[Treegarden]

internal motivation means that someones acts without external stimuli, their drive comes from within, its internal. External motivation means that an external stimuli is used to make someone act. I.e. a monetary reward, or validation etc. When someone is internally motivated, they can have a stable state. When external motivation is introduced, it can replace the internal motivation and will. Now what happens when you then lose the external motivation, the external stimuli again? The internal motivation is gone and this means all motivation is gone, the act stops.

On top of this, some people say motivation is cheap, discipline is what matters.

[zdragnar]

In the case of language learning, the external motivation provided by gamification is supplanted by the external motivation of having access to conversations, music, movies and literature that you previously didn't have access to, or required third party interpretation to appreciate. Being able to converse directly is a massive boon in the right situations, such as when travelling where you need to know the language to get around, or when your coworkers natively speak that language but not your own.

Discipline is well and good, and if you're willing to put in the effort to become better disciplined to push through difficult things, I agree that you're probably better off. I do not agree that someone who already has that level of discipline would be hurt by a gamified system, though. The rewards of gamification on their own are fairly minimal, as they merely provide a (possibly false) sense of progress independent of their own assessment of how they are doing.

[drewcoo]

Replacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards cheapens the activity and makes it less enjoyable. Awarding me badges for brushing my teeth and taking out the trash is a great way to help me do boring tasks. Awarding me badges for having deep, meaningful conversations with my partner . . . not so helpful. Alfie Kohn has collected decades of studies and written about that in his book Punished by Rewards. It's one of the books I try to give away to friends and coworkers who are interested in the subject. The pro-gamification folks seem to want to pretend that they're doing something totally different this time and they can ignore all the previous data.

https://www.alfiekohn.org/topics/motivation-inside/