How badly they want to show me ads, it’s impressive. Desperate ain’t sexy guys
Duolingo is not about learning a language. It’s about giving you the illusion of learning a language.
As long as I learn to ask where the bathroom is before I get there I’ll bet ok.
Look fuck the company but Duolingo absolutely can help learn a language
Wife’s streak is at 1,618 days across multiple categories. Almost 4.5 years. I imagine it’s like smoking at this point.
Having heard very mixed things about Duolingo’s actual usefulness, does your wife speak or write well in any of the languages she’s used the app to learn?
Not at all
My friend learn japanese and able to speak fluently after using the app. Though she does have japanese customer from time to time that she can test it with some of them.
Does she actually speak the language she’s learning?
Not even a little
Donde, está, la biblioteca. Me llamo T-Bone La araña discoteca. Discoteca, muñeca, La biblioteca Está en bigotes grandes, el perro, manteca. Manteca, bigotes, gigante, pequeño, la cabeza es nieve, cerveza es bueno. Buenos dias, me gusta papas frías, los bigotes de la cabra Es Cameron Diaz.
El tren de la Magdela al a una
What is the actual point of a streak?
A sense of pride and accomplishment?
Sense of achievement mainly
At one point it was gamification to tie the reward center of your brain into continuing to train using the app. Now it seems that it’s half that or half https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern to get you to pay to keep that reward system going.
Personally, my interest in language learning comes and goes. Doing the minimum to maintain a streak prevents me from forgetting too much before my interest returns.
To make you addicted so you keep coming back
Gamification including social aspects if you’re a regular app user.
Abusive ex if you aren’t a regular user.
The only way it could get worse is if they put a slot machine or roulette wheel in to give you prizes.
I fucking hate the gamification they did to Khan Academy. Just give me the knowledge map back.
Why leave the app installed if you’re done using it?
Knowing how prone they are to this kind of crap, I wanted to wait and see what it’d say when my streak ran out, I wasn’t disappointed
If you use the duolingo widget you can watch duo drop down a depressive spiral until they eventually die alone in the desert. It’s my favorite part of the app.
I uninstalled the app years ago and still see this in the play store.
Damn! The more I read I about it, the creepier it gets! The fuck is wrong with them.
Alot. Which is a shame because the app used to be decent a little over a decade ago. I remember using it back in highschool before the gamification and, without paying, it would let you access community forums, review lessons, and a lot of other features now locked behind a paywall or gone entirely.
I still remember when the heart system was first introduced and getting pissed that i had to essentially get everything right to keep moving forward in the lesson or pay to refill my hearts. I uninstalled when it became 3 wrong answers and youre done for the day without payment.
I actually started using Duolingo recently and the hearts system has you either pay, start your free trial for its subscriotion, or you watch an ad, even then though, that’s just shitty.
Exactly why I stopped so using it so quickly.
No mas
Same, it was sad but I’m not gonna use the all anymore due to that decision.
I had a streak in the triple digits, just un-installed it. I’ll be damned if I’m going to use that AI slop anymore.
I stopped using duolingo a couple years ago because I noticed I was just doing the bare minimum to maintain my streak instead of actually learning something new.
that actually helped me remember that my target language exists, it was good for me to at least have a brush with some learning on the days that i just didn’t feel like doing much.
what was the final nail on the coffin for me was duolingo neutering the japanese course, they delayed introducing kanji so hard i was seeing the most basic basics like 母, 父, 語, even 何 in hiragana, which made the course deeply counterproductive as reading japanese in hiragana only, when you know the kanji already slows you down considerably. consider: ははははなをもっています vs 母は花を持っています, both mean “my mum has a flower” but one of them has a string of は you need to decipher the meaning of first before you can understand the sentence, the other’s meaning can be understood instantly
That’s a shame. Duolingo was never great for learning kana, so I guess they thought to use it more in lessons, but they should’ve just improved the dedicated kana lessons instead. I had learned kana before using duolingo so it was a smooth transition to take on sentences introducing more and more kanji. It sucks that they’re just making things worse since there were some nice things about the app before.
