world out of the language game called Duolingo.
