Never ever ever ever ever give your work for free to a startup unless it’s running under an open source model that guarantees even if they do go public, all that work remains openly available to everyone!
Nonprofits FTW
Oh, there are plenty of counter examples, unfortunately.
Prominent ones?
Same for everything, including open source models
St Jude’s Children Hospital and Goodwill off the top of my head.
I can’t find anything wrong about St. Jude’s.
Everything is bound to have some bad examples. OpenAI and RedHat were also under open source models.
You keep bringing up open source, why? All I did was say that being a non profit isn’t as good an indicator as you might think. How does open source factor in it?
I’m saying that even if it’s not universal, it’s often one of the better indicators.
“Our non profit pays the ceo $1,900,000 a year. Yaaay”
I would not do any unpaid work for anything that was not straight up copyleft.
♥️
never give a corporation your labour for free.
People should have known this from the beginning.
These volunteers didn’t think about it in these terms.
They gave away their work for free to help people learn languages, and for a long time Duolingo seemed like the best platform for that.Starting your own platform is much more difficult than contributing to an existing one that seems to be operated with some amount of goodwill…
I understand that. Unfortunately, though, one has to expect always the worst from Corps, no matter how “good” they appear to be at the beginning.
If we always assumed the worst no one would buy/accomplish anything. This is not a realistic way to live. The best we can expect to do is making the best decision with the information we have at hand at the time. Of course a healthy dose of scepticism isn’t a bad thing either as long as it doesn’t get in the way of living a relatively normal life.
Poor computer literacy is really biting people in the ass. Quotes like this really stand out to me:
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company.
Did you not know that they would be able to do this from the start? Or perhaps you knew and were just being extremely naïve? Either way, not being aware of what kinds of control other parties have when you share data with them is something that’s all too common these days. I really wish people would consider the ramifications of what companies can do when you give information like this to them.
Like giving your phone number away for no reason. The moment you share it, you give companies all they need to start spamming the shit out of you (or giving it away to other companies that will happily do it instead). How is a concept like this so hard to understand?
It’s not that they didn’t know that they could. It’s that they didn’t think they would.
Because—and I say this as a user of Duolingo who first started using it after the old comments were made read-only, but before they were removed entirely—it’s fucking insane that they did. Those comments were so useful to the user. I don’t know how many times I went to them to have some aspect of the lesson explained to me because the app itself doesn’t actually do any real “teaching”, it just tells you that you got it wrong and what the right answer is. The comments from users helped explain the nuance in word meaning, or the relevant grammar rule, helping add enormous value. By removing them they are literally making their product worse for no gain.
People thinking that they’d act rationally wouldn’t expect that.
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but what if they give you cool digital gems
woo, shiny. my preciousss
Yeah, that’s an offer a man can’t refuse.
Same for people contributing to google maps
Or Instagram, Facebook, reddit… Lemmy. I guess Lemmy isn’t a company so we have that going but if it’s not your own instance you are technically doing work for someone else.
At least Lemmy data is public for anyone to read. I don’t care that much if random groups are sucking up all this data for themselves - it’s worth it in my opinion because it means good actors can use it for good too. If it were all going to one company, I would be less happy about the fact that they could just black hole it all for nobody’s benefit but their own.
Lemmy is more akin to helping out a community open-source project than helping out a company
I mean, I do that for me. If I’m going to a road I want the name and address to be right. I use g maps a ton.
I wrote the comment more as throwing some complementary thoughts. I understand how hard it is not to use google when they provide essential services. Regarding maps, I’ve been trying to use openstreetmaps as much as I can, and adding places using streetcomplete, but every now and then, I find myself using google too.
Seriously. I don’t know what outcome people expected. Duolingo is not a non-profit, or a community project like Anki. I hope everybody who is surprised by this is receptive to the lesson.
While it is true that corporations are terrible and will do anything in the name of profit, what you guys are saying is “they got fucked and it’s their fault.” It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are. They are formed by people who choose to fuck other people over for their own benefit. Fuck off with your victim blaming.
they got fucked and it’s their fault
That’s not at all what I’m saying. What I’m saying is people can choose to participate in a community that is controlled by a for-profit company if they want to, but they should temper their expectations accordingly.
