Duolanguages

I believe it was in 2019 that Leagues were introduced, presumably as a way to motivate people. My activity level has kept me in the Obsidian League by and large in the years since (I peeked into the Diamond League one week out of curiosity). I believe there used to be 30 people in each League, and the five or six lowest were demoted, while the five highest in Obsidian were promoted. (In lower leagues the 7 highest were promoted.)

The past week, they had suddenly changed this. There were 20 people in the league (I don’t remember if that started earlier or if it was 30 all the way until last week) and everyone from 11 down was demoted. The game kept telling me to hurry so as to not get demoted, but this actually had the opposite effect on me. There was no way I would do more exercises than usual if there was a risk of this pushing someone else into demotion, if there really were people who took this seriously.

The whole thing is pointless, since the exercises are exactly the same regardless of league. If there was some extra content in the highest leagues, it would make a bit of sense to compete for it, but I still wouldn’t since that would ruin the game for others. The only reason I have stayed in the Obsidian League all this time is that it was a good match for my activity level. I couldn’t get demoted if I did my daily exercises or even two of them.

As of an hour ago, I am in the Pearl League, where only the top 4 get promoted (same as Obsidian), while everyone from 13 to 20 is demoted. I am seriously tempted to do less than usual to see how it looks in the Amethyst League…

Why this change? My best guess is that the League system was getting top-heavy, with a large portion of the learners in the top Leagues. By rebalancing the Leagues, it may be easier to tell from the League what activity level you belong to. But for me, it may actually cause me to do fewer exercises. I honestly feel bad about pushing people down who make a serious effort but are demoted simply because there isn’t room for them in the League. I don’t really think this was what Duolingo was aiming for, given the nagging to not get demoted. But then again, not everyone has wisdom from Heaven, even though it is free for the asking.

The icon for Duolingo has been updated to show a portrait of a sick owl. It looks so disgusting that I have stopped using the app on my primary phone, so as to avoid constantly seeing it in my Recent Apps list. But unfortunately, I think it is quite apt. I wonder if Duolingo employees have designed this as a cry for help, or a warning to leave the sinking ship. I am more surprised that it has been approved for rolling out to the masses.

Unfortunately, the picture describes how I feel things have turned out for Duolingo. It has gone into decline after the founders sold it.

The feature where Duolingo stood head and shoulder above the competition was the number of different available languages, both as native languages and target languages. After suddenly shutting down the Incubator, there are no new languages, those that were under development are not released, and those that were in beta are not completed. Instead, the new investors had chosen to focus on a couple of large Western languages (Spanish, French, and to some degree German, as far as I can see) – fewer than even their competitors. So far the other languages are kept running, but I am not sure how long even free money can keep them going.

Another early victim of the sale was the forums, which not only added to the enjoyment of learning a new language, but also provided valuable advice. Grammar lessons seem to also have fallen by the wayside. I fear that Duo is not only sick, but in terminal decline. It seems that the program will die without having achieved its goal. This is quite tragic. But at least it has been a long and slow decline, allowing us to make use of the work that was done before the creators sold out.

I notice that if we do all or most of our daily quests, they get steadily harder. I am not sure how far Duo stretches that rubber band, because in the end I just don’t care that much about the imaginary characters and their bizarre projects. If I don’t have fun, why should they?

Finnish is difficult, no doubt about that, and I realize I have to repeat a lot after I spent a week without my smartphone in January. (An accident landed me in hospital for some serious surgery, and it took some time before I could resume my language practice.) But I would bet good money that this stretching of the goals is a feature that is built into the system for all languages. Since most users pay by watching ads rather than a monthly subscription like I do, it makes sense to try to keep them clicking. Until they get fed up and leave, at least.

We are paying for your boardroom furniture, don’t insult our intelligence if you want to continue to use that furniture.

