by Javantea
March 18, 2025
Duolingo has a lot of problems. I know this because I've spent 1232 days learning Portuguese, Spanish, and a little bit of Finnish and Klingon. I have a 1232 day streak and am in obsidian league. I'm hoping that the developers at Duolingo who are watching for negative sentiment find this post. Here's my duome if you want to see where I'm at.
Duolingo is for beginners. If you end up at day 400 in Duolingo, you might think that it is useful for intermediate and advanced speakers. This isn't true. The only argument that I have really accepted for why intermediate learners should accept Duolingo as a daily tool is that it's important to avoid losing ground in a language. By spending a few minutes you're able to avoid dramatic loss of vocabulary that often coincides with not using a language for weeks.
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May 12, 2009
Hooray!
The Twitter Language AI is ready to be used! How do you use it? Type a word
into the input box, then click "Search". This will search Twitter for that
word. It will return the last 15 results and histogram all the words it finds.
This is very simple functionality, right? Why would someone want a histogram of
words spoken on a topic? For one, market research. If you know the word that
people associate with your brand or topic, you can market it using their words.
Yowch, that's almost like advertising, isn't it? Yup. The actual original
purpose for this was to learn foreign languages by translating the most common
words first (similar to my Japanese Language AI). The second interesting thing
to do with the Twitter Language AI is to click the "Graph" button. This will
take the data in the left and graph it on the right as shown in the image.
This is really interesting and useful for scientists who don't want to import
the data into a spreadsheet just to graph it. It uses the Google Visualization
API and sends no data to Google (just your IP address and HTTP headers) to draw
this, which is pretty cool.
Click the image above to use the Twitter Language AI.
I am a hacker, a self-employed programmer, an open-source advocate, a scientist, and an independent security researcher.
During January 2-10, I only had to work a few hours and the rest of the time I could spend on my own interests. I worked on a few new projects and looked around the city a bit more.
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