Then one night I started reading at 11:57 PM, and by the time I was reading for 5 minutes, it was 12:02AM and I technically missed a day. I didn’t even realize how important the streak must have been to me, because I stopped reading after that and haven’t picked up the iPad to read a book in almost 2 years since then.
Edit: to one of the flagged replies that assumed I wasn’t reading much anyway (which I can’t reply to)… to be clear I didn’t just read five minutes a night, that was the minimum amount to keep the streak going. I read (iirc) 8 books in that time frame, including the lord of the rings trilogy in there. I wasn’t reading for hours a day, but probably averaging more like 20 minutes. Not a ton, but it’s not like I was barely reading.
Non-avid reader before to almost a year of avid reading, then all lost because of a hook metric. This stuff is a real deal.
Then, like GP, I just had a particularly busy day and didn’t get to my reviews until after midnight. BAM- a triple digit streak gone. After that, every time I logged in I got a reminder of my FAILURE (real or imagined) to keep up with my studies. I didn’t like being reminded of that, so I didn’t login. I ended up taking a year-long sabbatical from language learning instead.
Developers, don’t put streak counters in these sorts of apps.
If I were in your shoes, I would do Memrise to fill the little moments throughout the day. But the focus of my studies would be (1) a local community college Portuguese course; (2) the FSI Basic Portuguese course (or another drill heavy course from the 60’s, maybe linguaphone?) for self-study drill practice, 30min a day; and (3) a good sentence deck in Anki, minimum 10 new cards per day.
SRS apps can be good for building up a vocabulary base. Self-study drill based programs like the old FSI series can be great for internalizing grammar rules so that you don’t have to consciously think about it.
That does give you a great foundation for developing linguistic fluency though, should you relocate to the country or start immersing yourself in native media.
There's a streak, but it's so easy to ignore, specially since the app focus on 'learned words', something that duolingo had many years ago. The study is also organized in just chunks of 100. So instead, I focus on how many words I want to learn on the next week/month, or when I'm getting to the next group.
This definitely deserves a deep discussion. Get to the bottom: is it good, bad, is there a better way to implement?
I can speculate that, for many people, just getting a triple-digit streak is a big win.
Even if they drop for a year, or even forever, after losing it.
They wouldn't have accomplished the feat without the streak metric.
I don't have any data. As I said, it's speculative, but perhaps reasonably possible to be the case?
The trick is 1) finding the story that you want to read.
and 2) putting in the time to reach that state of flow/pull.
It's extremely pleasurable and I wish it on everyone.
I think the timetracker sort of motivation is like the runway before the flight. The bootstrapping. Or the kindling of a fire that will grow to sustain itself.
Also, days are like 48 hours long from the first timezone to the last timezone.
There's also the cracked lesson feature. They aligned cracked lessons to urgency gamification instead of something more sound like delayed repetition. As a result, you'll often have cracked lessons which you've long since permanently committed to memory and will be spending 15 minutes on easy lessons rather than doing the important, harder lessons.
It seems that the better language learning app would rather ask you to use the app less, if you make more progress when you do use the app.
The collection of recently failed flashcards that you can iterate is a great feature. It is somehow an automatic feature of spaced-repetition apps, since recently flashcards are shuffled into the stack at a higher frequency.
You _will_ need to supplement the vocabulary with Anki or another tool. You won't become fluent, but you will get a good basis to start talking with people comfortably. Becoming fluent depends on keeping up that talking. I would say that Duolingo gives a terrific starting point, at least for the three languages I've learned with it.
From my point of view, you can make it to A1/A2 proficiency in a language with Duolingo alone - after that, it gets quite hard. Teaching grammar and conjugations isn't its forté, without resources outside of Duolingo it will get rather tricky.
That being said, I still use Duolingo for my daily dose of language exposure - but without Anki (for vocabulary), youtube videos (to explain various specific topics) and evening courses (which help a lot by giving a structured approach on what to learn in what order), my learning curve would probably flatten out.
After nearly a year, I can help set up for dinner ("Where are the plates?" "There is bread on the table already" "Do you want tea?") and similar things.
Now I'm getting into genitives and such, and that's where Duolingo really seems to not do well. It doesn't explain why a word appears a certain way in a tense, it just makes you memorize that it does. Sometimes I'll ask my husband why, and he just says "Well, because that's the way it is". Of course I'll use the same explanation when my MIL asks me something about English.
Most native speakers are useless for why. You ideally want someone who learned both your native language and the language in question. Then they can often explain things relative to your language, and you'll learn things about your language and the language in question. Look for language notes from Hong Kong; I had found a university site with very helpful information on French many moons ago, but I can't find it again, it was written in fluent English, but with insights on English usage that were unlikely to occur to native English-only speakers.
I did French all through high school and most of college, then learned firsthand that I was maybe 25% as fluent as I assumed. Then I went home and went through the entirety of the Duolingo curriculum in a few months, without learning anything new (a couple new vocab words, maybe).
So, you could view this in two ways: either it's a scam that tricks you into wasting a lot of time viewing ads or paying a subscription without delivering on its promise. Or, you could see it as a shortcut that's worth at least a couple years of classes. But, at least in my experience, it does not enable you to speak a language with fluency.
(Which makes total sense if you step back and look past the marketing promises. Of course 20 minutes a day with a cartoon bird is not going to replace actually living in a country and being immersed in the language 24/7)
key problems:
1. not enough speaking practice. speaking is _at least_ 50% of the skill but about 10% of DL.
2. Waay too much time spent setting up each question w animations etc. not enoimugh learning time. much more repetition is required.
3. way too general learning. people have varying needs for language. e.g. work, travel, family, research/reading. teaching must be tailored to these.
Else you're like a dog listening to steam of human sounds: "Not walk, not walk, not walk, ...WALK!! (I know that one!), not walk, not walk, ..."
In my experience, Duolingo and other entry level apps can get you there especially for the person who hasn't learned a second language thus doesn't even know where to begin.
Not in my experience.
Anki + language-partner sessions + evening classes did it for me.
Luckily, that is a lot easier these days with the internet!
I can still understand a lot of Spanish and when I’m warmed up and have been back a few days my conversational level comes back.
Spaced repletion algorithms can be really helpful, but they can also be a hindrance. Duolingo treats the user like they don't know better than the algorithm. The language learner needs to be the one in the driver's seat with the algorithms and course material being there to support the learner.
Gamification is great, but it should only be there to help the user stay motivated meeting their goals. Like you mentioned, if you've already mastered something having it presented in your study session is actively working against meeting your goals because you're spending time studying something you don't need to.
I don't see studying everyday as an end-goal, though studying every day can be helpful for retention. You should feel rewarded but not punished when you "loose your streak".