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Wow, that's impressive.

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.

It can be demotivating. I use other language learning apps (not Duolingo, which is garbage), and I try to maintain a streak not because I care about it, but because I want the daily habit. Nevertheless, the number goes up… and help but get attached to it. I mean I don’t care about the number per se, but it was a reminder of my good study habit, which as someone with ADHD is an accomplishment itself.

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.

Out of interest, what other language learning apps are you using? I'm going to Portugal nest year and learning Portuguese through Duolingo at the moment. It's ok and some stuff is sticking, but I can't help but feel some of the why is missing and I'm just learning how to interpret their questions, rather than learning the language (I guess that's your problem with it?)

The ones I’m using now are specific to Japanese (WaniKani and Bunpro), but if you want to level up from Duolingo I would recommend Memrise for a similar bit more effective experience. They have a Portuguese course.

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.

Idk, I started out using both Memrise and Duolingo in August 2018 for French, used both for a couple of years but now use Duolingo only for French and Italian the last couple of years. I think both are good but prefer Duolingo. But to get conversational I believe you would have to go to more personal methods…

There’s no app that can build up conversational fluency. You can’t master a thing without actually doing the thing.

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.

For German I'm using Speakly. What I like about it is that it goes in order of the most used words, and all phrases are actually realistic and something you would use.

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.

> Developers, don’t put streak counters in these sorts of apps.

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?

Idk. Data point of me: I’ve kept up with other review apps that don’t have the streak counter longer. But obviously there’s a lot of confounding factors.

Readwise allows you to “recover” your streak if you miss a day for whatever reason. I’m sure it is for the exact reason you cite here.

I had the same thing happen in melodics (a finger drumming educational app), went over midnight, lost the streak and just mentally gave up on it. Duolingo (that I have the pro version of) does the same thing, but it 'froze' it for me after the fact, so I kept going. Weird how the motivation can switch to demotivation literally overnight.

And Duolingo appears to base it on your home time zone. My wife has used up a few streak freezes when we were many hours from our home time zone.

As a sporadically avid reader I wish I could impart my experience directly, but I'll try to describe briefly the wonderful moment of the 'flip', when, after working at a book for some time I become absolutely hooked. Then it's actually harder to stop reading, I want to know what happens next, I care about the characters, and am looking forward to the next chance I get to return to the story. At this point I actually want to read slower and make it last.

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.

I wonder what a fix would be? Maybe reset every 30 days and have a separate counter for the number of completed months that doesn’t reset if you fail.

I mostly attribute it to the fact that I started out the streak reading LOTR, which was really good and kept me going long enough for the streak to start to look substantial (a couple months IIRC.) Then I didn’t want to lose it so I kept picking up other books.

Maybe some added leeway time, more leeway the longer the streak is. Like a 300 day streak should give you maybe a week’s worth of “time off,” so to speak. I’m kind of imagining a sort of SLA type of counter.

If you start on a day, time it until you stop and count it for both days. What's the downside of someone starting at 11:59 and reading 6 minutes to game it?

Also, days are like 48 hours long from the first timezone to the last timezone.

Good point! If you flew from SF to AU, you’d lose a “day” in much less than 24 hours.

Anki (a flashcard software) allows you to set when the "next day" is. I put it around 4 am, it works well for me.

The website chesstempo.com has a daily streak that resets with no forgiveness, but it also has a weekly streak so as long as you use it once a week you can keep that going.

Change the date on the phone, and read again.

Were you really reading that much in five minutes anyway? It doesn't sound like you changed much.

"atleast five minutes"