It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are.
That’s exactly what they are. They are composed of people only to the extent that a car is composed of wheels.
If it’s otherwise in working order, a flat tire will be replaced and the car will be going wherever it’s meant to go. Profit city is where all roads lead to, and a flat tire (or four) can only delay for so long.
If you want to hold corporations to moral standards, you have to change the incentives (destinations) and restructure corporations to be actually owned and controlled by people who are then held to those moral standards (put more of the car into the wheels).
It’s not like corporations are some animal who can’t help but be who they are.
I think you need to read a little more about economics, because this is exactly what they are. In fact, they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits.
That’s for publicly traded companies. Duolingo wasn’t public when OP contributed to it.
Corporations don’t exist in a vacuum. They need to fuck people over or they’ll get outcompeted.
Thieves don’t exist in a vacuum either. So what you’re saying is a thief should rob more, or else other thieves will take what he could have stolen instead, and then he’ll be out of the thieving business? What kind of fucked up bullshit logic is that?
I know corporations are part of reality, but that doesn’t mean they should be excused for profiting on volunteer work. But my point is that the volunteers are being blamed as if they fucked around and now they’re in the stages of finding out, as if they’ve done something so stupid no one would have ever done. Unfortunately, part of reality too is that unless one of these volunteers has sufficient power and money to fight them, corporations like Duo will go on with impunity and they’ll keep fucking people over and others will keep not only justifying them, but also supporting them by buying their products, because it’s just easier to be spineless.
Unless I’m mistaken, I read that as them agreeing with you. They were just pointing out the reality, they didn’t say they agreed with it.
Why do you believe non profits are immune to this? They’re still incentivized to produce value. Maybe we just don’t mock volunteers for doing a good thing and instead shame the people taking advantage of them?
I didn’t say nonprofits are immune to it. I essentially said for-profit companies are for-profit. That says nothing about non-profits.
Anyone who has a passion for open source and wants to learn Spanish should check out LibreLingo! It’s also a nice project for people who want to contribute to something that is not owned by a company, though it’s a bit too early for contributors who have language skills but no coding experience.
Fantastic recommendation, thank you
Any suggestions for other languages? German? Italian?
Unfortunately I don’t know of any open source alternative. After another response in this thread I started using busuu.com for French and Italian, and I’m liking it so far. Their business model is pretty transparent, but I find it less annoying than Duolingo so far.
Viel Glück and buona fortuna with your language learning!
Duolingo, the dominant player, can simply buy competition like busuu, bypassing the need they’d otherwise have to improve their software.
I like that’s it’s more real life, the talking, people, subjects etc. Think I’ll use it for a while, because on duolingo I wasn’t evolving much anymore in German, this goes further up it seems
Just as pushy as duolingo unfortunately in ads and mainly in pushing to and rewarding premium.
Yeah, the adds take up some time, but I still find the overall experience less annoying than I did with Duolingo last time I used it. The push towards human interaction, which Duolingo has actively pushed away from, is also welcome.
I like to use Anki with some shared card decks: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=german
The learning pattern that Anki has configured by default suites me quite well and the app and the card deck is highly customizable.
Mind you, this is mostly only for learning vocabulary, not for learning grammer.
Thank you for this!
It looks cool, but I can’t even sign up for it (infinite spinning loading icon). I did a search and it’s been a problem for more than a year at this point, yikes.
This has been going on for decades. CDDB, IMDB, Redhat.
Anything you volunteer for will be monetized and you will get cut off from your own contributions.
Even here on Lemmy people post Twitter images and Reddit reader apps which only helps those platforms retain mindshare even if they aren’t directly profiting with ads.
This is a bit of “no true Scotsman” fallacy. If something you volunteer for hasn’t been monetized you can always say ‘yet’
FOSS is something people volunteer for and it mostly doesn’t get monetized and cut off. Sometimes this means that the original is cut off but a fork lives on, so I would rather say that volunteering for a closed product is dangerous in that regard, not volunteering forany product
This is where licensing is important. If you want to contribute your time to something you think is important, make sure that your contributions are licensed to be open and free.
