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It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak

• Rerarom 4y ago
  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.)
  • gilbertbw 4y ago
    I don’t feel like the dark patterns are really that dark when used by an education platform. All they are trying to do is encourage practice, which is very important to language learning.
    • lytefm 4y ago
      I agree. When I started using Duolingo, my intention was to do at least one lesson every day. I'm rather pissed if the daily reminder comes to late. If I don't want to practice daily anymore, I'll simply switch off notifications or uninstall the app.
    • gwd 4y ago
      I don't feel like Duolingo's gamification is dark, so much as counter-productive. They always give you a 15-minute "double XP" reward when you gain a crown; and there was a time when I got into a rhythm such that I always started my session just about to gain a crown; then I spent 15 minutes almost finishing the next crown, so I could start it again tomorrow. But of course, when you're doing that, you're pressuring yourself to get through as many lessons as possible, not to engage well with the material. You don't want to stop and read the discussions about a particular translation. And (since I'm studying Chinese), you often have a choice between attempting to speak Chinese, typing Chinese using pinyin, or clicking on the character blocks. The first two are almost certainly better practice; but the last is a lot faster and more predictable. And of course, now when I'm out of that rhythm, I'm totally not motivated to study, since I'm getting half the points I would otherwise be getting. If I'd been rewarded (not competitively, but just personally) simply for spending time in the platform, I'd probably be spending it more effectively.
  • Faaak 4y ago
    I quite like memrise, and it worked much better for me
    • LennyWhiteJr 4y ago
      +1 for Memrise
  • Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    Personally I like Drops.
  • bckygldstn 4y ago
    I track my usage separately in a spreadsheet, which avoids the stress of streaks, but still lets me draw motivation from past effort: https://www.ajnisbet.com/blog/tracking-goals https://www.ajnisbet.com/blog/tracking-goals
  • bondant 4y ago
    I like Babbel.com Tried German and polish and thought the lessons were good.
    • k8sToGo 4y ago
      Did it help you learn communicate in it or is it just like duolingo where you only learn basic vocab?
      • bondant 4y ago
        In the case of polish it gave me enough vocabulary and prononciation clues to not be afraid to go to Poland and be able to use basic sentences when talking with staff at restaurants, shops and hotels. I was also quite happy to be able to understand basic stuff on signs and have basic conversations with native polish friends.
        • k8sToGo 4y ago
          Thanks. I'll give it a try then.
  • torstenvl 4y ago
    Babbel is the least hated of this kind of app among my linguist friends. Pimsleur is highly regarded by phonologists. I get frustrated by almost all of these tools. In particular, I feel like Duolingo is much less useful if you already know another language, and is almost useless as a way to brush up on a language you already know (my boyfriend has been doing Russian Duolingo for three months and his vocabulary is just now finally not a strict subset of mine - when I tried to use it to brush up on French I gave up out of frustration after three weeks of not learning anything except a new insect name). Forgive the digression, but this reminds me of a general gripe: I wish there were more/better introductions and tutorials and other learning materials geared toward people knowledgeable in another human or computer language, the educational equivalent of P frames in temporal video compression. Rather than feeding you examples piece by piece and making you build up the mental model tediously, brain dump the mental model on you and let you fill in the specifics as you go. Easy Arabic Grammar by Jane Wightwick or Basic Polish by Dana Bielec are decent examples of what I wish were more prevalent.
    • dymk 4y ago
      Cure Dolly for Japanese is a huge infodump of high quality grammar explanation.
    • waqf 4y ago
      Horace Lunt's Fundamentals of Russian is one I found helpful, particularly for being upfront about the actual pronunciation rules. There are also many similar gripes among STEM tutorials. Why can't this physics/chemistry/economics book assume I know vector calculus/differential equations?
    • somenameforme 4y ago
      As an aside, in Duolingo you can click on the checkpoint icon, on the main lesson page, to take a test to advance to the next large group of lessons. If you're not learning anything in a series of lessons, you don't need to grind through them all. Similarly, there is also a sort of placement test each time you start a new language that helps adjust to your preexisting knowledge. You should never be in a scenario where you're using Duolingo without learning anything new unless it's intentional or you've mastered the entire selection of lessons they offer.
