I’m sorry to hear this.
I used Rosetta Stone with my son, and then eight years later Duolingo with my daughter. Rosetta Stone didn’t hold a candle to duolingo- Not to mention the expense of RS. I regret Duo wasn’t around when my son was still home, I think he would have flourished with it.
I’ve been wondering if the photos are random. We didn’t have trouble on the computer but I’ve noticed the quirkiest photo/expression pairings on my phone. (Like a man wearing camo with a rattlesnake around his neck talking about eating an apple. Some of them are quite funny, like a graphic of a bear paired with an expression about the ‘calm girls’. Or a crying woman talking about calm men. But that same photo will pop up for an expression with a completely different, equally as random meaning a little later. I told my daughter it was because they didn’t want you relying on the photo for clues, but I really think it’s mostly just random Graphics to keep from having a blank screen on the phone app. However, “she took her wife” is another story. I would think for the most part they would want to avoid such wording in foreign language because it’s very confusing for a beginner. I recently tried TalkBox.moM and was surprised at some of the wording in it- words I don’t want my daughter saying in a English, let alone devoting time to studying in French! Not amoral, just crude. French is our only subject we are doing online until I can find something else more suitable (that’s actually why I’m on the SCM forums tonight). Our family is doing a major pullback from the internet so I’m hoping to find a great offline program.
As for using Duolingo with young children, if anyone reading is interested, my daughter doesn’t know what the photos are unless I share them because I hold the phone in my hand. This way she is having to focus on the sound and not the print (she and I not got really good at reading French but we’re relying on reading so much that’s as far as we could go). I can edit on the fly if I need to, but I haven’t had to yet.