If a for-profit company violates the license, the contributors can fight back. If there is no license, you’re just giving them free labor that they can exploit however they please.
To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work. Even if you get a bit lax and include MIT and BSD licenses as FOSS, a company still cannot take your work and stop other people from using it.
In the case of Duolingo, it’s pretty different because that volunteer labor output is gated in a proprietary walled garden.
Whereas contributing a patch to chromium for example will never gate that contribution, even if it makes it into chrome and produces millions of dollars of profit for google. You can always and forever freely access and use a version of chromium with your patch as long as there’s still a copy left to access.
To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work
The trajectory for many Foss projects is to get the hardest part off the ground with mindshare and initial development. Then after all the hard work it becomes successful, the project is closed and all new features are added into the closed fork.
Technically you still have the original work but within a few years the project is dead except for your personal work because the main fork has a large corporation behind it continuing the development.
Meh Rehat gets a pass in my mind at least. They give back to the community enough. We are never going to get perfect people or groups. Microsoft is a totally different story.
Hashicorp recently commandeered its community built products from thousands of contributors by changing open source projects to an ambiguous if not hostile BSL. Opentofu for any current terraform users out there.
Previously named OpenTF, OpenTofu is a fork of Terraform…
🤭 LOL @ the name change.
Reminds me of OpenMW for Morrowind being listed as “OpenMicrowave” on the Google app store
They didn’t want people think OpenTF meant they were DownTF.
They totally are DTF, they just didn’t want you asking about it.
And still being removed from the store
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Definitely in two minds on Hashicorp’s license change. I understand why they did it, even if I don’t agree. Other for-profit companies were screwing them and the community over by taking, competing, and seldom contributing.
I have heard this point of view and truly don’t understand it. There were companies making money with an open source tool. That’s what some companies do, and the license allowed for that. They weren’t taking; they were using a tool, and providing a service upon it. If anybody is taking, it is Hashicorp from their own community that contributed thousands of hours to their business for free.
And those companies you refer to tried often to push upstream but Hashicorp just refused contribution time after time.
That said I understand it too. Insofar as capital investment demanded the cornering of a market and miscalculated the likelihood of a well backed fork. As a result I think, they probably sealed their fate even if it takes many years. How many people remember Hudson?
Good callout. Even Twitter images shouldn’t be hot linked but copied and pasted for preservation purposes; if a copyright takedown happens, then it happens. But at least we don’t risk having access cut because of a corporate killswitch.
It never stops shocking me that people think they can trust corporations which are run by upper middle class entitled business bros who never worked an honest day in their lives.
Google has a volunteer program to make their AI better. Fucking one of the biggest corporations in the world asking for free labor and apparently people do it?
You were/are doing it every time you solved a Captcha to prove you aren’t a robot.
Yeah but this is in the area of unpaid labor. You “had to” solve a captcha in order they let you use another service. You are not visiting a page with the sole purpose of voluntarily solving captchas
Google banned 4chan from using recaptcha at the time because everyone was just typing swear words in place of the scanned word that Google couldn’t OCR
Where did you hear about that? It sounds odd, because surely Google could’ve filtered out the swearwords, and at the end of the day users still had to solve the captcha correctly sooner or later if they wanted to post.
The old two word captchas were one word that Google knows in order to test if you’re human, and one word scanned from Google’s book scanning program that their algorithms failed to properly OCR, meaning for the second word you could type in whatever you wanted and you would pass the captcha
Sites were allowed to use recaptcha for free because their users were actually doing work training neural nets to read books better, if a large percentage of their users are saying every unknown scan is the n-word, I could see why Google wouldn’t want them having access to it
Long live 4chan
Oh wow cddb. Completely forgot that was even a thing until just now.
Your contributions are statistically meaningless unless you write articles attracting at least a couple of scientists. You were doomed to fail from the beginning. And after all, you are only a number in their spreadsheets.
That’s right, never trust a private company that might go public in the future.
That’s why you should build your communities on Discord instead. 🤡
That shit is the most infuriating thing ever to me. It seems like so many technical discussions and communities are going to Discord now where that information is not indexed or preserved. How many issues have I had where the answer was sitting on a Discord server that will never appear in any general search result?
