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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

#121

Post by bluGill »

ricardobeat wrote: post #38
jonathanjaeger wrote: post #5

My boss stopped learning Spanish on Duolingo when he lost his streak. It's a powerful motivator even if it's not a "true streak" due to streak freezes and such. My streak is at 1436 and if I lost it, I wouldn't stop Duolingo because I actually like it to learn, but the streak does make me happier, haha. I think I've had 2 days in the last few years of streak freezes due to 1 day forgetting and 1 day the site not savi…

That goes to show how easily humans are manipulated. When I read these comments it all sounds incredibly pointless. People cherishing a counter they are allowed to increase.

The problem is progress is slow and hard to measure. Streaks are something you can measure and consistent study makes a different after many hours of work.

That said, if you want to learn a language you need to study a lot. Complete everything Duolingo can in a few months and then find better courses of study to learn after that. You should never in my opinion have more than a 6 month streak.

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

#122

Post by dymk »

viburnum wrote: post #99
Finnucane wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the whole premise of the program.

When I started it was minimal.

Duolingo was always super gamified. Sure it ramped up, but there was never a time when the site didn’t look and feel like a game.

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

#123

Post by dwighttk »

duolingo (back when I used it years ago) also made it pretty difficult to even get questions wrong. They seemed to shy away from questions where I had to type in the answer (ie come up with the translation out of my own head) when I was out near the edge of my knowledge in favor of multiple-choice (ie they give you the translation but you pick it out of a couple wrong answers)

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

#124

Post by marban »

lttlrck wrote: post #34

I had over a year of completing the health three rings on Apple Watch (maybe failed on two or three day) - but a flight tripped me up and it fell apart very quickly. The ability to make up the missed days might have led me to carry on. Or maybe forgiveness if you'd gone over in the precious few days. It's sad really it was quite an accomplishment.

I've a ~six year streak with travel logistics and 3 Covid Shots being the only exemption. As long as it's planned, there's no need to get stressed about it.

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

#125

Post by avereveard »

dwighttk wrote: post #123

duolingo (back when I used it years ago) also made it pretty difficult to even get questions wrong. They seemed to shy away from questions where I had to type in the answer (ie come up with the translation out of my own head) when I was out near the edge of my knowledge in favor of multiple-choice (ie they give you the translation but you pick it out of a couple wrong answers)

Every now and then you get a hard mode prompt, which ramp up the freeform written questions

It usually happens when you do two or three lesson in a string, never seen it on the first exercise of the day.

What I miss is a sort of weekly recap across all units.

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

#126

Post by pessimizer »

unhammer wrote: post #69
Rerarom wrote: post #2

What are some good alternatives to Duolingo with fewer dark patterns? (And don't suggest traditional methods, I am very much not against them, I am just curious about apps and such.)

I use Anki. I wouldn't use it in the beginning, but when you're at the point that you can listen to some simple podcasts or videos or read some simple texts, then when you hear/read a sentence with a word or two you're unsure of, you add it to Anki and you get spaced repetition on that. (Don't just add lone words – although the context may feel like cheating, you want that reinforcement of related contexts.) Often I'…

Piggybacking off your Anki mention, I'd like to continue to spread around something (currently only of interest to people learning Italian or Spanish) that I've been up on lately. A guy came up with a wonderful (and monolingual) deck format for people who are learning Spanish or Italian to use the old-school method of learning Latin where you learn all verb conjugations by rote first and get them (and tenses/moods in general) out of the way. Then you can dedicate your language learning time to acquiring words, sentences and colocations (i.e. interesting stuff) rather than repeatedly and incompletely relearning the verb mess, leading to permanent blind spots.

He also surrounds the verbs in mock clozes, so you get hammered with context. You can also do it without doing anything else; the Romance verb situation can be isolated from the rest of the language completely. At least for Spanish you'll eventually need to know what common subjunctive triggers are, that they'd rather use the present tense (with context) than the future or past more often than you'd think, and other stuff that's an order of magnitude simpler to remember than those damned verbs. If you need to know irregular vosotros conjugations in subjunctive future, you've already got them in your head.

http://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/w_ultimate_spanish_conjugat...

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

#127

Post by davidzweig »

yorwba wrote: post #113
davidzweig wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We made something a couple of weeks ago, you might like it, needs login but is 100% free. Endless (depending on language) listening exercises, sentences are selected (from tatoeba) based on vocabulary (no selection based on grammar yet). It's also integrated with a flashcard system (also free). If you set a small vocab (100 words) and do lots of cards, you start to get a feel for the grammar of a language. Something…

As a contributor to Tatoeba, I'm always interested in checking out how people use our data. The interface needs work to be usable on mobile, but I guess you know that. I'm not sure whether the TTS you're using is really good enough to be usable for learning a language. I tried it in German and noticed quite a few TTS bugs, like pronouncing "Tu" as if it were an acronym "TU" instead of the verb "Do", as well as switch…

Oh, thank you for your contributions! Mobile, we're planning a RN app (site is MobX/React), but we got our hands full at the moment (who wants a job?). TTS, I used to be of the opinion that TTS is something that should be kept far away from langauge learners. But, it got so damn good: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service... At least for many langauges. Didn't check the German much, interesting. For Hungarian, it screws up question intonation. But often it just seems completely human-like. I was concerned about the license for the audio recordings, and I assume recording quality could be mixed, but I'll take a more careful look.

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

#128

Post by diydsp »

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?

no way. i learned german through immersion, then tried to learn the much simpler Spanish via Duolingo.

key problems:

1. not enough speaking practice. speaking is _at least_ 50% of the skill but about 10% of DL.

2. Waay too much time spent setting up each question w animations etc. not enoimugh learning time. much more repetition is required.

3. way too general learning. people have varying needs for language. e.g. work, travel, family, research/reading. teaching must be tailored to these.

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

#129

Post by weinzierl »

My experience is quite different. Pre-pandemic I used to use Duolingo on my public transport commute and I had it more than once that I reached my daily goal only to notice the next day that it hadn't registered properly. This happened quite regularly and with my free account I could only have one streak freeze, so I occasionally lost my streak because of this.

Another issue that caused me to lose my streak is when Duolingo says: "Sorry we encountered an error. Don't worry your streak will be safe." In my experience my streak was not safe.

I don't mean to be too harsh with Duolingo, I think they get a lot of features just right. The streak thing, however, was just an annoyance for me. These failures made me temporarily quit several times. Even if you know you should not become upset about stupid internet points it still hurts when you feel it is not your fault.

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

#130

Post by dghughes »

jonathanjaeger wrote: post #5

My boss stopped learning Spanish on Duolingo when he lost his streak. It's a powerful motivator even if it's not a "true streak" due to streak freezes and such. My streak is at 1436 and if I lost it, I wouldn't stop Duolingo because I actually like it to learn, but the streak does make me happier, haha. I think I've had 2 days in the last few years of streak freezes due to 1 day forgetting and 1 day the site not savi…

I was learning several languages and one day at 12:01am I lost a streak. That crushed me. From then on I haven't touched Dulolingo. It sounds silly but the streaks have a very real physical affect on me.

It's similar to redit where someone demanded a subredit of mine since they deemed I not active enough (I was active but not to random guy's satisfaction) and the redit mods agreed. I haven't been on redit since after being a member for 15 years.

So yeah streaks, the chain (as Jerry Seinfeld says), consistency being broken makes me feel like crap.

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