So, I've just deleted all progress on Duolingo's Vietnamese course, and gone all the way back to the beginning of the course.
Again.
At the time the redesign hit, Duolingo shuffled how its lessons were arranged. They attempted to preserve my progress by placing me midway on the new course. (I had been roughly halfway through the old course before the redesign.) But I quickly realized that because of the reshuffling, I had missed out on some units, and I was frustrated at having missed some key lessons. So I just deleted all my progress and restarted.
...actually I've lost track of how many times I've deleted all my progress on Duolingo and restarted. I think I first started Duolingo back in 2015 or 2016. (
I wrote about my experiences on Duolingo back in 2017, but I had been using it for a while before then.) I would study it for several months, then get busy at work and miss a few days, and then just give up on it. And then I would come back to it several months later, and realize I had forgotten half the words I had learnt, and decide to just restart the whole course from the beginning. I must have restarted Duolingo 2 or 3 times, even before the infamous redesign hit in November 2022.
...but anyway, two days ago, I just got notified that Duolingo had changed its Vietnamese course again.
This time it looks like it's the content of the course they've changed, not the structure.
Again, they attempted to preserve my place on the course, by placing me roughly a quarter of the way through the new course. (I had been about roughly a quarter of the way through the old course.) But, after a few lessons, I quickly realized that there were a lot of new vocabulary words on the new course that I had missed out on because they'd occurred in earlier lessons. So I just restarted the course again.
The introductory lessons from the redesigned course are full of vocabulary that I had never learned on the old course, so I think I'm glad I restarted.
Gone, as far as I can see, are all the old nonsense sentences that Vietnamese Duolingo used to be so famous for. ("Bee and Coffee", "The Goat is at the Ferris Wheel", "The glove is at the station", "you are that chicken" etc)
I don't know, maybe these strange sentences will start popping up again a little bit further down the course. But they're not in the introductory lessons.
The new course actually looks like it has useful sentences and vocabulary instead--how to order drinks, how to introduce yourself, how to communicate at work and school, etc.
So, maybe it will be a better course.
I just hope that this time, I will be able to complete the course before they redesign it again, and screw up all my progress. We'll see.
