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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

#191

Post by toast0 »

cmg wrote: post #76
Shacklz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Most native speakers are useless for why. You ideally want someone who learned both your native language and the language in question. Then they can often explain things relative to your language, and you'll learn things about your language and the language in question. Look for language notes from Hong Kong; I had found a university site with very helpful information on French many moons ago, but I can't find it again, it was written in fluent English, but with insights on English usage that were unlikely to occur to native English-only speakers.

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

#192

Post by jmyeet »

dymk wrote: post #190

Nobody ever became conversational in a language by using Duolingo. It's IMO a determent to language learners, because it makes you _feel_ like you're learning something without actually putting together the skills needed to understand even basic native content. Rather than spending time with comprehensible input, people get stuck in the Duo well where they're content to collect rubies and points. Drop Duolingo, use a…

This mirrors my experience with Duolingo. I think I did 5 Spanish exercises every day for like a year and can't remember any of it.

What's more, it's easy to guess many answers knowing nothing. Simple things like the only word that's capitalized will be the first word in the answer.

I also remember thinking the vocab for a given topic was really arbitrary too.

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

#193

Post by gnicholas »

gre wrote: post #112
dan-robertson wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you start on a day, time it until you stop and count it for both days. What's the downside of someone starting at 11:59 and reading 6 minutes to game it? Also, days are like 48 hours long from the first timezone to the last timezone.

Good point! If you flew from SF to AU, you’d lose a “day” in much less than 24 hours.

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

#194

Post by AlecSchueler »

jeremyjh wrote: post #162
jammu wrote: post #153

I love that Duo streak is hard to lose, unlike other apps where if you miss a day streak is gone. The goal of app is to help you keep learning. In life things are bound to happen because of which you might miss couple of days or more, it make no sense to penalize you for that. I have been trying to maintain streak in other apps but I when I miss a day, I am not motivated enough to go back and start again. Also, strea…

But how does the streak motivate you if you know that it is meaningless - and not even really a streak?

In a way it's a streak that's more meaningful for you, because you know yourself and what you can and can't do, and you know what innocent things (dinner with friends, meetings at work) might be fair enough for you to skip a day for, and that way you can control it and not let it control you.

There's also the fact that your lower brain systems don't care that you "know that is is meaningless" -- they still see that number getting bigger and give you that dopamine hit, which is what will really keep you coming back for more.

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

#196

Post by murphyslab »

One odd feature of many apps that use streaks is that they fail to account or allow for a rest day or a weekend. Even with work one can have perfect attendance and only be there 5 out of 7 days. It's strange that it's normal for apps to demand more engagement than that to maintain a streak.

I find it overbearing that apps create the expectation of participating even when I am in the middle of the forest and mountains with zero network connectivity. It incentivizes unhealthy lives and life patterns of never disconnecting from the internet. Why can't these apps allow users to choose what kinds of streaks they want to aspire to?

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

#197

Post by senorsmile »

cogitoergo_some wrote: post #136

I've been able to "hack" around the streak loss demotivation by tracking my language learning practice outside of the Duolingo streak measure. I use an app called "Habit" to track good habits I want to follow, such as exercise, meditation and language learning. It has the ability to set up weekly goals such as 3 days out of 7 or monthly goals and displays progress and various stats. That flexibility has helped me tra…

I track all of my language learning across multiple languages and multiple resources per language using Google spreadsheets. The streak effect at that point is much more about seeing my overall progress per language and effort spent over months and years.

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

#198

Post by [deleted] »

aix1 wrote: post #50
UweSchmidt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private tutoring has to be, with a good teacher, orders of magnitude better than anything else. Services that ask you to "request a quote" instead of naming a price are of course not for everybody. Has anyone had success with finding tutors on platforms like italki.com? I tried for a bit but probably didn't spend enough time to find the right tutor.

> Has anyone had success with finding tutors on platforms like italki.com? italki - yes, absolutely, but taking your time to do the research definitely pays off. My method was to shortlist teachers who: (1) fit my linguistic needs (country/dialect, native speaker status etc); and (2) satisfied certain availability criteria (timezone, teaching days/hours etc); and (3) had a high enough number of students and -- critic…

[deleted]

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

#199

Post by koluna »

This is a well-known play on FOMO - there is that bit about the inherent fear of missing out on being top of leaderboard/in-game items/bonuses/etc. What's fascinating is just how easy this mechanic is applied to so many modern games and apps, and how hooked folks become on it even though they know what's going on.

"Ugh... they implemented this for FOMO... but damn I can't skip playing this game for a day because I am going to miss out on the +1 bonus to agility that's gonna be awarded if I log in 7 days in a row."

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

#200

Post by rjh29 »

hermannj314 wrote: post #48

What I noticed from the sobriety community (specifically alcohol), it is important to make promises to yourself 'one day at a a time'. There is a presumed danger to tying too much of your ego to the duration of your sobriety. I am not sure if it is scientifically proven, but if you relapse the assumption is you would rather have a psychology built around making the right choice today and not one built on pride of a l…

Yeah. Because relapsing happens to almost everyone. And even if your "sober streak" resets to zero you haven't lost your motivation to stay sober, the experience of being sober (and knowing you can cope), and the tools you've learned. You're still in a better position than before, all you need to do is get back on the horse. Fixating on a streak just makes it harder to do that.
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