I’ve tried to use discord before but it seems just kinda… awful. It’s essentially a single uninterrupted, general purpose comment chain about a singular topic. It’s a forum meet twitter but worse than either?
Yea that’s cause originally it was just meant to be gamer friends voice chatting and text chatting with each other. They build all the other features on top of what they had originally so it’s terrible as a reddit/social media alternative.
Discord is the same thing as technical slack threads, or IRC chat. People try and use it as a reddit replacement when it really truly is not.
Forget reddit replacement, people try to use it as a wiki/documentation replacement.
Deranged behaviour.
Yeah. I’ve come to believe the problem isn’t Discord itself but how people use it. But I totally get your point. So many niche communities. I had to make a Discord account and then someone just fucking answers “!faq” and a bot pastes the answer. Why was that not on their GitHub page? It is what it is.
A Discord server can be created in seconds and can easily have everything they need. I get why they turn to it but it sucks.
Well modded discord servers for popular topics will have forum channels that behave exactly as you would expect them to. Sure they’re not indexed on search engines, that much is true, but discord isn’t the “blink and you’ll miss it” live chat client that it once was.
I was specifically referring to the forum like sections. The lack of indexing and internet archive means large swaths of knowledge, timelines, history, and even culture will become dust in the wind.
I thought that Slack was what that use case is for. It’s an acronym that stands for Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge. I didn’t realize folks were using discord for productivity use cases.
Tons. A special firmware I use for my 3D printer is supported through Discord. All questions and new firmware links are posted there. Even with Slack being “searchable”, unless I am mistaken, it’s not indexed by search engines, right? So when trying to figure something out I would need to search for webpages and then also search Slack right?
The worst part is that it is preserved, as long as the Discord channel still exists, but is functionally impossible to find. Because search engines can’t index it from the outside, and Discord’s search function is just a dumb literal string matcher.
And that won’t stop all the regulars in the channel from jumping down your throat anyway because you asked a question that was answered 17,782,169 chat messages ago. Didn’t you see it? It’s right there. Nestled in between said regulars posting pictures of their cats, or showing off the latest computer peripheral they just bought, or kibitzing about the weather in whatever towns they live in. Interleaved between six separate conversations that were also going on at that time. I mean, duh!
“Just search!” I did, and all the results I got were you guys likewise jumping down the throats of the last 200 people who asked the question before me.
Unfortunately, I feel forum communities have themselves to blame for a lot of people not wanting to interact with their forums.
Essentially, there’s a level of gatekeeping that existed where if you didn’t ask questions the ‘right way’ or even ask the ‘right questions’, you would be flamed and potentially have your post deleted. Some of these people actually believe that if they can’t answer a question, then it’s the fault of the asker and not their own.
Why go through the effort if that’s how the community is going to behave? Sometimes, it’s more fruitful to say nothing than to tear someone down or give wrong information just so you can contribute something.
Discord is nice because of how informal it is, although it’s also getting corrupted by the same autists who need to have everything ‘just’ their way. (referring to things like forcing people to start threads instead of an open room for questions.)
Since when as autism anything to do with this? I’m figuring out but can’t find an answer.
I’m all in on Matrix. After hearing the words, “Nobody uses IRC anymore, everyone uses Discord now”, I knew we were in trouble.
mIRC for the win.
Why discord? Everything on it will be lost without exception. Fuck discord.
It’s why they put the clown face emoji at the end. Discord sucks so hard for finding information. The number of interesting projects that exclusively use Discord for their documentation is astounding and frustrating as hell.
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Mozilla is a non profit foundation, the corporation is owned by the non profit and exists for tax reasons only. They’re different than a regular corp.
The NFL was a non-profit until 2015.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a non-profit that stopped the free distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Non-profit status doesn’t automatically equal good but Mozilla has been good so far…for the most part. It has had its own controversies.
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Not what I’m referencing.
Oxford originally pledged to give their vaccine away for free but Gates convinced them otherwise.
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Correct. I should have gone into more detail. Cheers!
