1. What happened?

For the first half of the month, I have been busy preparing for an exam, which required me to fly to a different city, and several job interviews. For the second half, I came back on campus, packing up and shipping a lot of my stuff back home, because I am graduating and I used to have a hoarding issue (but that’s for a different post). All this is to say, I may or may not have forgotten to take care of myself, physically and mentally. So, when I opened up Duolingo the other day, I was not surprised to find out that I had lost my Duolingo streak after 336 days. I had just been way too busy to open up the app, despite the fact that its icon is at the most visible spot on my home screen.

Then I decided: this is a moment I should celebrate. And there is no other better way to do so than writing a blog post reviewing the app and my experience with it. So here it is.

2. My experience with Duolingo

I first downloaded Duolingo during quarantine. I was learning French at the time, and heard about this language learning app that everyone was talking about. I could read fairly well at the time, and have already familiarized myself with all the basic grammar structures in French, so Duolingo was not of great help. I kept using it out of curiosity. And it was fun. I liked how the app gamified language learning experience, which, I have to admit as a language learner myself for years, was never the most exciting thing you could expect from life. I stormed through about a ¼ of the entire course, but later found it boring because sometimes I would have to repeat answering the same question over and over again. Progress was slow. I lost patience and uninstalled the app. I think I had a 100-dayish streak and that was it.

The idea of learning Japanese randomly came to me when I was having lunch last summer at a Burger King. Now, I am more of a “I am going to do this now, or I will for sure lost interest 3 days later” kind of person. So, I decided that I could not afford buying a textbook or signing up for a course. I then thought of Duolingo all of a sudden: “I have never tried using Duolingo to learn a new language. Maybe I should.”

And I did.

The first 30 days was quite refreshing. I had never learnt a new language from scratch using Duolingo, so I felt excited. My progress slowed down after around 60 days of using the app. That was when I felt more and more comfortable reading hiragana and katakana, and that was also when I started to seek help from resources other than Duolingo. I kept using it anyway, because at this point, I wanted to test out how far I could go to keep this streak alive. After around another 2 months, I finished reading quite a bit about how Japanese grammar works, i.e., the basic of the basics. In terms of grammar and reading, I think that was when I caught up using other resources with my Duolingo progress.

I got a bit bored after 4 months of using Duolingo. At this point, I think I have made it a habit of mine to learn a bit of Japanese every day. There were many times I had wanted to opt out so bad, but apparently Duolingo’s unrelenting effort of reminding me to continue the streak convinced me to keep going. Every time I received a text message reminder from that annoying little green bird, I would click away, but then thought to myself: “Alright, you win. Fine, I’ll do it. It takes two minutes anyway.” I guess the reason I wasn’t really surprised with breaking my Duolingo streak, or even annoyed, for that matter, is that I just stopped caring about the streak. I did not stop caring about language learning though, neither did I stop caring about learning Japanese. It was just that I had much more motivation to continue learning Japanese than keeping a learning streak. I realized that forming a learning habit helps when learning a language but even when there is not a active habit, learning is still most likely happening. Gamification may be one method, but there are all different kinds of language learning methods out there that works. I liked gamification in the past, but that does not necessarily mean future me will keep liking the same method. It may slip out of use as I get more and more familiar with the language. And that should be okay.

3. My review of the Duolingo app

From my experience, I would rate Duolingo three and a half stars.

Pros:

a. Duolingo is beginner-friendly

No prior knowledge of the target language or language learning in general is required. You can start learning a language from scratch. Like, scratch scratch. Ground 0.

b. Repetition

Duolingo repeats its course content to make sure that you remember everything you have seen. Even if you have not, you can still attempt to guess at the answers, and that guesswork is already enough to stimulate some of the old memories from previous days of learning.

c. Habit formation

That is what Duolingo is notoriously known for: the annoying little green bird popping up in your email inbox, while occasionally bombarding you with text messages and your smartphone notifications. However, if you look at this from an opposite angle, if you actually followed what the green bird told you to do – to take a few minutes off and learn a bit – you will be surprised to find out that sometimes habits are so much more crucial than the content that you are actually learning. You tend to get farther down your learning journey by taking one gentle step at a time, because you are not straining yourself.

d. It’s pretty cool

Last I checked, you can learn High Valyrian and Cantonese in Duolingo, two of the languages for which learning resources are not as readily available as popular languages such as German and Spanish.

Cons:

a. Grammar-translation method

Duolingo uses grammar-translation method at its core. What you do in Duolingo basically is that you translate sentences word by word from the source language into the target language. And grammar-translation method just may not be the most effective and efficient language learning method per se. In Duolingo’s case, little attention is put upon speaking and communication. The learner would encounter sentences like “My dog sells books in the kitchen”, which, I most likely would never say to anyone in a million years in real life, and are still asked to translate them.

b. A bit repetitive and tedious

This could be seen as the opposite side of its aid with memorization. While it is helpful, it can also be extremely frustrating to know that it will take you days before you move on to the next grammar point with some new learning content.

c. Pronunciation

Phrases are pronounced in a robot-like voice. Sentence formation is a major category in Duolingo questions where you click on blocks of phrases to form an entire sentence. The problem it creates is that there is no chance of you figuring out the how the sound of a sentence flows out. All you hear is period after period after period and one stop following another, which. Is. Never. How. Native. Speaker. Actually. Talks.

4. Am I still going to use it after losing the streak?

Yes, because I liked the app in general. I think in language learning, habit formation is much more important than rushing through a course in a short amount of time. And Duolingo helps me with just that. Like I said, the learning content did not matter as much anymore. Duolingo has now become a gentle reminder that I am still actively (although with the least amount of effort) doing the learning.

Disclaimer: I said this in my last blog post and I will say it again: This is my experience and mine only. I like Duolingo because it works for me. Find whatever works for you. Good luck.