avid Duolingo user here.
1 - the new update is a massive disaster (I'll explain in a bit). Maybe it's different for other languages, but for Russian language I vehemently hate the update. I dislike it so much that I tracked down Duolingo PM person on LinkedIN and tried to message them directly.
The app updated for me a week ago with one dialogue that I tapped to confirm. Thinking it's just another incremental update. Suddenly everything changed. I thought I might figure it out, but nope. The article says, some of whom wrote excellent tutorials on the company’s message board [0]. It's not a tutorial as much as people are very confused (glad it wasn't just me) how the new update works and it's just a LONG thread to help with the confusion. If a mobile UI/UX designed for a consumer app needs a long thread like this, you can see it's probably was a poorly executed update.
The UI/UX is not the worse part, the worse part is that now I hate using Duolingo. Let me explain:
Duolingo has been a great daily motivator for me. The gamification of the app (up to now) was excellent. That is its biggest benefit. It's a motivator with a structured progression plan. The Russian lessons are okay, but they're just the starting point, I often have to go online and google something to understand the grammatical reasoning. All together, I have now bought 4 Russian books plus a Russian cheatsheet. That's just the Russian version, I was told the French has some hints and explanations.
Some backgrounds on Duolingo's gamification parameters:
A - You have a daily goal. This could be 1 lesson, 2 or etc. Users set this goal. I set mine to 1 lesson/day but I often do more.
Each day when you complete a lesson you get some points. You get more points (from a choice of troves) if you watch an ad.
B - Each lesson is inside a specific language skills. Like "Adjectives 1". There are 1-8 lessons inside each skills.
C - When you complete all lessons inside a language skill you get more points and then you can move to the next skill. Each lesson is a series of questions in form of translation from English to Russian. Russian to English or listening to a phrase and typing it in Russian. I think there are like 20 questions per lesson (but I have never counted them).
D - When you start a new lesson (up till this new update) you have life levels (IMPORTANT background about the new update.). This is exactly like a video game. You get 5 or 6 lives which are visually represented as slices of arcs of a circle around a heart. If you have a grammatical error each time you answer a question you lose one life. If you lose all your lives you're unable to complete the lesson. If you can complete a lesson you lose your streak. But you can use tokens you have accumulated or buy tokens to get more life. So you can reach your daily goal.
However(till now), if you went back to an already completed lesson you would not use any lives. So you could repeat an existing lesson and make your daily quota. This had two benefits. One, I could directly pick which lesson I wanted to repeat. More importantly it was an stress-free process for me to accomplish my daily goal. Basically you're not anxious about losing your allocated lives and instead you can focus on language learning.
D - You have a consecutive daily streak. I'm currently at 197 days now. Which for me it's a biggest motivator. I also get daily email reminders. If you lose your daily streak you can pay from $2.99 to $9.99 to maintain it. $9.99 if you have a longer streak.
E - There is a double-or-nothing wager if you can maintain a 7 day streak. Basically you spend 50 tokens and if you maintain a 7 day streak you get 100 tokens back.
So what is so terribly wrong with the new update?
i - The UX as I mentioned above is incomprehensible. Basically there is a long thread on what all these things mean and do now.
ii - MOST IMPORTANTLY, they added a lot of anxiety now to learning a language. The biggest motivator for me which was maintaining my daily streak, has now become a source of anxiety. Why? Because I was able to repeat existing task without the risk of losing all my lives and still finish my daily goal. After finish my daily goal, I would either repeat another lesson that I thought I was weak at or start a new lesson. But, it was all risk free. So I had no worries about making any mistakes just focus on learning. Now, you have no choice on what specific lesson inside a skill you want to repeat and new level or old level you lose life with each mistake. As a result I started looking elsewhere to see what other app I could use.
So why did Duolingo make such an awful update? I'm guessing to increase their revenues. The new updates at least with my experience is forcing people to buy more lives to maintain their streaks. I think it might be their way to force out the people who are just casual users, and focus on serious users like myself and try to better monetize their serious users. In practically you could end up paying as much as $1.99/day to maintain your daily streak.
2 - Is it a helpful teaching tool? It's just a great motivator. I already speak two languages natively (because I'm an immigrant). I took one course of Japanese in college and I did okay. And I still remember some phrases. However, learning Russian proved to be harder than I thought. For one, I'm older now and we do not retain languages as fast. But also Russian grammar and way of thinking in that language is very different. Verbs not only have present and past (masculine, feminine) tenses, there is also concept of perfective and imperfective, also Imperatives. Then nouns have gender and also nouns have six different cases. Then there is variations on some of these rules for cases. All that said. It's the vocabulary that finally becomes the hardest part. Because there are no easy mnemonic to remember a word since there are very few associations to words we are familiar with in English.
As I said above, I had to buy 4 Russian books and one cheatsheet. One visual learning book, two books on Russian etymology to help me remember the words better by understanding their etymology. One Russian grammar book which helps explain a lot of the stuff. The Russian cheatsheet for a quick reference of a grammatical rule. I've recently play Russian101 pod twice a week when I'm driving which has been helpful learning some new phrases. With all these, I still have to google stuff when I'm using Duolingo to quickly understand something.
It's worth mentioning Duolingo added TinyCard, flashcards app. Which actually helped to retain some of these words. I often parallel my daily Duolingo with TinyCard. It was probably their most important teaching tool they added.
Basically, it's a great motivational tool. It's a free way to get you started and get you motivated. However, I'm not sure with the new update if the motivation to continue after the first lessons will be there or not.
[0] https://www.duolingo.com/comment/26612939/Where-are-the-inst...