You’re absolutely right. I guess that’s the game-ification of this. It kinda makes me want to stay in the league I’m currently in, but like you say, if I slip down or up a notch or two, I don’t stress. The main thing I’m watching most now is just being consistent with how many points I get per day, and there is a handy chart that shows the last 7 days. Currently, I’m working on keeping that to around 300 points a day, though there is some gaming strategies I’m using to achieve that.
Some folks here already provided some strategy insights; if there are more, please share! What I’m mainly doing is taking advantage of the [Early Bird|Night Owl] Chest, which gives you 2x points for 15 minutes. Note that I’m a) a paying user, and b) mainly doing this on mobile since I believe there are differences in the mobile vs web apps.
I like the fact there’s game-ification but I wish there was more benefit to doing it. I’ve no idea what though, TBF. I try to do at least some lessons each day to keep my streak going but again, there’s not much point other than for pride. You can do a wager to win some gems but as a paying user I’ve got more gems than I know what to do with (and there isn’t much to do with them). Seems like they have more use if you’re not a paying user.
(I’ve just realised you get gems for finishing in the top three each week so I guess there’s that.)
I do the Early Bird/Night Owl thing and it’s nice to get more XP but again, I kinda wonder why. For me it’s more about doing lessons and completing topics. The ‘Special Events’ like the Lightning Round are quite good for mixing things up a bit too.
Has anybody here used Duolingo or something similar in a foreign language? There are only four languages that are taught in German: English, French, Italian and Spanish. I used it to refresh my mostly forgotten high school French, but sometimes I tink it would be nice to learn an entirely new language. I would love more options, but somehow learning a foreign language in a foreign language feels like a horrible idea.
Ran myself ragged in leagues to get an achievement and have ignored them ever since.
For anyone wanting to supplement Duo, check out the audio lessons at Free Courses — Language Transfer. Totally free and doesn’t require registration or anything. I took the Spanish course, which was 90 recorded lessons between the teacher and student, designed for the listener to pause and speak along with the student. Excellent and highly-recommended.
Actually, I think this is a great idea! This is like what I do with Netflix, setting one language for audio and another for subtitles. I’m learning German and constantly review what I already know in French and Spanish every time a new word or phrase is thrown at me. Comparing genders or contrasting sentence structure helps me to remember the content of the lessons. I’ll have to look for apps that support that if Duo doesn’t, because it would save me a few steps.
I started with Duolingo, so I could understand my Japanese mother as her Alzheimer’s dementia further took hold of her and shunted her into her mother tongue.
For the past years I’ve been at it, I felt that either I still had a ways to go before I could understand Mom or that I really sucked. It wasn’t until I overheard this manager of a Japanese restaurant in Hawaii speak with a woman fluent in the language that I realized what the real problem was: I’ve been learning the Tokyo dialect and my mother speaks the Nagasaki-Ken dialect of her hometown.
I’m only doing one language, but I wonder if you can get specific dialects of languages? But just in general, when you’re learning a language via a course of some kind, you’re going to be learning the “institutional” version (so, I guess in this case, the Tokyo dialect?). Seems like they should include specific dialects, though, as sometimes, they differences are enough to where it’s nearly a different language.
That’s what I wonder too. Don’t get me wrong, I like Duolingo and it’s been a useful tool in my Japanese studies for reviewing words and such but I’m not sure that it’s really something that would help me learn a language with any fluency. But then again I haven’t used it anywhere near this much.
It’s also kind of infuriating how the web site and app differ and progress from one seems disconnected from the other.
Then there’s the times where I know I’m correct and it doesn’t think I’m correct. It can be really annoying with Japanese with the word picker and there’s a particle in there (like が or で or something) and I use it to build what would be a a totally grammatically correct sentence but it doesn’t match what it wants and it kills my streak
Clunky English? Sure. Technically correct, absolutely. And -さん like basically all Japanese is gender neutral. How am I supposed to know Honda-san is a Mr. without additional context? Oh, I get it - it’s a clever meta commentary on Japanese’s lack of context, right?
The other infuriating thing about Duolingo’s Japanese lessons is there’s really no way to focus on kanji review. There’s kana lessons up the wazoo but kana isn’t my problem — I may have mentally displaced much of my previous Japanese education from years of neglect, but kana is pretty well burned into my brain. What I really need is kanji review. Lessons seems to introduce new kanji kind of out of the blue without warning or explanation and it’s always like wtf?
Anyway, I don’t want to discount what a great service and product it is. It’s really fun and addictive, and they do a great job with the gamification. It just could be much better in some regards as a learning tool.
(Also, if you’re on the free tier and don’t want to get bombarded with ads, a Pi Hole works great for this.)
I like to supplement my use of web duolingo (which has a keyboard) with duolingo on my ipad, (which has speaking exercises, but uses hearts and a broken touch keyboard.) Sometimes I can go days without using my ipad.
But for me, web duolingo uses the new path UI (linear as all get out), and ipad duolingo still uses the old tree UI (do whatever exercises you please in whatever order seems right). So I have even less of a compulsion to use the ipad.
This month, however, the challenge instead of requiring 1000 XP requires 30 mobile exercises. So in the first time in many months I’m being penalized for not doing something I have even less inclination to do, even though I’m probably spending more time with duolingo overall.
I should be mature enough to realize that the games don’t matter, but the whole point of duolingo is use gamification to reinforce the routines of learning a language.
I mean, it’s a supplement to real language courses and immersion. It’s not going to teach you a language on its own.
My main strategy is to only do lessons up to the point where one lesson remains to finish the level. Since finishing the last lesson in a level gives you 2x points for the next 15 minutes as well, I keep those almost finished levels until I need a lot of points, at which point I start my session with one of them and then do one or two normal sessions with double points.
Absolutely. About half the languages I speak I learned from English speaking sources rather than my native German. I don’t really see why it would be a problem? You’re clearly fluent enough in English to do it
