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It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

leejo.github.io

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Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

#71

Post by dealpete »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #61
iratewizard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Duolingo for about a year and they definitely have a lot of stuff like that built into the gamification. Often times, though, playing the game they designed is counterproductive. I've broken 100+ day streaks twice now because I realized I was only putting in the minimum for the sake of the game. I've found it better to take a month off here and there so that I can come back and focus on my actual goals. The…

Does the app work? I don’t mean the gamification: I mean, are you becoming fluent (or even just literate) in the language outside of the app?

It is a good way to get started with a new language, but you won’t make it to fluency. They don’t have enough content for that.

Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

#72

Post by udp »

viburnum wrote: post #26

I wish they had a setting to turn off all the gamification. I’m an adult. I don’t care about streaks or points or gems or whatever.

I don’t mind streaks alone, but it seems like whenever I open the app I have to click through about 10 pages of animations about League Repairs and Streak Freezes and Friends Quests and Gem Boosts. It’s really frustrating and almost always makes me quit the app immediately. I just want to take a lesson and I’ve paid for the subscription already.

Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

#73

Post by Shacklz »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #61
iratewizard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Duolingo for about a year and they definitely have a lot of stuff like that built into the gamification. Often times, though, playing the game they designed is counterproductive. I've broken 100+ day streaks twice now because I realized I was only putting in the minimum for the sake of the game. I've found it better to take a month off here and there so that I can come back and focus on my actual goals. The…

Does the app work? I don’t mean the gamification: I mean, are you becoming fluent (or even just literate) in the language outside of the app?

Fluent with Duolingo alone? Very unlikely in my experience.

From my point of view, you can make it to A1/A2 proficiency in a language with Duolingo alone - after that, it gets quite hard. Teaching grammar and conjugations isn't its forté, without resources outside of Duolingo it will get rather tricky.

That being said, I still use Duolingo for my daily dose of language exposure - but without Anki (for vocabulary), youtube videos (to explain various specific topics) and evening courses (which help a lot by giving a structured approach on what to learn in what order), my learning curve would probably flatten out.

Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

#74

Post by lb1lf »

Telemakhos wrote: post #49
superasn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for me. I had a 800+ day streak and I remember that on the days I couldn't practice, I used to play Duolingo story #1 at 1am with half eyes open just to keep it going. But as soon as my streak ended, my frequency of playing went from 6 days in a week, to 5 days.. and now I haven't played it in months. Fake or not, keeping the streak alive did help me learn a lot of French (well actually there is one more side to…

> even after all that I can't speak a single proper sentence now apart from the basic je m'appelle stuff This is the real problem with Duolingo: it doesn't actually teach you to communicate in the language. Rote memorization and communication are two different things, and Duolingo does very little aside from drilling memorization. Streaks and gamification don't contribute to communication, which has its own system of…

That it doesn't - teach you to communicate, that is - but I found DuoLingo great at providing the base vocabulary and phrases to enable me to make my first small attempts at communicating.

(I suddenly found myself stuck in Brazil for work for two months this year, and after a couple of hours of DuoLingo I was able to exchange a few phrases with hotel staff, often interspersed with the most useful phrase 'O que isso significa?' (What does that mean?')

The best part of DuoLingo was (and is) to save my conversation partners much of the 'Oh, in Portuguese we call that...' we'd otherwise be doing.

Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

#76

Post by cmg »

Shacklz wrote: post #73
matthewdgreen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the app work? I don’t mean the gamification: I mean, are you becoming fluent (or even just literate) in the language outside of the app?

Fluent with Duolingo alone? Very unlikely in my experience. From my point of view, you can make it to A1/A2 proficiency in a language with Duolingo alone - after that, it gets quite hard. Teaching grammar and conjugations isn't its forté, without resources outside of Duolingo it will get rather tricky. That being said, I still use Duolingo for my daily dose of language exposure - but without Anki (for vocabulary), yo…

I'm using Duolingo to learn Russian because my spouse is Russian and I want to communicate better with his family (especially his grandmother, who speaks less English than I do Russian).

After nearly a year, I can help set up for dinner ("Where are the plates?" "There is bread on the table already" "Do you want tea?") and similar things.

Now I'm getting into genitives and such, and that's where Duolingo really seems to not do well. It doesn't explain why a word appears a certain way in a tense, it just makes you memorize that it does. Sometimes I'll ask my husband why, and he just says "Well, because that's the way it is". Of course I'll use the same explanation when my MIL asks me something about English.

Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

#77

Post by rmbyrro »

ninkendo wrote: post #62
needle0 wrote: post #40

Losing a Sojourner medal streak in Ingress (due to being busy due to my own wedding!) made me quit playing the game regularly. Streaks can be effective in keeping the user returning, but once it's broken it can be a perfect moment for the user to churn. Hence, I can understand how the Duolingo devs made the streak less fragile than it would initially appear, but doing so (and having the cover blown) also makes return…

I had this problem with the Books app on my iPad. I had a nearly 300 day streak going of reading at least 5 minutes every day (and I have not been an avid reader throughout most of my life.) The books app would keep track of the streak at the bottom of the screen in your library view. Then one night I started reading at 11:57 PM, and by the time I was reading for 5 minutes, it was 12:02AM and I technically missed a d…

Wow, that's impressive.

Non-avid reader before to almost a year of avid reading, then all lost because of a hook metric. This stuff is a real deal.

Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

#78

Post by sieabahlpark »

ninkendo wrote: post #62
needle0 wrote: post #40

Losing a Sojourner medal streak in Ingress (due to being busy due to my own wedding!) made me quit playing the game regularly. Streaks can be effective in keeping the user returning, but once it's broken it can be a perfect moment for the user to churn. Hence, I can understand how the Duolingo devs made the streak less fragile than it would initially appear, but doing so (and having the cover blown) also makes return…

I had this problem with the Books app on my iPad. I had a nearly 300 day streak going of reading at least 5 minutes every day (and I have not been an avid reader throughout most of my life.) The books app would keep track of the streak at the bottom of the screen in your library view. Then one night I started reading at 11:57 PM, and by the time I was reading for 5 minutes, it was 12:02AM and I technically missed a d…

Were you really reading that much in five minutes anyway? It doesn't sound like you changed much.

Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

#79

Post by slickdork »

someotherperson wrote: post #14

One thing I found odd about Duolingo is that they disabled offline lessons. It was the most powerful thing they had -- to me at least. I was able to board planes and just grind for hours, I could travel cross country and do the same. Even in normal travels I was able to use it without constant disconnects -- it was great. But they decided one day to just nuke it... for no reason as far as I could tell. My subscriptio…

I'm curious, did offline mode show ads? If not, then I can suspect why it was disabled.

Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

#80

Post by bondant »

k8sToGo wrote: post #58
bondant wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Babbel.com Tried German and polish and thought the lessons were good.

Did it help you learn communicate in it or is it just like duolingo where you only learn basic vocab?

In the case of polish it gave me enough vocabulary and prononciation clues to not be afraid to go to Poland and be able to use basic sentences when talking with staff at restaurants, shops and hotels. I was also quite happy to be able to understand basic stuff on signs and have basic conversations with native polish friends.
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