  • sanqui 4y ago
    It's a paid app, but I enjoyed Speakly's approach of "endless stream of open cloze exercises". It forces you to actually type words in the target language (unlike Duolingo which is mostly translations into the source language), it has a clever spaced repetition algorithm, and it lets you practice for as long as you want and stop immediately at any point, unlike Duolingo locking you into 20 question long lessons.
    • davidzweig 4y ago
      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 like 40 languages are supported. https://dev.languagereactor.com/phrasepump https://dev.languagereactor.com/phrasepump (this is the dev site, will go to prod in a couple of weeks)
      • sanqui 4y ago
        That looks great so far! Pair it with open cloze with translation once you determine that the user should know the word and you've got magic going. You could even "beep" the word out of the recording (I'm assuming they're TTS). Edit: typo
        • davidzweig 4y ago
          We use microsoft TTS, was trying to figure out if they can give time ranges for beeping out words.. didn't see it. Holy grail would be just generating audio files to listen to, no front end at all. :)
      • yorwba 4y ago
        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 switching to an English pronunciation next to English names (pronouncing "Hallo Roger" more like "Hello Roger"). Tatoeba also has many recordings in quite a few languages (e.g. German https://tatoeba.org/en/audio/index/deu https://tatoeba.org/en/audio/index/deu ) You should try using them if possible. For download instructions, see https://tatoeba.org/en/downloads https://tatoeba.org/en/downloads
  • hutattedonmyarm 4y ago
    I switched to Babbel a while back and couldn’t be happier
  • unhammer 4y ago
    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.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      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_conjugation.html http://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/w_ultimate_spanish_conjugat...
  • oliwary 4y ago
    I've really enjoyed using Mosalingua! It is focused much more heavily on common phrases and vocabulary, and lets you choose a certain area (such as business, sport, dating) that you want to focus on in another language.
  • emursebrian 4y ago
    There are a lot of alternatives, but I found myself bouncing back and forth between different resources and spent a lot of time curating content. I started working on some of my own tooling to help with this. For example, one tool took a list of sentences and translations and ran them through Google TTS to get recording to use in Anki. After working on this tooling for a while, I decided to move away from Anki and just build an app. Right now, we're working on building out a beginner Thai course focused on reading because educational material in that area is severely lacking. We're also working on a series of graded readers. Soon we'll be launching quick-study feature that allows you to curate lists of words and phrases that you want to learn. You will be able to select from anything you've already learned, draw from our existing library of 129,000 words and phrases or input new content. Once you've created or lists you can use the quick-study that will create a custom lesson for you based on how familiar with the content you are. Not launched or even in beta yet, but the site is public. The info is listed in my profile and you can contact me from the site if you'd like to get in touch.
• jonathanjaeger 4y ago
  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 saving my exercise. Ah well, I still like my streak even if it's not 100% pure!
  • superasn 4y ago
    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 it.. even after all that I can't speak a single proper sentence now apart from the basic je m'appelle stuff)
    • jonathanjaeger 4y ago
      Yup, I always do one story when I'm strapped for time just to keep it going on days I can't do exercises.
    • Telemakhos 4y ago
      > 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).
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  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 want to "learn a language" I want to "be able to communicate in an area". So doing a Duolingo speedrun on the airplane is pretty much useless (or even months before). What you really want to do is know how to buy a girl a drink, for example. In a loud situation this may even involve counting to the bartender, "language learning" apps aren't going to show you how to count on your fingers the local way. It really changes the priorities to what you actually need to use.
  • Frummy 4y ago
    So how do you learn with that goal in mind? And how do you know in advance what the cultural demands are?
    • yieldcrv 4y ago
      I go to a club in that country and figure it out. Takes an me about an hour and a half to observe, and then try. I don't consider myself extroverted. The more stimuli the better, because the less actual talking is expected. Very basic bits of information need to be transmitted. Nobody is going to understand your years of app language, or years of school language, and definitely not your accent. You need idioms and expressions and you aren't going to blend in either way. Do it live.
      • pessimizer 4y ago
        Come on now. People are definitely going to understand that, and encourage you. You may not understand their idiomatic expressions of encouragement at all, but that's your opportunity to use your app/school language to learn something new.
        • 4y ago
• toyg 4y ago
  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.
