apparently i was among the top 1% of learners of japanese in 2023. idk if that's impressive, but it sounds impressive, because i started in late august, was ranked in the beginning of december, and no doubt there's a whole lot of weebs who want to learn the language. it feels pretty special to be among the top 1% of them.

perhaps predictably, the main reason i deleted my account was their shift towards "AI", whatever that means. i was aware of the paid 'AI powered practise sets' stuff, and their cringe blog posts about how they "democratised" learning using "AI", but i just stuck my head in the sand and decided that this probably didn't affect the quality of the courses themselves. yesterday, after learning about how they laid off a whole bunch of translators to replace them with "AI", i've decided i can no longer ignore the problem. the idea that i might be spending hundreds of hours learning stuff made up by fucking robots is just scary to me. having spent so much time in that app, i was almost tempted by their new year's discount despite vowing never to pay, but thanks to that reddit post i'm staying true to my word.

some other gripes that diminish the value of the app for me are:

• i noticed that nearly all their lessons expect there to be 4 words left in the word bank, so i nearly always unconsciously used this as a checksum to validate my answer. something tells me this isn't a good habit to form when learning a language.

• the stories (their fill out the blanks + answer questions + vocabulary test thing) are entirely in kana, but the lessons begin to teach kanji pretty early on. basically, you're taught adult japanese, but the stories, which are far and few between, are written for preschoolers, and the sheer number of homonyms in japanese + the lack of spaces make the latter actually harder to read. they also use words and grammar that haven't been taught in the lessons yet. overall, stories feel like a complete afterthought, and like they don't belong in the course at all. fwiw, i'm told they're quite enjoyable in the french course.

• the kanji practise thing is pretty miserable. you get to trace over someone else's strokes, and not get to actually see the abomination you drew in the end. it also doesn't matter if you already spent a million hours learning parts of a character, you'll get to do it again whenever it's a component of another character (e.g. the 水 in 氷). there's thousands of kanji, so you waste hours upon hours practising strokes you can't see the result of, when pracitising composition would have been sufficient and more productive.

• speaking of 氷, the tts just completely made up a pronunciation for it that's not in the dictionary. other times, a kanji in the word bank will have a valid dictionary pronunciation, but which doesn't match the one in the sentence you're asked to reconstruct (e.g. 人 is 'hito' or 'jin' depending on context, and it says the wrong one)

• being taught entirely through tts is incredibly questionable anyway. i know japanese has good tts, and that's why vocaloid existed when english tts was still at microsoft sam level, but sometimes there's obvious roboticness to the voice, and i can't help but wonder if i'm being conditioned to speak like a robot myself.

• if you click on a kanji you've learnt, you'll get to see it in all the compound words it's been used in in the course, which is nice, but finding back to a particular one is hard. it's not possible to search for them, they're grouped by the unit they first appeared in. i often find myself wondering 'haven't i seen this one before?' and not being able to easily look it up.

• the guidebooks become very barren by section 2, and just cease to exist altogether in the middle of section 3. it's like they don't expect people to get as far as i have. they still introduce new grammar and polite/informal variations of words, and you just have to figure that stuff out on your own. supposedly they had a forum where you could get help the app didn't provide you with, but they've since shut this down. i wouldn't be surprised if that was to prevent people from talking negatively about the oncoming enshittification.

so what now?

i won't be signing up for other e-learning services. it doesn't matter if people swear they're good, it only takes one competitor to undercut the others by using "AI", then everyone else is incentivised to do the same. nor does it matter if they promise humans review the output, they'll be forced to abandon that once their competitors undercut them using "AI" review, and there's no way to verify their claims anyway.

i've decided i'll now be struggling through the japanese version of ace attorney to practise. when i run into words or sentences i don't understand, i'll write them down by hand. if i succeed, it'll be cool to experience what that game was like before it was dumbed down for an audience to which foreign countries and the word 'ramen' are offensive. i may also buy second hand textbooks to help me on my way, there's a surprising number of them being sold locally at any given moment.

i want to take the opportunity to mention that this is my hobby now, and i don't plan on doing any programming in my spare time anymore. i've been wondering whether or not to write a 'postmill dead' announcement, and i feel i'd just hate the response to that if i made it loud. so this is that announcement. postmill dead. from now on, my life will be dedicated to learning languages, playing piano, and watching oily men pretend to beat each other up on stage.

finally, it's worth mentioning that duolingo allegedly used volunteer labour to build their courses up until 2021, when they hired some of those volunteers as contractors before firing them. so perhaps they always were shit. if there's a lesson to take from this (no pun intended), it's to never volunteer any work to for-profit companies. they'll screw you over.