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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

I envy the author's persistence. 500 days of working on a task without skipping a day is impressive.

It gets easier to maintain habits the longer you've been doing them. Most people can manage a 500-day streak of brushing their teeth easily. So the trick is to integrate studying into your daily routine the same way, such that it will feel just wrong to skip.

It sounds pretty impossible to me. I don't think I've had a 500 day streak of anything that isn't a biological function in my life. In the last 2 years I've not even maintained a streak of eating food every day.

How do you not eat food for a full day if you are not purposefully avoiding it?

I want to go eat, but then something else comes up and I forget. After a while of feeling hungry the hunger goes away or is difficult to notice.

It is impressive, but you can buy items (with the in-app currency you get from finishing lections) that allow you to skip single days (or even whole weekends, IIRC).

That's correct - though you still need to log in to buy a Streak Freeze after it's used up, so you can't skip more than 48 hours. You can't "buy" multiple Streak Freezes in advance.

The Weekend Amulet is only offered after completing the lesson on Friday, as far as I can tell - you can't just buy them in the store, and they expire after the weekend is over whether you used it or not.

(I'm currently on an 872 day streak.)

I got a bit over a 500 streak but stopped after that. I felt that spaced-repetition on the words was more effective than whatever DuoLingo was doing, and DuoLingo's lesson for the language I was learning was not well maintained.

The gamification techniques DuoLingo's used made it much easier to maintain the streak. Albeit, it was really easy to just do DuoLingo "to get it done" rather than focusing on it as part of study.

If you travel this is just about required (I crossed the dateline on last night's flight, had no Saturday ....)

I am on my 561 day streak today and I subscribed to Duolingo plus a month ago to repair my streak because my streak broke due to the jat lag disorder in the U.S.A. Before that I kept a 80 day streak but didn't know how to fix it when I just skipped just one day.

Now it becomes a part of my routine to practice German on Duolingo. Everyday for only about 10 minutes, and I like the Duolingo stories feature very much now and I can practice even for about 30 minutes on weekends.

It only takes ~5 minutes per day. My girlfriend has well over 1000 days. I got ill at some point, forgot my streak freeze, and had to give up at around 500 or so. Then I lost interest... I did miss the whole update where they started with advertisements to pay for the application (which are akin to spam because apparently 'no' does not mean 'no'). I'd have quit over that regardless. Though perhaps a webbrowser or PWA would do the trick (I use the Android version).

That being said, I did learn quite some Spanish and I'm happy I did but I am not sure Duolingo (or Memrise for that matter which I also tried) works better than high school spaced repetition, Anki, or Pimsleur.

A lot of people have impressive streaks - https://duome.eu/

I don't think there's any way to verify these are legitimate streaks though, and haven't been paid for. The whole concept really fell apart after Duolingo started monetizing that aspect of the app.

Well, do what works for you. I know first hand that letting a massive streak end can jeopardize your interest in starting again, so a strike revival system actively helps people.

Looking at a global streak leaderboard doesn't help you improve your foreign language skills, so I'm not sure what "fell apart."

If you miss a day, then your streak has ended. That's just what the word "streak" means. By accepting money to look the other way, Duolingo is cheating those that actually have kept their streaks going legitimately.

It's a flawed concept to build a leaderboard on a pliable statistic. That's what I'm saying.

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