  • leejo 4y ago
    That is a fair point. I went back through my history in the app to figure out the real numbers: First day of use: 11th Dec 2014 First missed day: 19th Jun 2017 (921 days later) First freeze use: 20th Oct 2020 (2,140 days after first day of use) The missed days were down to (IIRC) time zone crossing and patchy internet, I can't recall if Duolingo let you off here or if there was leeway in the streak calculation. Those could also be Duolingo being down for maintenance. I think when I started using the freezes was when the value of the app had dropped for me. 2,140 days is a pretty good run. FWIW: living in a French speaking country has provided the most value. Duo helped initially with vocab building. I find/found the lack of colloquialisms one of the biggest problems with it.
    • Blahah 4y ago
      Wow, two and a half years without missing a day is impressive. Kudos to you for having that rigor, and to Duolingo for whatever about their design allowed you to engage so consistently. Do you have a sense of what kept you going? And what about Duolingo helped?
    • SicSemperUranus 4y ago
      > I find/found the lack of colloquialisms one of the biggest problems with it. This is actually a big problem with how people perceive language in general. It's hard to understand if you only speak one language, but the idea of a language as a discrete unit is a myth. Here in Québec there is Québécois French, which in and of itself is a generalization, as many regions have different accents and expressions. In France there are many kinds of French. Some people say they "can't even understand" people from a certain other region... That's pretty much where a dialect crosses the line into a language! In general people will learn what we call "international French", which is spoken by no one but understood by all. But good luck navigating the subtleties of a French-speaking society without being familiar to their regional dialect.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• someotherperson 4y ago
  One thing I found odd about Duolingo is that they disabled offline lessons. It was the most powerful thing they had -- to me at least. I was able to board planes and just grind for hours, I could travel cross country and do the same. Even in normal travels I was able to use it without constant disconnects -- it was great. But they decided one day to just nuke it... for no reason as far as I could tell. My subscription went with it. Shame. EDIT: based on the responses below I did a quick search and it appears that it was silently removed, refactored and then returned slowly back to people depending on their account age/device. This is actually incredible news (to me).
  • occz 4y ago
    Sounds strange - I've been able to do offline lessons as recently as this week. On android with a free account. Maybe this was something temporary in the past?
  • iandanforth 4y ago
    How did this not result in refunds for thousands of people?
  • vulkan92 4y ago
    Not with you on that. I just did your exact usecase on my flight of 9+ hours and it worked just fine? Maybe they shuffled around the way you set something to download? I can confirm that this feature still exists (atleast on iOS)
    • Tepix 4y ago
      I think you can do one level oer exercise while offline, not more
  • finolex1 4y ago
    Offline is still very much a thing: https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/4410000601869-How-to-access-Duolingo-offline https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/4410000601869.... Maybe you just had a bug?
  • 4y ago
• iandanforth 4y ago
  It's so incredibly demotivating to lose a streak this doesn't surprise me. I quit duo in large part because of the streak mechanism.
• aliswe 4y ago
  What made me lose interest in Duolingo was (losing the friends whom I conversate with and) 1. The lessons are so sluggish, if I know everything I want to be able to zip through them. But no - apparently these success animations and transitional effects are good for me. And 2. The totally senseless examples and also the sometimes cryptic questions when you don't know what they are asking for because the language is ambiguous.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    Not a big Duolingo person, but I suspect your complaints may be outdated now. They made the sentences less stupid in general and introduced switches to turn off a lot of the frilly stuff (because your complaints were shared by a lot of people.) My problem with Duolingo ambiguity is that if you want to do language learning on Duolingo starting from the middle rather than at the beginning, you'll get a lot of questions wrong because you're not familiar with the exact vocabulary that Duolingo wants you to know (i.e. what it taught you in earlier lessons.) Since it's constant translation drills, it builds up its own internal conventions about what English word translates to what target language word that you don't know as someone who has learned from other sources. I've found translation to be a dead end for me. If I don't know a Spanish word I look it up in a Spanish language dictionary and/or thesaurus, and if I can't manage to figure it out using that and context, then I'll finally look for an English translation of the word. Totally there for English language grammar instruction, but not translation.
• forinti 4y ago
  I am doing French and Russian, and there's so much more material for French. I wish there were stories in Russian, at least. Anyway, I try not to look at the points or streaks, my real motivation is to learn the language.
• viburnum 4y ago
  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.
  • frutiger 4y ago
    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.
    • lostcolony 4y ago
      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).
  • Shacklz 4y ago
    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 long term.
    • Jabbles 4y ago
      > 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?
