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It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
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Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
#92I will break steaks in apps on purpose, to fight the gamification. At a certain point it is not really helping and just manipulating you for the application's benefit as the article explains.
Do it because you want to, you are getting something from it, not because you have to.
Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
#93Earlier 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?
Tourist fluent, maybe. Enough to go to a country and get by on the patience of the natives.
I did French all through high school and most of college, then learned firsthand that I was maybe 25% as fluent as I assumed. Then I went home and went through the entirety of the Duolingo curriculum in a few months, without learning anything new (a couple new vocab words, maybe).
So, you could view this in two ways: either it's a scam that tricks you into wasting a lot of time viewing ads or paying a subscription without delivering on its promise. Or, you could see it as a shortcut that's worth at least a couple years of classes. But, at least in my experience, it does not enable you to speak a language with fluency.
(Which makes total sense if you step back and look past the marketing promises. Of course 20 minutes a day with a cartoon bird is not going to replace actually living in a country and being immersed in the language 24/7)
Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
#94I will break steaks in apps on purpose, to fight the gamification. At a certain point it is not really helping and just manipulating you for the application's benefit as the article explains. Do it because you want to, you are getting something from it, not because you have to.
I discovered this somewhat by accident when I started wearing an Apple Watch.
Ended up with a ~400 day move streak. Yay me, right?
Well. It got pretty annoying toward the end, having to wear the damn thing every day. It kinda creeped up on me, one of those things where the motive to just not wear a watch for a day is low, so why not put it on and keep up my streak?
But cumulatively? There's a huge difference between mostly wearing a watch and always wearing a watch.
It was a relief when I busted it, finally, for two reasons: I could have a normal relationship with the device on my wrist, and I was in no danger of ever setting another record streak.
After that I deliberately bust streaks in apps at a number I choose in advance, something like 50 or 100.
Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I wonder what a fix would be? Maybe reset every 30 days and have a separate counter for the number of completed months that doesn’t reset if you fail.
Maybe some added leeway time, more leeway the longer the streak is. Like a 300 day streak should give you maybe a week’s worth of “time off,” so to speak. I’m kind of imagining a sort of SLA type of counter.
Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
#96They need a vacation mode. Though I imagine the fact that they don't include such an obvious feature is because it would interfere with their bottom line.
Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
#97I work for a foreign language instruction services company. We mostly serve government and military, but we do accept private students. All of our linguists are extremely skeptical of apps like Duolingo. And before anyone replies something like "your company has a vested interest in propping up instructor-led language training", if apps like Duolingo actually worked, the government--especially the military--would sto…
For these reasons, I think the most realistic answer for the best way to learn language is private tutoring. For people who have a specific need to learn a language this is of course true. Or even for people who have an amount of time and effort they are willing to dedicate to that end. The thing is, though - I’m very unlikely to invest in private tutoring in order to learn a language speculatively. The time and fina…
> I’d estimate that I’ve spent maybe 200 hours over three years with it, which has taken me from not knowing a language to being conversationally fluent in that language
This really jumped out at me. 200 hours to get to conversationally fluent is very, very fast: in the CEFR framework, with proper tuition, this generally gets one to about A2 ("elementary").
How closely related is the language you're studying to the language(s) you already know? Do you supplement Duolingo with other resources? And, last but not least, what's your definition of "conversationally fluent"?
Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
#98A) For those that question the apps and are on the fence, consider a traditional methods of language learning, consider a class at a community college. Community college in San Francisco is free for San Francisco residents and they have many language classes! Similar arrangements might be available wherever you currently live, and they're also cheap either way. B) I travel a lot and I realized that I don't actually w…
I recently signed up for a full-time, in-person community college language course this Fall. Not free where I live, but still very cheap compared to private tutoring.
Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
#99Re: It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak
#100I wish the streak thing could be turned off completely. I have no interest in being pushed to use an app more than I want to.