Same thing happened to me. Also when trying something new, failing took something like gems or hearts. That made it so I only grinded the very easy lessons to get the gems and never actually using them.
Oh yeah, that’s another thing! They made it tedious to make progress, probably in an attempt to squeeze out more money, but I ended up just losing motivation for actually learning because it became a drag.
if a non shit app would add an “import streak” feature (just make me upload a screenshot or type in the number) id switch in a heart beat.
Why is a streak so important?
deleted by creator
I’ve come to realize that Dopamine is the reason for EVERYTHING.
As someone with ADHD, I feel this so hard.
bc ive been at it for over 3.5 years https://youtube.com/shorts/b4C8yeQ1NCM
Come to think of it, an application threatening, shaming, and guilt tripping you into coming back might not be the healthiest thing ever.
DuoLingo replicates all the same patterns as an abusive relationship.
The aggressive notifications to do a lesson are literally why I use it. I have ADHD. Without the owl threatening to kill me and everyone I know, I would forget about it and forget all that I’ve learned so far. 😔
Yeah i uninstalled
It could be aggressively persistent without sounding like a psycho, too, no? I mean, I have no frame of reference, but I sort of assume that constant reminders would work as well as constant belittling reminders. Maybe I’m wrong.
Ideally, for myself, it would be like getting a dog’s attention and getting called a good boy when I actually complete a lesson.
Positive reinforcement wins. You’re a good boy! You’re a great boy, even!
The gamification is genuinely so helpful. You can get it through other apps like habitica with some setup. I have ADHD too but I found Duolingo good for habit building but jot the greatest for actual language learning
the streak is half the work, the other half is actually having done the thing. if i just tap “ya i did that” (when i didn’t) because i want to keep the streak going it’s meaningless
I do think we tend to underestimate how much you can accomplish with 5 minutes of study a day. My main problem with Duolingo is that it isn’t effective, but if I spent the same 5 minutes using anki or a better tool I get results
Personally, once I realized the gamification wasn’t actually helping me learn the language, engaged or not, I started resenting it more than anything. The app cared more about my streak than I did and when I decided to deliberately let mine end, it would use freezes and shit to keep it going despite missed days. And then nag me to buy more freezes which it would just give me as rewards for doing a single lesson that day.
After that, all the gamification shit was annoying because it meant I had to sit through like 5 screens of “rewards” I didn’t give a shit about after each lesson.
The thing that made me dislike the gamification was the p2w mechanics of the timed challenges. “Oh you ran out of time, but you can buy an extension!” How the fuck is buying an extension going to help learn a language?
And from there I realized that the multiple choice form of the questions meant my test taking skills were carrying me as much as or more than any language skills I was developing. There’s only so many legal sentences you can build from a limited set of words and if they usually have only one verb option, it’s not going to help learn the different verbs.
I have trouble sticking with things. Gamification is absolutely manipulative but it also worked for me. I tried to keel that streak going even when it did nothing for my goals. So I kept the gamification but changed the app so that I’m manipulating myself to further my goals and it works just as well
Kinda does wonders to develop habits when you have ADHD.
that’s why i liked duolingo when it was a good leanguage learning helper app, it really did keep me thinking about my target langauge every day at least a little
Has anyone actually learned any language with duo lingo ?
Exclusively with Duolingo? Could be a little too hard depending on the language. I used it to learn French, also had actual classes and some other resources, but used Duolingo for a while as main resource. It’s not optimal as it sucks to learn actually speaking, but it’s fine for reading/writing, and sometimes a little to easy for listening.
I’d be surprised if anyone has. You need to actually use a language to learn it properly. But an app is a good start and supplement.
I learned probably 90% of my Spanish through Duolingo. My reading is good enough that I can usually follow along with Spanish news articles and Spanish spoken at a moderate pace. (So almost none of it, haha) I have hearing comprehension problems with English as well though, so that’s not Duolingo’s fault.