      • Shacklz 4y ago
        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 :)
• moron4hire 4y ago
  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 stop paying us in a heartbeat. There is a lot of diversity in instructor-led training. None of our classes are anything like what you would have experienced in highschool or college. Our largest classes have 4 students in them, and that's strictly a cost-cutting scheme that Gov has insisted on for maintenance training. You'll be one-on-one with your instructor. They'll be a native speaker with often decades of experience teaching language. They'll be tayloring a lot of supplemental material specific to you. We even have some of our own apps that we've developed (that's my job), nothing like Duolingo (though nothing you can just use without our curriculum or instructors). A lot of people say "the best way to learn a language is to live in a country where it is spoken". Clearly, that is unrealistic for the vast majority of people. I would also say it presumes you are a specific kind of extremely extroverted, fearless person. Most people find themselves becoming quite introverted in situations where they can't communicate easily. For these reasons, I think the most realistic answer for the best way to learn language is private tutoring. 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. Language training shouldn't take that long.
  • UweSchmidt 4y ago
    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.
    • aix1 4y ago
      > 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.
• leephillips 4y ago
  Once, while traveling, I suddenly realized that my streak deadline had just passed, and I managed to cheat by changing the time on my phone. However, when I tried that again at some later date it didn’t work. Duolingo is pretty good for getting you started with a new language, and can provide some valuable practice, especially if you don’t yet have a teacher. But don’t take it too seriously. Its translations are often poor: https://lee-phillips.org/whyDuoLingoWhy/ https://lee-phillips.org/whyDuoLingoWhy/
  • meatmanek 4y ago
    I used to set my phone's time zone to Hawaii when I needed a little more time to do my streak. The trick is to not open the app after midnight without changing your time zone, otherwise it will lock in your lost streak.
• jordz 4y ago
  Lost my 635 day streak last week, offered £5.99 or something to repair it. I was pretty gutted but actually on reflection, the gamification just added undue stress. Duolingo is great for vocab and repetition, it was only with a tutor that I really became conversational.
• lttlrck 4y ago
  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.
  • nohackeratall 4y ago
    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.
  • marban 4y ago
    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.
• needle0 4y ago
  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 returning to the app not as urgent...thus less effective in preventing churn. Huh.
  • iratewizard 4y ago
    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. There's also the cracked lesson feature. They aligned cracked lessons to urgency gamification instead of something more sound like delayed repetition. As a result, you'll often have cracked lessons which you've long since permanently committed to memory and will be spending 15 minutes on easy lessons rather than doing the important, harder lessons.
    • matthewdgreen 4y ago
      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?
      • sshine 4y ago
        > Does the app work? Not in my experience. Anki + language-partner sessions + evening classes did it for me.
        • dotancohen 4y ago
          I supplement Duolingo with Anki, otherwise I would forget the vocabulary.
• m0llusk 4y ago
  Potentially amusing related analysis: Duolingo is the Devil by Langfocus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbmXSR_QiP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbmXSR_QiP8
• soheilpro 4y ago
  I lost my 780 day streak, complained on Twitter and they repaired it: https://twitter.com/soheilpro/status/1356677917011365889 https://twitter.com/soheilpro/status/1356677917011365889
• claydolatry 4y ago
  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.
• hermannj314 4y ago
  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.
  • billjings 4y ago
    Durable "streaks" are built on worthwhile days. Focus on the days, and the streak will take care of itself. Focus on the streak, and one day you might realize that it hasn't been worth keeping for a long, long time.
    • nebyoolae 4y ago
      I really like this thought. Thanks for sharing.
  • rendall 4y ago
    I've always wondered, if someone has a drink the week before getting, for example, their 10 year pin, do they not get the pin, or is there some kind of duolingo take-back?
    • xanaxagoras 4y ago
      You would not celebrate your 10 year anniversary, which would connote 10 years of "continuous sobriety" or 3650 days in a row without a drink.
    • rjh29 4y ago
      Personally if I drank once or twice within a 10 year period I'd still count it as 10 years sober. There's a big difference between a one-off 'lapse' and a 'relapse'. And I suspect a large number of '10 year sober' people have had the occasional lapse and just don't want to admit it. Put it another way, is 10 years with a few lapses worth significantly less than 10 years completely sober? Of course not. It's still a huge achievement. So why punish yourself?
