The reason Duolingo is set up the way it is, is because it's not a language learning software. That's what the general public uses it for, of course, but what we fail to understand is that we're not the consumer we're the product.
Duolingo is a translation company, they're paid to translate documents for cheap and use their learners to do it for them for free. When you start a language what you're doing is translating tiny bits from wikipedia and such that they present to you. This is how they know the answers and train you to put in the answers they want. The higher you go the more you get texts from their clients, just a sentence or two of course, but they splice together all the answers to all the sentences to get an "ideal" translation.
They get paid, the client gets their work translated for cheap because they only have to pay the agency for their work, and you...well hey you learned a new language :D
Re: Livemocha + Duolingo tl;dr
The reason Duolingo is set up the way it is, is because it's not a language learning software. That's what the general public uses it for, of course, but what we fail to understand is that we're not the consumer we're the product.
Duolingo is a translation company, they're paid to translate documents for cheap and use their learners to do it for them for free. When you start a language what you're doing is translating tiny bits from wikipedia and such that they present to you. This is how they know the answers and train you to put in the answers they want. The higher you go the more you get texts from their clients, just a sentence or two of course, but they splice together all the answers to all the sentences to get an "ideal" translation.
They get paid, the client gets their work translated for cheap because they only have to pay the agency for their work, and you...well hey you learned a new language :D
Seriously Duolingo pissed me the fuck off.