Sunday, August 06, 2023

Immortality and Mortality in Duolingo

At first, I didn't come across any of the odd sentences that Duolingo is famous for, but then for several lessons in a row there were many sentences about how the horses closed the windows, the cows opened the doors, and the pig or the dog cooked dinner at the farm. Then those sentences disappeared, and everything seemed normal for a while, until the other day one sentence was that Duo (the owl in the Duolingo logo) is never going to die. That swaggering sentence made me laugh, but this morning a new sentence took an unexpectedly grim (if realistic) turn: "Todo el mundo tiene que morir" — "Everybody has to die." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 6 August 2023)

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