Duolingo is little better than a gacha game these days. It wasn't bad early on but its nearly unusable these days.
I like Babbel a lot for early levels - its gotten me back to a rough-B2 German level. I was probably approaching C1 in college, slipped to an A2 from lack of use, but I'm building it back up; and spent a while learning Norwegian from scratch a couple years ago on it.
Pimsleur is probably next on my list once I top out on Babbel to build up speaking.
Interesting idea on the ChatGPT sentence prompts. I'm not sure I fully trust it for that, but its worth a try.
Edit: Hm. Interesting idea. It's definitely a bit better at German than me, but its still making a handful of mistakes (as compared against other sources).
I love cryptic crossword, but there's so many "inside rules" that make them hard to approach for newcomers. It doesn't help that there really aren't a lot of good easy cryptics.
The thing with chess, even if you don't know the rules, you can still play and (potentially) lose the game. If you don't know some random american trivia, you're stuck forever.
The place I most notice it is the Hugo nominations.
Pre-2010 its almost exclusively a White Male author club.
2010-2016 seemed to be a fairly decent balance.
2017 and later there's basically been no White Males. Scalzi seems to be "grandfathered in" somehow with a few of nominations, then Andy Weir and Kim Stanley Robinson with 1 each. Certainly no millennial or younger either, as the article discusses.
The old status quo was bad, but even I have to admit its over-corrected a bit.
The way I see it, I read sci-fi for different ways of looking at the world. I realized that I had stopped reading straight-white-male authors, not by design, but just because it always felt like I had read it before. Even the really "innovative" ones were innovating within a really narrow set of parameters.
I have no idea what criteria the Hugo nominators use. And it's certainly not up to me to yuck anybody else's yum. But I can say that I'm finding a lot to think about in books by authors who would likely be dismissed as "woke" based solely on their appearance.
I like Babbel a lot for early levels - its gotten me back to a rough-B2 German level. I was probably approaching C1 in college, slipped to an A2 from lack of use, but I'm building it back up; and spent a while learning Norwegian from scratch a couple years ago on it.
Pimsleur is probably next on my list once I top out on Babbel to build up speaking.
Interesting idea on the ChatGPT sentence prompts. I'm not sure I fully trust it for that, but its worth a try.
Edit: Hm. Interesting idea. It's definitely a bit better at German than me, but its still making a handful of mistakes (as compared against other sources).