Normally I would post almost exclusively in the aseanhive community but this is not very relevant to what is going on over there.
I basically gave up on learning Thai because it is really difficult but I was gifted a premium plan for Duo Lingo and figured I may as well at least give it a try. I searched through the available languages and there are a ton of them in there. I was disappointed that Thai is not an option even though Klingon and Elvish are available.
Duolingo does make learning fun and that is part of the appeal. The leaderboards and other incentives to keep you at it are great ways to encourage you to at least try a little bit each day. I am studying Spanish and I would say that after more than 250 days in a row of using it, I have very little in the way of language skills because rarely do I ever spend more than just 10 minutes of "studying."
I have gotten far enough in the lessons that it gets a bit complicated though and something has started to happen that makes it even more complicated
Duolingo is "woke" depending on the language
I think it is probably also dependent upon where you the user are from but lately, I have been noticing that there are same-sex relationships constantly being thrown into the lessons.
This I actually can read and it simply says "Hector has a husband and six children,His family is big!"
Ok, so Hector is gay and has 6 kids. I'm not saying that this situation has NEVER happened, but I don't know of any seeing as how men cannot have children on their own. Even if they were super-wealthy adopting 6 kids is exceptionally unlikely. I guess it's a modern day Brady Bunch. There are stories that are in there about two people, some of which have headscarves on (indicating a religion of a certain variety where you would be put to death for being gay) that are referring to their wife when they are a woman themselves.
Here's another example. The man in the picture is saying my spouse is named Eduardo. Eduardo is a man's name so you have to put the masculine version of the noun in there because Spanish is a language of masculine/feminine agreement with both verbs and nouns.
I want one thing to be understood here: I do not have a problem with people being homosexual at all. I live in Thailand. Transgenderism has been accepted here for hundreds of years and it is a normal aspect of life. But when you are attempting to learn a language that requires masculine/feminine verb agreement in order for the sentence to be correct they are seriously making this more difficult than it needs to be by throwing woke elements into it.
It is stunting my ability to achieve growth in this language. Sometimes, the context of the answer is not clear because you are just supposed to guess whether or not the person is in a relationship with a man or a woman. Several times I have gotten the answer wrong because I chose the heterosexual option.
If you want to have some sort of PC agenda then maybe introduce that a bit later, not when I am already struggling to remember the various ways that a word has to change depending on whether or not the person in question is male or female.
I can't say for sure but I would be willing to bet that if your account originated in Saudi Arabia that this would NEVER happen. There would be public outcry and banning of the app. The fact that the woman depicted in the pictures has a headscarf on in the gay stories they are telling would be illegal in many of these countries.
I don't normally really care about any sort of woke-ness in the world because I can just choose to be or not be involved in it, but here was have the largest language learning app in the world that is constantly making the actual learning part a lot more difficult by throwing this in there.
Again: I am not trying to avoid things that are gay, I just think that it over-complicates and already difficult thing to learn when I have to guess whether the person I am talking to has an esposo (husband) or an esposa (wife). Maybe save the progressive stuff until later, more advanced units?
Go ahead and attack me I guess. I think I make a valid point here though.