Moving the Goal Posts

[izmeina]

It must be just over a year ago now that I first signed up for Duolingo

Some random browsing on assorted productivity porn sites led me to a woman who had signed up to do 5 minutes of French a day using this bright shiny new language learning app.

Went for a peek and was pretty impressed. The idea of bite sized language snacks that could be fit in while waiting for the bus or sitting at a cafe seemed rather more alluring than the usual dreary 1 hour slugging through text books usually associated with language learning
This was the perfect opportunity to conduct an experiment. Of course it could never be double blind with control groups and all that proper official stuff designed to minimize confirmation bias. But choosing a language that I was interested in studying but had never attempted to learn before and setting the bar low with only one lesson per day - more if desired but not necessary, this seemed like an opportunity too good to miss

And so it must have been some time in April 2017 that I signed up for the Duolingo adventure.

I chose Spanish because it is a useful language to learn and is not too far outside of the serpent comfort zone. Years ago having attempted to learn Mandarin Chinese, came to the conclusion that learning to read and write would require far too much effort, the language itself while interesting from grammatical and word formation aspects, had such an annoying sing song grating whininess to it that it was like listening to jazz all day long.

I had dabbled in Arabic many moons ago so that was off the table aside from the fact that Duolingo did not have it on the menu back in April 2017. Not checked for progress since but there sure are some seriously obscure languages on the platform. Irish Gaelic, Czech and Hungarian. Even Welsh made it onto the list. Those are hardcore languages for folks with ancestry or intellectual curiosity. Not quite Klingon or Quenya but not too far off in terms of obscurity.

So after many months of slowly plodding and climbing up the tree, I decided it would be interesting to add Russian to the list which I did in September 2017. Strangely the app just added the 200 something day Spanish streak and treated both languages the same.

So kept on slowly plodding away nibbling the tasty fruits from the Duolingo tree until I finally got to the very last juicy apple from the 62 bunches on the Spanish Tree.

Then it was time to start all over again and go for the goal of getting them all to be bright shiny and golden at the same time. The most I ever managed at once was 20.
Day by day, if you don’t practise and polish those already nibbled apples, they lose their golden shine and turn back to red or green or sometimes blue.
So it is like running on a treadmill to keep up.
Eventually I worked out a strategy that instead of polishing up each skill as it lost its golden shine, and then constantly having to catch up on older ones fading away, it made more sense to do them in batches of 4 or 5, get them nearly polished and then do a quick blitz of the lot devoting only one lesson to each which would then be sufficient to get 5 golden bunches in one go.

That was until they changed the rules a few weeks ago.
Those 25 bright shiny precious rings had vanished and were replaced with crazy crowns. About 18 of them were adorned with the number 2 and the rest were all 1
Went googling for the new rules only to discover that each branch of fruit on this bright shiny new grafted tree now had a whole lot more apples and 5 crowns. But it takes longer and longer to jump from one to the next.

So I am glad that I did manage to finish one tree before they grafted all the crazy extra branches on to the rest of the trees in the orchard

Comments

[catness]

I've abandoned Duolingo again, but tried out the new version after reading about it in the news. Theoretically, it's cool that they added a lot more content for learning the language deeper. But sticking with the same course after completing the tree, to earn gold again and again while it's slipping from under your fingers, is the exact definition of stagnation and the toil of Sisyphus.

It suddenly struck me that the whole concept is flawed, from the point of view of gamification. I understand that spaced repetition is important for learning a language, and that people tend to forget even basic words if they're not using them regularly, which I suppose is the case for most Duolingo students, who learn languages just for fun, not for using in their immediate environment. But in a game, you need continuous progress. You level up, get better equipment, better in-game skills; there may be occasional setbacks, but overall, it's constant improvement until the game ends. When it's undoing all your progress and you spend a lot of efforts just to stay in the same place, it's too depressing and frustrating just like RL ;)

I think playing Duolingo past the endgame (completing the tree) doesn't make much sense. If you're serious about learning the language, you should move on to the "real thing" (books, web sites, forums, maybe sites with advanced courses); if you want to have fun, move on to a new course.