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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

#41

Post by aix1 »

moron4hire wrote: post #27

I 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.

Based on my experience of language learning, I agree with you.

> The OP take about having used Duolingo for almost 10 years. That seems absurd to me. I would hope they have mastered at least half a dozen languages with that kind of effort.

This completely glosses over the costs involved.

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

#42

Post by Jabbles »

Shacklz wrote: post #37
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.

There's a setting to turn off the "ding" when you get something correct. I thought it's annoying, so I turned it off. Suddenly, the app felt very dull, and maintaining my streak felt hard - I kept forgetting to look into the app. So I turned it on again. ... Pavlovian conditioning works, even when I'm the rat. For the time being, I'm okay with that, because Duolingo does help me learn French, let's see how it goes lo…

> Duolingo does help me learn French

Can you say more about how much it has helped you, in what ways, and what else you have been doing to study?

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

#45

Post by claydolatry »

Quite a few anecdotes here validating the streak so I'll just be an alternate data point. When I used Duolingo regularly it was because there was a goal I intended to learn a foreign language for. The gamifed streaks never really had an effect on me and are quite off-putting.

I understand because of that I am not their target demographic. Or maybe I am and they want to engage users like me more. Maybe if the UI felt a bit more immersive--a clip of native French speakers interacting rather than cartoon bubbles and gems, for instance.

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

#46

Post by matthewmacleod »

moron4hire wrote: post #27

I 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 financial requirements are too high a barrier.

But Duolingo is an investment of maybe 10 minutes a day at some moment of downtime. 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 - something I would otherwise just never have done.

Duolingo (or other similar systems) are very obviously not the optimum way to learn a language to fluency. And it’s especially obvious that they wont replace a tutoring service for government and military clients. But a lot of the criticism of them completely ignores the fact that they fill an entirely separate niche which is totally valid.

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

#47

Post by Frummy »

yieldcrv wrote: post #6

A) 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…

So how do you learn with that goal in mind? And how do you know in advance what the cultural demands are?

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

#48

Post by hermannj314 »

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 large number of consecutive days of sobriety.

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

#49

Post by Telemakhos »

superasn wrote: post #12
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…

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 rewards: when you communicate successfully, you accomplish some real-world task like buying yourself bread or getting a date, and that accomplishment doesn't need game-level rewards. Gamification is only effective when trying to palliate some sort of otherwise boring "grinding" (to use a gaming term from RPGs).

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

#50

Post by aix1 »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #35
moron4hire wrote: post #27

I 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…

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 -- critically -- a high enough total_lessons/total_student metric (I forget the cutoffs I used).

I then looked through their profiles (there were by this point only tens of teachers left on my list for German), arranged trial lessons with a handful, and picked the one.

Been with that teacher for a few months. Couldn't be happier with the experience and with my progress.

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