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Well fuck, I guess enshittification is universal. The only safe space is community foss/libre projects I guess
And only as safe as the audit it gets
New life lesson: never volunteer for a for-profit company.
But then how would spez ever be able to take Reddit public?!
This baffles me. We’ve seen time and time again that for-profit will fuck you over any chance they get over a dollar if they must, and people still volunteers for them.
I guess that’s the difference between normal people and capitalists.
People who keep trying to do Socialism in a Capitalist system are doomed to fail, because Socialism produces enormous surpluses and Capitalists love to just gobble that shit up.
“If peoples basic needs were met nobody would work!”
People “work” all the time of their own accord, we just call it volunteering instead of “work.” People love saying “I don’t want to work,” but really what they mean is “I don’t want my economic output stolen from me by my employer while what’s left is stolen by ever increasing prices with no wage adjustment to compensate.”
People “work” all the time of their own accord, we just call it volunteering instead of “work.”
Never even mind volunteering. $50B/year in wage theft in this country. People contract to do labor and then their bosses simply short them. Back in 2019 a coal company attempted to close a mine without paying over $1M in back wages. The workers shut down the rail out of the money and seized the coal until they were made whole.
Wish more folks who got fleeced by DuoLingo had the gumption to do something similar.
It’s harder to protest and make demands when most volunteers don’t even know where the fuck Duolingo’s HQ is, much mess live anywhere near it.
Love that username 😂
It’s the best spell in existence
Agitate on the forums. Let other people know about open-source alternatives. Organize other power users to submit bad data in protest.
I would argue the traditional family structure is a micro-socialism state.
That depends heavily on how the family operates.
Historically speaking, the male head-of-household had dictatorial control over the ownership and expenditures within the household. Only in the last two generations have western women gained the right to hold down jobs and assume credit for large purchases, to own their own homes, and to take full custody of their children. The idea of emancipated minors, civil rights for children, and labor protections for young people are even newer. And there are plenty of reactionary political attitudes in the country that would see these reforms rolled back.
A family certainly can operate in a socialist capacity, when productive property and its surplus is shared equitably. But there are plenty of instances in which the head-of-house is functionally no different than a landlord, demanding the rest of the family live contribute surplus labor while existing in relative poverty.
dude what
Make sure to put anything you want public under the correct license. If a platform doesn’t support CC or GPL or MIT, then leave.
EDIT: Or Apache, or IDGAF, of course. ;) But what I would really want is a license that forces your content to remain free, even if used in something else. Basically copyleft: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.html
All my stuff is under Apache-2.
I put all mine under AH64
Oi, you got a loicence for that choppa?
And yet I am sure everyone reading this comment will leave a rideshare driver review this year or answer a question from Google maps or post information on Faceboot. A policy doesn’t mean much if it isn’t possible to enforce in a consistent manner.
Yeah dude, leaving a review for a gig worker is totally the same thing as volunteering for a for-profit corporations.
I saw one interview with the CEO on Reddit and deleted the app. The guy is an absolute nonce.
So we’re still using nonce then?
So long as you keep acting like one.
Are all of us here aware of the meaning of the word ‘nonce’ or are we using it as a different word for “idiot”?
Welcome to the party pal - where you get downvoted because you thought the word used to marginalise gay people had fallen out of favour…along with poof and bender.
For the nonce I’ll go with that.
…nonce means paedophile…
Yes you can tell by the way he used nonce
Nonce codes are very important for OAuth2 flows
Why would you give away your production value to a capitalist for free?
It’s literally the only power you hold in the labour market, and it’s your own fault if you give it away for nothing.
Yes, how dare you contribute to a community effort.
Wait, isn’t the post you just made doing just that?
You missed the word “capitalist”
If it’s a for profit organization then ask for a salary or don’t help them.
Has shitjust.works paid you for your commentary here? If they decide to become a for profit company in 14 years, are they going to pay you back salary? What about all those people that ever posted to reddit? Is the world a better place if they never did it? Does reddit owe each of them a salary?
Sometimes you contribute to something because it makes the world a little better place.
Maybe now that we’ve seen it done and people know how to contribute, we could make a free and open version of duolingo.
