Leaderboard

This has been bugging me for some time now. I don't understand the popularity of Duolinguo. I used to learn with Busuu and I don't really understand how it happened that Duolinguo has taken over the market... Is it customer care? Better experience? More colors? :-) Can anyone explain? Thanks

If there's something Duolingo lacks, it's the ability to admit the mistakes they make. I'm a native Dutch speaker and I did their Dutch course to report errors and help them improve the course. I only started and I reported loads of mistakes already, but only 1 of those were taken seriously. "Jullie geven hun de hoed" obviously means "you guys give their the hat", not "you guys gave them a hat". I know every native speaker will go like "WTF?!" when they read "jullie geven hun de hoed" because it's grammatically wrong. And yet they told me I was wrong and THEY are right. WTF?! And even some sentences I answered correctly were counted as incorrect. I reported them all, but none of which were ever taken seriously. So that's how I lost my motivation to use Duolingo forever. I wouldn't even recommend it even if the moderators were dictating me to do so!

It's out of context learning, which isn't always a bad thing in small doses, but shouldn't be the main method of learning a language at any point in your studies, imo. I believe you should try to get words, grammar, etc in context. For example, read a paragraph where you encounter a few new words. If you find it helpful, as many people do especially in the early stages, you can then take these new words and memorize and/or review them. But I wouldn't advise spending most of your time doing this, and I wouldn't advise drilling lists of words and sentences that you've never encountered in context.

So I just tried it and I have to say that it's rather horrible. The words and translations aren't natural and some doesn't even make any sense - what does 'raining cats and dogs' even mean? I'm having a dreadful time on the website so far as I keep failing my tests because of these mistakes. They also keep using super formal and rare words that nobody uses anymore. Oh and some guy (presumably American or British judging from the username) tried to argue with me about my own language in the discussion section when I complained about one of the translations. I'm rather offended by this website. At least now I know that I wasn't exactly wrong for being pessimistic towards this website.