• fullstackchris 4y ago
  Yes, but this is certainly a key to their success. They bring people back even after 2, 3, days, or even a month! Duolingo doesn't care _when_ you come back, as long as you _do_ come back. I was an earlier adopter of duolingo, and it's amazing to see how huge they've become. Overall I think it's an awesome platform; they've done very well with the entire design and clean UI of the site / app.
  • ben_w 4y ago
    Also an early adopter. For me, the current UI is the absolute worst part. I don’t want animated cartoons emoting — often incongruously with the sentences, but even when the emotion suits they are grossly exaggerated — in response to correct answers. I don’t want the “motivational” messages that remain even after disabling motivational messages. I definitely don’t want the “motivational messages” toggle to randomly reactivate, spamming me with far more quantity of annoying messages interrupting my flow. I don’t want the news feed. I don’t want the “lesson complete!” screen, followed by how many skills I’ve restored today, followed by my position on the league table if that changed, and possibly one un-skippable animation of a chest opening for each of the Daily Quest goals I met. I do want the quizzes to load quickly, and (when on the web) to be openable in background tabs so I can queue up all the specifics I want to revisit in a session — years ago now, I did that with the entire German course, revisiting each lesson once over two days. But you’re right, they don’t care so long as people keep coming back.
    • whiplash451 4y ago
      But hey, you need to keep those PMs busy!
• gizajob 4y ago
  Don't do it! Keep that amazing streak! I think you'll regret it once you let it go.
• atlas_shrugged 4y ago
  Just curious is this 8 year streak for 1 language? What % completion are you for a the language? Do you consider yourself proficient?
  • ChadNauseam 4y ago
    Anecdata, but I completed the whole french duolingo tree and kept my whole tree "gold" the whole time, and I still don't feel like I'm proficient in french at all. I thing duolingo can be a good addition to another language learning system, but on its own I think it's next to useless
    • rjh29 4y ago
      I'm the same with French. A few years later I recall nothing. I am proficient with Japanese which I learned using traditional methods and lots of reading over a few years. There's no magical easy way to learn a language!
  • leejo 4y ago
    > Just curious is this 8 year streak for 1 language? No. Probably five years for one and then switching between others (German, Italian, and Spanish). > What % completion are you for a the language? I got close to the end initially then they added more to the tree so I never finished the tree as I didn't need to. I just looked at it and I'm at 50% so they've added a lot since I last checked. > Do you consider yourself proficient? I've lived in the French speaking part of Switzerland for nine years. That has made me proficient. Having French speaking colleagues, going to evening classes, giving talks in French, receiving correspondance and filling in my tax returns in French, working in a local gallery (adds vocab and situations outside the norm), watching French films and TV, listening to French podcasts and radio. Duolingo helped with building some vocab and grammar. Becoming more proficient in French and living in a French speaking country has, on the flip side, started to erode my English (spelling for the most part).
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• drdec 4y ago
  I will break steaks in apps on purpose, to fight the gamification. At a certain point it is not really helping and just manipulating you for the application's benefit as the article explains. Do it because you want to, you are getting something from it, not because you have to.
  • samatman 4y ago
    I discovered this somewhat by accident when I started wearing an Apple Watch. Ended up with a ~400 day move streak. Yay me, right? Well. It got pretty annoying toward the end, having to wear the damn thing every day. It kinda creeped up on me, one of those things where the motive to just not wear a watch for a day is low, so why not put it on and keep up my streak? But cumulatively? There's a huge difference between mostly wearing a watch and always wearing a watch. It was a relief when I busted it, finally, for two reasons: I could have a normal relationship with the device on my wrist, and I was in no danger of ever setting another record streak. After that I deliberately bust streaks in apps at a number I choose in advance, something like 50 or 100.
• zwarag 4y ago
  I wish the streak thing could be turned off completely. I have no interest in being pushed to use an app more than I want to.
• standardUser 4y ago
  They need a vacation mode. Though I imagine the fact that they don't include such an obvious feature is because it would interfere with their bottom line.
• yolo3000 4y ago
  Not quitting of course, but I hate it when my Garmin watch informs me that the activity I just did has not improved my condition in any way.
• dwighttk 4y ago
  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)
  • avereveard 4y ago
    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.
