Duolingo

[redbird]

Over at covidcoffeecorner, today's discussion question is about what games people are playing right now, in person or otherwise, and one of the examples liv used was gamified self-improvement stuff like Duolingo, and I wrote:

I'm mostly, and deliberately, ignoring the gamified parts of Duolingo, at least for now. "Maintain your streak" is gamified talk for "do at least a little every day," and I want to keep that up, because it's easier to maintain that sort of habit than "I will do French at least four days a week" or the like.

I was looking at the "league promotion" bit when I first started, because I had a bunch of free time, and found the early lessons extremely easy. Right now, I'm doing intro French as much for listening practice as vocabulary. It's still at the point where I know most of the words before Duolingo "teaches" them to me, many via Spanish cognates or borrowed English (it has me practicing that the French for "weekend" is "week-end") or picked up from menus and signs in Montreal. But I can't go too fast right now, because typing can strain my left hand.

I suspect the gamification would work better for me if I was doing this with people, friends or in a class, or if all those "lingots" I earn for things like meeting my daily goal were usable for anything I remotely wanted.

covidcoffeecorner is for anyone who wants to chat/have some more social interaction during the pandemic. Drop by if that sounds interesting.

Comments

[mindstalk]

Yeah, I mostly use Duo for getting me to exercise a bit of Spanish every day. Sometimes I learn new words too, but I'd gotten most of the grammar from formal study. 'game' is mostly having an 810+ day streak (streak freezes occasionally helping, easy to pay for when I get 80 lingots every 10 days now.) I was having a total points competition with a friend, but that died when they changed the 'test-out' rules to give only 20 points instead of all the things you'd tested out of, so I have a huge lead locked in.

A friend is using it to learn some Spanish and Japanese, and keep her German fresh.

[carbonel]

As you probably know, I've been doing Duolingo Hebrew for a few years (1080-day streak). The only aspect of the gamification that affects me is maintaining the streak, which I will admit keeps me doing it as an every-single-day thing. I've used a few streak freezes over that time, but fewer than ten, possibly fewer than five. It's just part of my bedtime routine -- Duolingo, some Candy Crush, reading, start the CPAP, and lights out.

The sad thing is that I'm getting to the end of what they have for Hebrew, and I want to keep improving that, not move on to a different language. I've still got at least another six months, but the end is in sight. I've played a bit with Memrise, but I've had trouble with making it work usefully for me. (I don't need to repeat words I know solidly six more times to prove I know them.) But I'll probably have to contend with that eventually.

[kareina]

I really love the convenience of DuoLingo, but I hate the gamification aspects. I wish we could choose between having it nag us about streaks and getting a summary of total hours this week, or this month, or this year.


I truly don't care about the "streaks", and even if I did I wouldn't agree with its measure of my streaks, anyway, as I measure a "day" as that time between when I wake and when I sleep. My normal time to do a duolingo lesson is just after I crawl into bed and as my dawnlight is bringing on dusk. Therefore my streaks count only the number of days in a row that I happened to go to bed on the same side of midnight.