[227/365] you'll all just have to take my word for it that I'm happy for you

[cosmolinguist]

I have a love/hate (or, participate/grumble more like) relationship with Duolingo, I have for years. They keep changing it and making it worse, too!

But one change I do like, which I've recently enabled, is "making my profile private" which, whatever, but what that means is I'm not part of leagues and friends don't "congratulate" me for gamified things like learning 1000 words or completing a monthly challenge.

I'd be alarmed to see "all six of your friends congratulated you" on something that I didn't even know had happened. (That's not false modesty: the app doesn't tell you how many "words" you've "learned" as you go along or anything and, once the month challenges stopped being mere points targets, I stopped even understanding what they were, much less if I'd done those things yet or not.)

Also I truly fretted for the Wellbeing of friends who finished a month's challenge in the first third of the month, or even the first day. I know whenever I complete a lot of lessons in one day, it's because of insomnia or depression. So, I silently refused to press the "congratulate" button for this until at least halfway through the month. I expect this to have as much impact as the times I don't say "thank you" to the bus driver when I'm getting off the bus because they were mean to me or drove too fast or whatever other slight I am annoyed about: it makes me feel ever so slightly better to stand up for my values, and it surely never even gets noticed by the person from whom I am withholding my politeness.

I expected the lack of "leagues" to be a relief, because I never cared which one I was in or what my place within this week's was, so being constantly notified of such things was just annoying. But I am surprised at how much difference it makes to not see or be seen by other people there at all. I'm sad I'm no longer able to send applause or party-popper emojis to my friends for their achievements! But I'm relieved they can't do that for mine, for some reason.

And I'm surprised at how relieved I am now that I don't know how they're doing in their leagues and goals. I have so little data to otherwise extrapolate from (except for diffrentcolours, I'm not duolingo "friends" with people I actually hear from much) and this feels like exactly the wrong amount of information to be getting from someone: either too little or too much.

I knew that the gamification and social elements of the app are supposed to encourage and reinforce regular learning, and I thought I was just indifferent to those, but it turns out I might have been using it in spite of them! Removing both has, oddly, removed a stress from my life. I say "oddly" because that has surprised me, it doesn't feel like it makes sense... but who am I to argue with anything that quiets my brain a little!

Comments

[otter]

I didn't like the gamification or social elements either. They just added stress. I haven't been on duolingo in a few years. I was working on Spanish and German for a while.

[cosmolinguist]

I've done Welsh and German before, but I'm back to Spanish now, which I studied in high school.

[bunnypip]

I've done some German on there (which I did to A Level at school), a little bit of Gaelic, all the Latin that was available in beta, and now some Welsh.

[bunnypip]

I didn't do Duolingo for ages after one too many gamification updates (unprovements). I'm back on it at the moment to do some Welsh which I may have an actual need of in future, but we're (me and M) backing that up with 90s TV programmes about learning Welsh.
I don't think I have enough friends on there to be getting silly congratulations but the league thing is very annoying.

[haggis]

There is also an app called Say Something in Welsh which focuses much more on speaking and listening. I have seen it recommended a lot by people who are serious about learning Welsh.

[bunnypip]

Cool I will have a look! Diolch!

[cosmolinguist]

TV programmes about learning Welsh sound great! Anything you'd recommend? D does Welsh on Duolingo too, because his sister married into a family whose first language is Welsh so he likes to try it out on his niblings.

[bunnypip]

We've just started on 'Learning Welsh Language - Now You're Talking' which is a series of (I think) 36 20 minute programmes from 1990. It's available on YouTube although the video quality is pretty bad, at least on the ones we've seen so far. But it seems to tackle things in more of a useful order than Duolingo and covers stuff about regional variation.

[haggis]

That makes sense to me because the gamification elements are all about creating pressure to encourage you to keep doing the thing and if that grates, it really grates.

I have a long streak because I started doing Duolingo consistently during maternity leave and I really don't want to break it. I had a while of doing the absolute minimum because I hate the new path system so much but I have got back into doing more because I do actually enjoy learning Welsh, independent of all the gamification BS.

[cosmolinguist]

It's a shame you can't skip to the end of a level in a path if it's about something you know, which gets really repetitive and boring, but otherwise I feel lucky that I do not hate the path system. :)

[barakta]

I think they should make stuff like leagues and gamification optional but that probably would make them less money or something cos if the product is free, then you are the product, enshittification etc.

I played with Duolingo for a bit on German but found it frustrating cos it didn't tell me what vocab had been covered and kept repeating stuff in an infuriating way then suddenly throwing new stuff at me with no teaching which made me get wrong answers which just turned me off (I hate quizzes where I can't get the right answer cos I have no way to, a lot of work training quizzes are like this cos it's guess what the right answer is cos it's arbitrary and drive me nuts). I need structure to learn stuff which Duolingo didn't have and the gamification was hateful - I loathe gamification and will switch right off it. That was about 8 years ago tho.

[silveradept]

I'm glad that the owl has made some of the stressful bits much less so.