  • david_allison 4y ago
    Typing in the answer is difficult from a UX perspective (on Android at least): Barring Gboard, all Android keyboards that I've tested do not support automatic switching of languages[1]. Even with Gboard, you need to explain to the user how to install the language for the keyboard. This is not trivial. You then may have to deal with another input method, and recommending one to use (for example: do you want Pinyin/Cangjie/Zhuyin). This is different for each language. You'll probably need to deal with Android manufacturers doing ridiculous things to lock down their devices. I would not be surprised if some restrict you from changing the default keyboard. And if you make your own virtual keyboard, you've got a lot of accessibility to think through. [1] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/TextView#setImeHintLocales(android.os.LocaleList) https://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/TextV...
    • dwighttk 4y ago
      Maybe but they had that as an answer type, they just used it very sparingly.
      • dwighttk 4y ago
        Just went back and did a lesson. They also have a “translate this sentence” but you are selecting from a word bank and there’s only one verb (declined one way) in the bank… That is the kind of thing I’m talking about. Just not challenging at all. The second lesson was a story which was a lot better than what I was seeing before, but I still think they adjust the difficulty so you are missing fewer questions so that you’ll stick around.
• weinzierl 4y ago
  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.
• s1k3 4y ago
  Dz
• sireat 4y ago
  Duolingo must have psychologists on staff who realized the insidious side of the "keeping the streak". One of the happiest days in my life was the day after losing the streak on 750words a few years ago. I had a 500+ day streak going but it had not built into an effortless habit (like a cold shower). Surest way to misery is feeling forced into doing something yet not getting enjoyment nor showing any improvement. I am reasonably sure if I had tried to not break the streak in say doing standup ala Seinfeld the results would have been similarly dismal. On the same note I quit Duolingo when I realized that the modicum of German I was learning was quickly overtaken by my teenage daughter. She was in a very average German class spending less time on lessons.
  • hintymad 4y ago
    Duolingo's founder is a world-class researcher on user experience. I'm sure he himself has deep insight into human psyches.
  • sigstoat 4y ago
    > On the same note I quit Duolingo when I realized that the modicum of German I was learning was quickly overtaken by my teenage daughter. She was in a very average German class spending less time on lessons. how much german have you learned since quitting?
• cogitoergo_some 4y ago
  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 track my streak outside of the gamified experience that is Duolingo. It has helped me stay motivated based on my personal goals and not be artificially motivated by the whims of the App developer & PM who are focused on driving goals such as DAU/engagement and monetization.
  • senorsmile 4y ago
    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.
• jmartens 4y ago
  I am traveling on vacation for 2 weeks right now and decided to let my 1,000+ day streak end. But it hasn't ended!
• g9yuayon 4y ago
  Speaking of language learning, I wish Duolingo could come with leveled readers. We build our intuition on languages only when we see words and phrases used in different context. Somehow it's hard to find good Spanish readers, compared with ample readers in English. I was trying to read the reading materials for the Mexico first graders (https://libros.conaliteg.gob.mx/primaria.html https://libros.conaliteg.gob.mx/primaria.html), oh boy, there are just too many new words for me even though I was at Duolingo Spanish unit 5. I used to use a reader called America Today. The book 2 talked about all the natural wonders of the US, and the book 3 talked about the America society: a day of supermarket manager, a day of a big city, and etc. The difficulty of the book was so well arranged that I had no problem progressing through it, and I had no problem with English grammar or day-to-day vocabularies after finishing the series.
  • NoInkling 4y ago
    Duolingo does have the stories section for low-level, contextful reading/listening material.
• jammu 4y ago
  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, streak is only one gamification point in Duo, it's ok if it isn't perfect. Leagues, stories, medals provide enough motivation to keep making progress. I have tried to learn french multiple times and nothing made me stick to my learning routine like Duo has. It might not teach the language to hold a conversation, but I like how much progress I have made reading front.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    Dailies are great for getting you to come back, but losing a streak can be enough to make you reconsider your life and never come back; especially when you were doing it out of habit and not really "into" it anymore. Cf: World of Warcraft
    • jammu 4y ago
      That makes sense, I think that's more of a reason for not enforcing the streak so strictly. Giving levay days helps you not obsessed over it. Also, for a user who lost his streak and is devastated over it, I do think Duo support helps them restore it. I do think they realize it's just a number and there is not need to traumatized people over losing it.
