Duolingo rant

I love learning languages and learning about different cultures. I've used many tools over the years to try and develop my language skills with varying levels of success. Duolingo is far and away one of the most effective language learning tools but it's not without its limitations.

One of the things I don't like about Duolingo is that it relies on momentum to be effective. If you break that momentum then you start to fail miserably and the whole experience can become disheartening and discouraging very quickly. What I mean by momentum, is your continued use of the site. This is built into the design with the emphasis placed on daily streaks. Users are encouraged to return daily to complete lessons in their course or to practice for a few minutes at least to keep their streak alive. The longer your streak becomes the more imperative that impulse becomes. Now there are ways to freeze your streak and take a day or two off from lessons but there's a danger when you do this that you will lose the impulse to continue.

If you don't particularly care about maintaining a streak you still aren't completely immune to the need to maintain momentum. Sure you can complete a lesson once a week if you want instead of doing it every day, but regardless of how much time you invest, the platform is still designed to progress your language learning through the course with the assumption that you have retained everything you have learned so far, and when you maintain momentum, that is a pretty safe bet. However the problem comes when you do decide to take a break for an extended period and return, you might find yourself lost, and half way through a course whilst struggling to complete a single lesson because you've forgotten everything seemingly that you had learned.

This lost feeling isn't unique to people who stop using the site outright, I have an interest in many different languages and from time to time when I feel "fatigued" with a particular language then I will switch to another for a while. Returning after an extended period of time, however I end up in the same position as if you stopped using Duolingo entirely - faced with a course that's progressed further than what I have retained. You can reset a course in Duolingo, there are certain penalties for doing this, notably XP earned in the course once reset does not count towards achievements until you pass your previous peak in that course, the other major penalty is that you start from the beginning, even when you use placement tests to skip over the most basic modules you're still left much further behind than you were previously.

What Duolingo needs in my opinion is a way to detect a learner returning to a course they haven't done in a while and a refresher course that recaps everything you had learned up to that point, in a shortened, abridged manner. Going back over previous units one by one manually is incredibly tedious. The only other option which I have seen people turn to is to use an external resource to revise before returning to Duolingo which seems to completely defeat the point.

The only other major gripe I have with Duolingo which I have noted previously is the fact it doesn't have social features to enable you to actually engage with other learners, I understand why they choose not to provide these features but still it feels like a feature that should be there. At the very least for premium members whose real-world identity the platform already verifies by virtue of the fact that they have to provide a payment method.

If you want to join me on my language learning journey you can find me on duolingo - I'm @toxicshadow2k7 over there.