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666
I'm not been my usual devilish serpent self. Just simply marking a significant milestone. For the first time I have got as far as a 666 day streak on Duolingo which in normal Muggle numbers is the equivalent of 1 year and 10 months in a row. Slow and steady
It is just such a pity that a site so devoted to gamification decided to remove the greatest motivation to continue daily practice. The rules used to be or maybe they still are for some of the customers that a 10 day streak earns you 1 lingot, 20 gets you 2, 100 gets you 10 lingots etc etc
Obviously by the time you are in the 500 zone the cash register goes ka-ching with a big fat 50 something coins every ten days just for showing up.
But they stopped doing that way back when I had clocked up 400 days straight.
I don’t know if the reasoning is that 400 days is long enough to make daily practice an ingrained habit or if the developers just like playing around with the toys and moving the goal posts to piss off the cheapskate customers to lure them over to the version with supersized Coke and fries.
Funny how I don’t consider myself the sort of creature too enamoured of bling and pretty points. Never mind the sizzle. Just give me the steak. But I must confess that without all the dressing up of plain vanilla language learning into a game where lessons can take as little as five minutes and they all add up in time to a bright shiny tree dripping with apples of various colours, I would have been far less likely to stick around
Duolingo has found a way to make the necessary tedious repetition of learning a language into fun and frivolity and the odd bit of competitive rivalry. I have given up on that since they moved the goal posts and my phone recently died. It is just not worth the extra effort especially now that Twitter is about to blow up any moment with the Mueller gossip.
I signed up some time in February 2017 and decided to learn a language from scratch as it would be the fairest way of being able to assess how effective the lessons are.
I certainly found it easier to use and much better than the now very ancient and antiquated Linguaphone which used to be the very expensive gold standard for language learning in the century I grew up in. Of course I was cheap and borrowed the German version from the local library. It was good but nowhere as marvellous as they made it out to be in the adverts. But those where the days before the internet where it was very hard to find spoken materials in foreign languages outside of libraries. There were certainly no youtube videos to look at and listen too or chat forums to practise on with real native speakers. Hanging around native speakers or going full immersion in the target country or a lot of ridiculously hard work and dedication were pretty much the only available options for learning back in those dinosaur days.
What I like about Duolingo apart from making a game out of all the boring bits is that you always hear the words of the other language spoken while reading them so that you never get in bad habits of pronunciation which then have to be unlearned.
Of course there are a lot of commentaries about the quality or lack of it of some of the robot voices but I guess I would have to listen to their English language courses to be able to comment on that
I know I am getting somewhere when I can choose possible translations of sentences correctly because ‘they sound right’ rather than logically trawling through each one for relevant grammatical elements. So the lessons are aimed at the subconscious mind as well as the rational logical one which makes a very big difference in learning effectively and retaining information
I will never manage to fill an orchard full of bright shiny gilded trees dripping with golden apples. I will make do with my current two with the later addition of Dutch and Indonesian.
Wondering if anyone out there will ever do for maths what Duolingo has done for languages. Keith Devilin’s Wuzzits are a good start but such a tiny corner of that vast universe.
It is just such a pity that a site so devoted to gamification decided to remove the greatest motivation to continue daily practice. The rules used to be or maybe they still are for some of the customers that a 10 day streak earns you 1 lingot, 20 gets you 2, 100 gets you 10 lingots etc etc
Obviously by the time you are in the 500 zone the cash register goes ka-ching with a big fat 50 something coins every ten days just for showing up.
But they stopped doing that way back when I had clocked up 400 days straight.
I don’t know if the reasoning is that 400 days is long enough to make daily practice an ingrained habit or if the developers just like playing around with the toys and moving the goal posts to piss off the cheapskate customers to lure them over to the version with supersized Coke and fries.
Funny how I don’t consider myself the sort of creature too enamoured of bling and pretty points. Never mind the sizzle. Just give me the steak. But I must confess that without all the dressing up of plain vanilla language learning into a game where lessons can take as little as five minutes and they all add up in time to a bright shiny tree dripping with apples of various colours, I would have been far less likely to stick around
Duolingo has found a way to make the necessary tedious repetition of learning a language into fun and frivolity and the odd bit of competitive rivalry. I have given up on that since they moved the goal posts and my phone recently died. It is just not worth the extra effort especially now that Twitter is about to blow up any moment with the Mueller gossip.
I signed up some time in February 2017 and decided to learn a language from scratch as it would be the fairest way of being able to assess how effective the lessons are.
I certainly found it easier to use and much better than the now very ancient and antiquated Linguaphone which used to be the very expensive gold standard for language learning in the century I grew up in. Of course I was cheap and borrowed the German version from the local library. It was good but nowhere as marvellous as they made it out to be in the adverts. But those where the days before the internet where it was very hard to find spoken materials in foreign languages outside of libraries. There were certainly no youtube videos to look at and listen too or chat forums to practise on with real native speakers. Hanging around native speakers or going full immersion in the target country or a lot of ridiculously hard work and dedication were pretty much the only available options for learning back in those dinosaur days.
What I like about Duolingo apart from making a game out of all the boring bits is that you always hear the words of the other language spoken while reading them so that you never get in bad habits of pronunciation which then have to be unlearned.
Of course there are a lot of commentaries about the quality or lack of it of some of the robot voices but I guess I would have to listen to their English language courses to be able to comment on that
I know I am getting somewhere when I can choose possible translations of sentences correctly because ‘they sound right’ rather than logically trawling through each one for relevant grammatical elements. So the lessons are aimed at the subconscious mind as well as the rational logical one which makes a very big difference in learning effectively and retaining information
I will never manage to fill an orchard full of bright shiny gilded trees dripping with golden apples. I will make do with my current two with the later addition of Dutch and Indonesian.
Wondering if anyone out there will ever do for maths what Duolingo has done for languages. Keith Devilin’s Wuzzits are a good start but such a tiny corner of that vast universe.