I’m definitely not fluent, but it’s not like I wouldn’t know what to do if someone handed me a form in Spanish, either.
Overall it’s just the repetition that matters. I don’t think I would know any less Spanish if I’d spent 20-30 minutes every day for the past 2+ years using a different app to learn.
Thanks. That’s quite a good result I think. Did you practice outside the app (I mean at the beginning) ? How long would you say it takes to be able to read a newspaper article without too much difficulty?
This is just for the English speaker learning Spanish Duolingo course, which I’m told is one of the best ones, so it may not apply to other courses. But IMO it was easier to pick up the majority of the beginner vocabulary in Duolingo (they’ve got the drill aspect of language learning down pat) and then spread out to other sources. I especially needed outside help with grammar because (at least when I was doing the early parts) Duolingo didn’t explain grammar very much, so there was a bit of ramming my head against a brick wall.
How long an article takes me to read depends on how many colloquial phrases it has that Duolingo hasn’t introduced me to, if uncommon words or jargon are used, etc. The dictionary app I use is pretty good and includes slang, so when I do run into unknowns it only takes a few seconds to look it up. But overall I’d say I read maybe 1/2 to 2/3 the speed I read English, depending on all the above factors. It does fatigue me a lot faster than reading English, but I think that’s a normal thing for second languages you’re still learning.
Edit: oh oops I misunderstood your last question, it took me maybe a year to start on news articles and maybe another 6 months to get comfortable with them. Totally YMMV depending on how much and how seriously you study, this wasn’t anything like full time study for me.
The quality depends on the individual(s) developing the training content as well. I don’t know if it’s changed, but the Korean course used to be quite bad/lazy and had a lot of Konglish and English loanwords, even for words that had an actual Korean equivalent. I think official courses and textbooks, as well as videos and podcasts, are all much better ways of learning than through these flash card apps. A better use case is retention of existing language skills, I think.
“Streaks” are shitty dark patterns IMO.
Yeah but at least the interests of the user and duolingo are somewhat aligned in this case
I wish the whole streak paradigm was time weighted. Like I got over a 1 year streak on my Apple watch over Covid. That’s basically never going to happen again. I wish there was some kind of “this is your longest streak in the past <time period>” or something. It all just feels so all or nothing.
I believe you can get a users longest streak from the public API end point. IIRC it’s something like
duolingo.com/users/{username}but it’s been a few years
people calling every engagement tactic a dark pattern these days is giving me teenagers using therapy speak in wrong ways vibes
I liked it because it was a learning app and I have a tendency to fall off. But paying real money to restore my streak? Hell nah
shit’s got 80 million ads now. get fucked, ICE owl
I remember a while back, I was too busy for a little while to use Duo and came back to the widget trying to guilt trip me into using it. Because I missed like half a week. It’s so toxic and honestly isn’t even that useful for learning. So I uninstalled that shit immediately.
I can ask for an apple in so many languages.
Duolingo is so stupidly annoying these days. It has gotten so much worse compared to a few years ago.
Constant bugging, too many popups that are almost as bad as Microsoft products. I want to learn a goddamn language not jump through a hundred hoops every single time.
Not to mention that it all boils down to a guessing game. Some questions have multiple answers and unless you choose that specific one that DuoLingo had in mind it counts as wrong. It also won’t tell you why you guessed wrong.
Are there better apps these days?
Duolingo isn’t in the business to teach you a a language, that would mean you won’t need the app anymore.
I’ve used Babbel, it seems more to learn a language, but it requires a paid plan to use. It does work more like an actual language course though, with more emphasis on longer sessions instead of 5 min per day.
Duolingo is a toxic ex.
Sounds like they’re threatening to steal your dog or something.
never used Duolingo, but i think i can relate now, i had a toxic girlfriend that would talk to me in Portuguese, i don’t speak that language
never used Duolingo
i don’t speak that language
I believe I may have a solution
i am trying not to go back to abusive relationships
Portuguese isn’t that bad
6 lessons? ew.