I ran into a rough patch in my Finnish course. As a paying subscriber, I have unlimited “hearts” so I could have just moved ahead, but it seemed like a bad idea. Some people complain about the “hearts” system, and I did not really miss it when it went away back in the days, but then they put it back with 5 hearts instead of 3, and now I love it. If I make that many errors, I must be moving too fast. I agree with Duolingo on that, and I don’t want to buy my way out of that. I am not here to finish the course but to learn.

On the Android phone app, I could not do anything with the hearts except wait, and repeating old lessons only gave me 5 XP per bubble. But on the website there were still dumbbells (training weights) that I remembered from earlier in the game. Choosing this would let you repeat topics Duolingo thought you might be on the verge of forgetting, and clearing them would give you 10 XP and restore 1 lost heart. So while it gave less XP than moving forward right away, it gave acceptable XP and fulfilled a useful function.

But then one day there were dumbbells on my Android app too! And not only that, but when I tried them, I found that they gave 20 XP! That is a lot of XP for basically doing 10 exercises from the previous two topics. If I had double XP for clearing a topic or one of their daily “happy hour” events, I could get 40 XP for each, and could easily rack up 80 or even 100 XP before the double XP ran out. So yeah, it feels a bit like cheating. Doing this took me to number 2 in the Obsidian league this week, on Saturday. So on Sunday, I waited with my daily exercises till after the league was finished. I got number 6, so I just barely escaped going into the Diamond league, the highest one. I really feel that should be reserved for serious students, and not for someone exploiting an app feature.

OK, it is not technically cheating. The previous two topics are typically in need of practice, and harder than the early lessons that I would sometimes randomly get on the website when using dumbbells. Not only have I repeated the early lessons so many times already, but the lessons get exponentially harder the further you come. And by that I mean that you not only learn rarer (and usually longer) words, but at the same time you learn new and more alien grammatical features. I wish they had stuck with one of those things per topic, like teaching us the new words first and the new grammar next.

Since I have a paid account, I can’t easily see the remaining hearts, so I am not sure if the dumbbells restore hearts on the app too. I suspect not, because I get notification hours later that my hearts are full again. So that is one thing I would like to see different. Another is that I think 15 XP would be more fitting (same as for ordinary lessons) or even 10 like on the website. That way I would not be tempted to stop moving forward at all and just float on the listening exercises.

Duolingo is constantly adding and removing features, often doing so only for some of their users in order to compare and see which approach causes the most progress and least quitters. So maybe it will be gone soon. Or maybe it will be nerfed (toned down) to a less cheat-like level. I think the latter would be best. But it does make me practice more. I am getting pretty good at the previous two lessons now. ^_^;

I see that a couple of posts ago, I pointed out the bizarre practice of giving double XP for simple exercises from long ago, instead of for recent exercises that you are still learning and likely to make mistakes on. I am happy to report that this is gone. It is now much harder to get bonus XP at all, and you don’t get it for repetitions anymore.

The option to repeat specific bubbles (topics) is entirely gone, you only get repetitions for the larger units of roughly 10 bubbles. That said, you can still repeat early units that are hilariously easy and get XP for it, just not double XP. In fact, it seems that repetitions now give half XP, 5 XP per session instead of the old 10.  And it seems that when I repeat a recent unit, Duolingo really does dredge up the harder exercises from that unit, so that even I (who progress very slowly and cautiously) make the occasional mistake. Good job! Overall, it is much harder to get XP than before. I have mixed feelings about this. I certainly think it was too easy before, but I feel that right now the system is not rewarding enough. It ought to give progressively more XP for harder exercises, not just low XP across the board. But I guess it beats giving the highest XP for the easiest exercises, at least.

Overall, Duolingo is harder to navigate, harder to “play”, less fun, and less rewarding, but it was excessively easy before, so the change is not all bad. I used to be able to maintain my position in the Obsidian league with only 5-10 minutes a day, which frankly isn’t enough to make any serious progress in learning a difficult language. Especially when you’re motivated to only do super easy exercises. It should be more effective now… if we stick with it.