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dougdonohoe | 5 months ago

I can relate to this post - great thoughts!

I took Spanish in high school and college, so had a rudimentary understanding of verb tenses and some vocabulary. Before I walked the Camino de Santiago el Norte (45+ days in Spain), I used Duolingo to brush up on my Spanish.

It helped my reading most, my speaking a fair amount and my listening/conversation the least. I was able to ask questions, but was often flummoxed at any reply that wasn't the most basic.

I grew to hate the gamification, but was addicted to my "streak' also ... using math lessons when I didn't feel like doing a Spanish lesson. The so-called "leagues" were kind of useless since the same people weren't in the league from week to week. Any friendly competitiveness to "learn more" was lost when randomly assigned to a different group each week.

I finally abandoned the app this spring.

I'm trying Babbel now since I'm going back to Spain for a month and Patagonia next year.

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jghn|5 months ago

> I grew to hate the gamification

I don't understand people who say this. I completely ignore the gamification. If I don't feel like doing it one day, I don't do it. I don't even know what the leagues are, despite seeing people talk about them. I never look at any score or badge that they provide.

Why do people care about this?

gs17|5 months ago

You have to click through a lot of it. If I open it and do a lesson, it will demand I commit to a streak (if I haven't done it in a while), show me the new 1-day streak, show me about streak freezes, see how much XP I got, see what quests I made progress on, see that I did not get promoted in the leagues, see my new league placement, and probably a dozen other things that aren't language learning. I don't care about this stuff, but I'm forced to interact with it to use their app.

dougdonohoe|5 months ago

Duolingo makes it hard to ignore - the whole app is gamified. It's like ignoring water while swimming in the ocean. Yes, you can turn off notifications, but sometimes they were helpful.

I think gamification triggers some innate feature of our brain, just like TikTok or Reels or mobile games, etc. It is designed to be hard to ignore.