Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

leejo.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 231 posts

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

#61

Post by matthewdgreen »

iratewizard wrote: post #55
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'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?

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

#62

Post by ninkendo »

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 day. I didn’t even realize how important the streak must have been to me, because I stopped reading after that and haven’t picked up the iPad to read a book in almost 2 years since then.

Edit: to one of the flagged replies that assumed I wasn’t reading much anyway (which I can’t reply to)… to be clear I didn’t just read five minutes a night, that was the minimum amount to keep the streak going. I read (iirc) 8 books in that time frame, including the lord of the rings trilogy in there. I wasn’t reading for hours a day, but probably averaging more like 20 minutes. Not a ton, but it’s not like I was barely reading.

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

#63

Post by lampshades »

toyg wrote: post #8

Of course you can refill freezes, but you need enough credits to do so. You accumulate credits as you complete lessons and hit targets. So OP was, effectively, living for a period off the riches he had accumulated over almost 10 years (!) of efforts. That's not easy.

Tip: streak freezes cost less jewels or whatever on the web client than the mobile one.

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

#64

Post by sshine »

iratewizard wrote: post #55
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'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…

Yes, it seems that Duolingo will encourage and reward you for using the app, even though your rate of learning is not increased more by this.

It seems that the better language learning app would rather ask you to use the app less, if you make more progress when you do use the app.

The collection of recently failed flashcards that you can iterate is a great feature. It is somehow an automatic feature of spaced-repetition apps, since recently flashcards are shuffled into the stack at a higher frequency.

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

#65

Post by sshine »

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?

> Does the app work?

Not in my experience.

Anki + language-partner sessions + evening classes did it for me.

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

#66

Post by amrrs »

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've seen with Wordle players recently. No one wants to break the streak but once it's broken once or twice it's almost the end of it

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

#67

Post by nohackeratall »

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 am with you. I am well aware of being gameified yet it worked for a while for me as well. But after having been sick for a few days I lost my streak. Apple tolerates no sick days (don't take this out of context).

Also, not getting in enough stand hours because I have to put the watch on the charger during the day (the non-replaceable battery of the watch is on its way out) was another reason to stop chasing rings.

I still use the watch to track my activity and my sleep but I gave up chasing badges.

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

#68

Post by Shacklz »

Jabbles wrote: post #42
Shacklz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure! I think Duolingo is fantastic to learn basic sentences and vocabulary. To reach A1/A2 proficiency, Duolingo is absolutely amazing in my opinion (I can only judge it for French though).

Once you go into the B1+ area, the usefulness of Duolingo starts to fall off, slow but steady - learning grammar and conjugations in all the different tenses isn't its forté. I think it's still very useful for repetition and constant exposure to the language, but without content outside of Duolingo, I'm not quite sure if it would work out so well.

For me personally, YouTube has been an amazing learning source for French - there are a lot of channels out there with tons of high quality teaching videos. If I had to name one, "Learn French with Alexa" is probably my favorite, but for a lot of topics it's very useful to watch multiple videos from different channels on the same topic, both as repetition and also because sometimes having multiple, slightly different explanations helps.

Since a few months, I do visit a weekly French course though - self study brought me only so far; reading already works quite well, listening so-so (depends on the talking speed), but I have a hard time speaking myself. It takes a very long to find the words, but the more I have to talk in course the better it goes.

One more thing: For purely learning vocabulary, I very much recommend Anki, it's amazing to just memorize words.

Ugh, this got a bit longer than intended, hope it gave you a bit of an overview of my approach :)

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

#69

Post by unhammer »

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'll look up a word and find some real-world usage example too and add that.

I did use Duolingo a bit when starting out, but I felt like I didn't really remember any of the words introduced there, just learnt how to hit the buttons as fast as I could. (And oh gods those annoying animations). Pimsleur on the other hand is amazing when starting out. Then a combination of podcasts, simple stories and Anki.

I've also heard good things about italki, seems like a marketplace for 1-on-1 language tutoring online.

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

#70

Post by lostcolony »

frutiger wrote: post #32
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.

Use the website from a desktop/laptop. Almost all the gamification takes a back seat there. Also don’t use the word bank - force yourself to do the freeform typing.

You can also access the website from your phone (though it might require 'desktop mode' at this point). That's what I did when I used Duolingo if I wanted it on the go, and the experience was a lot better (as well as allowing me to type answers as you mention).
Post reply on HN