Thursday, June 15, 2023

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.
The last time I restarted the course from scratch was back in November.  At that time, Duolingo had redesigned their website to make their courses more linear.  (For more information on that redesign, see this news article from August 2022: Duolingo’s redesign has some fans up in arms. Its CEO says it’s not turning back.  That article is from August, but my experience was that the redesign didn't hit the Vietnamese course until November.)
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.  
Anyway, follow my progress on Duolingo HERE.   The quizlet which I use to consolidate all of my Duolingo vocabulary is HERE.  And the last times I mentioned Duolingo on this blog are HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.  
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1 comment:

Joel Swagman said...

Update: Turns out I spoke too soon. The nonsensical sentences are still there. They've just been moved to later in the course.

November 27, 2023 at 10:17 PM

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