      • kamaal 4y ago
        On the other hand, may be it should not be things like obsession at all? Many important things in life like fitness, diet etc are very repetitive and hence boring to some extent. There are times when you just to have to get through the grind even if you are not interested or you are aligned with it. The point being don't just depend on the initial euphoria of things to do a thing that's good. If something is good on the longer, at some point it does get a little boring, and that's ok, just keep doing it. There are things that I stopped doing because I was bored and a few months later I had like a moment of epiphany- It wouldn't have hurt me if I had stuck to this, quitting has cost me more. May be one should think beyond doing things for immediate emotional relief.
• _wdqx 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • lma21 4y ago
    Not sure it’s a flex. Long time Duolingo user here, that streak-building addiction is real. It’s like i’m on the platform to hit my streak and much less to learn.
    • _bmjr 4y ago
      You’re describing the incentive strategy behind orange theory, general education, or any habit building app. Being addicted to self-improvement is generally a positive thing. I wish my other apps invested more research engineers into optimizing incentives. Brilliant.com is great for learning, but builds no habits.
• imwillofficial 4y ago
  Noooooooooooo don’t lose your streak!
• lma21 4y ago
  How is it possible for you to buy / restore that many freezes? Are you paying for them?
• Tainnor 4y ago
  Apps like Duolingo IMHO try to sell the illusion of learning. Far more people like the illusion of learning than actual learning, so it makes sense from a business POV, but if you're really dedicated, textbooks + flashcards + immersion will get you farther ahead.
  • emursebrian 4y ago
    I think that's partly true, but the other aspect of it is that there are a lot more people who want to start learning a language than those have made it past a beginner level. Apps like Duolingo and others also completely neglect giving the language learner longer passages of text to read or videos to watch. Most learners do this on their own, but it does take a tremendous amount of prep work to find the appropriate materials. Once you have the materials, you need a way to re-enforce what you've learned. I was doing this with Anki and found it very cumbersome and time-consuming to do.
• satisfice 4y ago
  What is Duolingo? I do realize I can Google it. But isn’t it interesting that Hacker News brings all of us into contact with alien civilizations every day. Whatever Duolingo is, sounds like it became a significant part of you life. For me it has been Wordchums and FastHabit.
  • dymk 4y ago
    Duolingo has 40 million monthly active users. Ball is in your court if you don't know what it is.
    • satisfice 4y ago
      You are right of course. Being an author, filing a patent for my invention, having a family, and juggling clients means my court has many balls. My comment was merely a bit of musing about how big the world of ideas is. Don’t you also find that reading Hacker News you stumble on entire ecosystems you never heard of before? Anyway, I did look it up. Apparently it’s about learning languages, in case you also didn’t know.
• dymk 4y ago
  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 proven method like Pimsleur, grab the Anki Core Vocab deck for your language, and start consuming native content ASAP.
  • jmyeet 4y ago
    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.
• bmacho 4y ago
  How does this work? If I won't be able to Duo for a few days, it will allow me to keep it still?
• murphyslab 4y ago
  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?
• koluna 4y ago
  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."
• karlzt 4y ago
  I've been missing days on purpose the last two weeks, this post is such a coincidence for me!
• tus666 4y ago
  Seems like a strange way to measure language proficiency. Can you hold a conversation in said language?
• peterfield 4y ago
  Had a somehow similar experience with Strava. I am biking these days only to commute - so doing the same boring 15km urban route 2, 4 or 6 times a week (Returns). Each time my performance would be driven by the weather, my load (public library books weight a ton), fatigue state after a long word day or a poor night, traffic, roadwork etc...not by my training consistency or motivation. Yet the app would keep notifying me of new records beaten each time to keep me engaged by shortening time after time the distances measured,resorting down to timing every single "one block long" segment between traffic lights, stop signs or various landmarks to find new records to beat :( "your best time is now 41sec (instead of 42 2 years earlier)" -> that's when I stopped completely using it.
• plaguepilled 4y ago
  I am very pro-duolingo as a product. However, I am not sure if there's a use case for it that Anki doesn't achieve with notably less adverts. Am I just not the target audience?
• jhoelzel 4y ago
  you have restored your streak with money. if its worth money to you, get the super duolingo offering and dont be bothered with it at all. *once you have a one year streak, you become VIP which means you can 5 days of "vacation" instead of the usual 1. so thats 5 days that recharge once a month. In order to present the number of streaks that this guy has in his screenshots you will need to spend "gems" or "money" whichevever comes more easy to you. So yeah, its nice that after investing time every day for one year, i get to get a week off in between ;)