Somewhat childish, somewhat cringe, powered by a huge green owl with psychopathic tendencies, this gamified language-learning platform has been part of my life every single day for over two years now.
Consistency, consistency, consistency
I only knew about Duolingo from the multitude of memes about the notorious green owl terrorizing people into doing their Spanish lessons, and when I met some Spanish people during my Erasmus exchange in 2018, I decided to give it a try and learn español.
The main thing is that Duolingo counts how many consecutive days you do your lesson, and calls it a streak. My relationship with consistency was paradoxical. I always failed to keep a streak for more than a few weeks but after some time I always came back consistently, only to fail again. This cycle repeated itself for more than a year. Then, on the spring of the dreaded 2020 when the overwhelming urge of self-development induced by the famous lockdown overtook… but my consistency couldn’t triumph for more than just another week.
Then summer came again and I started yet again, for another good month and yet again lost my focus and streak. However, at the end of that year Duolingo started sending year in review reports. According to my report, even with my pathetic consistency I was somewhere around the top 5% of learners according to their ranking by XP.
This positive feedback was the reason why I decided to try to make something out of this. By this time I still barely struggled with the very basics of Spanish and also didn’t want that 2-3 years of foggy and rusty high school German to go down the drain. So I decided to do one week of Spanish and one week of German. Every single day, for as long as I can. As one can imagine at this point, almost one year into the pandemic I was just desperate for a stable point in my daily routine rather than thirsty for language knowledge. Although I did and still do secretly long for effortlessly switching between various languages in such a badass way as Hans Landa. But then again, I had no expectations of being badass while my entire life was full of chaos, lack of routine and procrastination.
So that’s how I started out 2021. Working and studying from home quite monotonously it wasn’t an effort to keep my streak alive for the first 3-4 months. Then I moved back to Cluj, changed the structure of my day, so I made Duolingo lessons part of my morning routine, and it’s been like that ever since. Yes, ever since I wake up every single day with that damned owl but at least this way I don’t have to worry about losing my streak later through the day. It takes usually 15 to 20 minutes. I haven’t missed a single day in more than 800 days as per the time of writing.
Does Duolingo work?
My main goal with Duolingo was habit building and didn’t commit very much to actually learning. I just did my lessons and let them do to me whatever they could while definitely not spending too much conscious effort on actually trying to improve my language skills. I first started to notice progress after 3-4 months. I randomly clicked on a YouTube video in Spanish and noticed that I could actually understand most of it.
Duolingo is not built for quick learning. If you’re looking for learning a language fast, Duolingo might not be the best for you. It is however really suited for long distance runners. Possibly the best thing about it is how gamified the whole thing is, which makes the entire process very low-effort, albeit quite slow. It provides immediate feedback on mistakes, has surprisingly good typo tolerance which it can distinguish from actual errors. Following this method you really don’t need to overload your brain with understanding and applying explicit grammar lessons, Duo chunks it up into digestible pieces and on the long run, the grammatical structure of the langauge gets immersed into your brain really-really well.
As someone in IT, the time I am able and willing to concentrate is short and expensive, so having a method to learn languages where I can just go with the flow is the option I would opt for any day, and Duolingo pretty much does that. Apart from the occasional frustration caused by repeated mistakes, it’s actually a relaxing experience. In defense of traditional language learning with focused lessons, books and exercises, it would probably work multiple times faster. I am just in no hurry to make progress when it comes to this. I finished the Spanish course in about two years( although only doing Spanish every second week). By the end I can say that this alone took me to a confident B1, shaky B2 level.
Their official blog has many entries about tips and tricks:
Results
I am definitely not completely fluent in Spanish, and I still struggle with German. This is mainly because even though I was doing one week of each, I’ve been doing German with much less motivation and did much less of it daily than I did Spanish. What’s important to note however is that the Spanish grammar is already mostly absorbed into my head. It’s my vocabulary that’s lacking, although not that much. I find this important because I think that the structure of the language is generally the most difficult to acquire, and once I have that, probably reading a few books would expand my vocabulary enormously and I will do just that in the near future. I’m probably also biased to some extent since Spanish has many common and transferable aspects with Romanian, which I’ve been speaking for a longer time. I can say however that I could pass a B2 exam with not so much effort, and I am fairly sure it’s because of Duolingo.
I’ve also been a top 1% learner twice these years, although the reporting system must have some flaws somewhere as I definitely didn’t spend 15,000 minutes on Duolingo in 2022, and I reckon the other reported metrics are also off, but I didn’t really bother to actually check them.
Ending notes
The platform itself changed a lot over time, and sometimes, at least in my opinion, not necessarily for the better, yet I find it important to note that the overall progress has been a positive one, and I can attribute all my Spanish, and most of my German knowledge to it. The key point that I found is that first, for actual language learning it works best on the long run and second, it’s an excellent way to build habits1,2. Right now, 800+ days into this habit building, I still haven’t overcome procrastination. At least now I can procrastinate in Spanish.
I’m excited to see what the GPT-4 integration will bring in terms of real conversation practice. Until then, I will keep on increasing my streak. This text was definitely written by my own good will and I declare here that no gigantic owl with a gun forced me to write this. In fact, if Duo was indeed out there after me, he would definitely not allow me this tone and would come and smash my head into the keyboasdkghadslgjk;ha;kjdshfjkdsag;hljdkfgh.