Every video is transcribed to get much better transcripts than the closed captions. I filter on high quality transcripts, and afterwards a LLM selects only plausible segments for the exercises. This seems to work well for quality control and seems to be reliable enough for these short exercises.
Would love your thoughts!
Duolingo is tough because they set the expectation that this should be free, so you're walking into a challenging business.
But I think the concept is fundamentally better to connect language learning to something entertaining and relevant. If you can make that work, you have a heck of an app.
You can do it!
At the end of the day, whether it's effective or not, Duolingo sells the feeling that you are learning a language to people. Winning a competition with Duolingo means doing better at making people feel like they are learning a language -- the strategy to win against Duolingo probably involves watering down the learning even more, to better sell the feeling.
A good way to think about it is look at some organization that wants to be effective at actually teaching its employees a new language, like the state department:
https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-lang...
20 hours a week of intensive instruction.
Spanish 30 weeks Cantonese 88 weeks Turkish 44 weeks
This is what it actually takes.