I’m not doing this to make the world a better place, God damn it.
I’m here because I want to feel validated about my opinions!
There’s a difference between participating the way most users do (using the service) and participating the way this post is talking about (keeping the service running). Funny you should use Reddit as an example considering how pissed the admins were when they finally realized they were doing slave labor for a bunch rich tech guys.
I wasn’t aware that Lemmy is a for-profit enterprise.
Plus, my getting use out of a product and simply by doing so helping the company make money (say by increasing engagement or such), is extremely different to somebody going out of their way to produce work for that company in a way that doesn’t directly benefit the producer at all.
Put another way - Am I helping keep my local supermarket in business simply by shopping there? Sure. Would I offer my free time to help clean their store?
Hell. No.
In 2009 Duolingo was originally funded by the NSF. Their motto was free education will change the world.
In the 14 years since, they became something else. All those crowd sourced comments from a good upstanding project require the project and it’s data not to become evil.
not everyone started as an epic lemmy leftist
I should have that pikachu face meme handy.
I gotchu.
And here I am just pissed that Duolingo keeps overhauling their whole program. Like, in less than 2 years time, they’ve had 3 different versions of the website and of course it wipes out all of your progress and approximates where you may be in their new system. Except the latest. The latest update just wipes all your shit out and says “good luck fuckface!” I’ve become less and less a fan of Duo over the last 4 years and yeah, not gonna do the AI thing with it anymore. Sari can go on vacation with my one-eyed dog named Max and eat cheese sandwiches for all I care.
I’m still mad I bought the super duo costume which they then completely removed from the app
Yeah, very annoying to be told a word is “new” when I know it well, and vice-versa be expected to have done whole lessons on other words that I’ve never seen before. That said, not many options for Hungarian, I’ve only seen Drops as an alternative daily app.
DuoLingo imo is kinda crappy anyway. Boring, repetitive, and terrible at teaching listening comprehension.
I can give it credit for getting people interested in language learning in an approachable way, but that’s about it.
Oh look, theft that’s legally protected because something starts making profit! It’s like the existence of the stock market is the central problem with capitalism, since it’s just an excuse to be a shitty person and is only ever used in that capacity. “fuck you, i get more money this way” is a dumb fucking principle to operate a society on. Antisocial, in fact. Google’s IPO can be directly traced to every single problem the internet (and so, society) has right now.
Capitalism is the problem with capitalism. And It’s not an excuse to be shitty, but the cause itself.
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Just vote with your dollar, unethical companies always lose market competition ☝️🤓
I’m not so sure about that.
I think you forgot the /s , because real life shows that unethical companies rarely lose market competition. See pretty much every oil company, facebook, microsoft, amazon…
I’ve literally put “☝️🤓” in the end though… Can’t get more sarcastic than that
Guess I’m too old, I wasn’t aware that emoji combo also acted as a sarcasm warning
No worries!☝️🤓 usually signifies a pick-me idiot who thinks they’re the smartest in the room, it’s usually used sarcastically to present a common but idiotic opinion. Emoji combination shows them at the moment of going “Uhm, akshually!!”
I mean this is by the guy who brought us CAPTCHA, are we all that surprised? Same playbook, just a different play. Skim some labor off the top.
is there a non-shitty alternative to use that anyone could recommend? would be really interested.
My library offers Mango Languages.
I started looking for alternatives when they added the weird character voices and I started noticing inaccurate pronunciation of kanji in my Japanese course. A lot of people on the message boards recommended Memrise, and it’s been great! The official courses contain actual video and audio of native speakers, so I knew for a fact the pronunciation would be correct—even better than the old Duo voices!
There’s also user-generated content, too, some of which might not be accurate, but most of the user courses I’ve found are pretty good. You can even make your own set and publish it.
(I haven’t visited the site in a few months, so I can’t guarantee it’ll be exactly as I found it, but I doubt it has changed much)
And depending on what languages you’re studying, you might be able to find some good ones dedicated to your language if you do some digging. For Spanish, I used SpanishDict, and for Japanese, I used Kanshudo (both are freemium, with more restrictions than Memrise)
