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. ^_^;