I am pretty sure it was 150 XP last week and the week before. For some reason, Duolingo gives out extra lingots for doing much more practice on weekends. I think this is a terrible idea for the same reason I have written about before (about going out too hard from the start) but gradually less terrible the longer you have come.
That is, if you gain those 200 XP by practicing where you are lagging behind – if your skill tree is not completely gold for instance – I think this may be worthwhile. But the thing that really counts is your daily streak, doing a little each day. And I am afraid people will lose that because they overdo it in the weekend and get fed up. Ideally you should look forward to your daily play if you want to stay motivated.
But in particular it is a bad thing to race ahead down the skill tree. A few days later you will find yourself struggling because your brain will have forgotten much of what you learned during the weekend, and you will be looking at a sea of words that you don’t know how to get across.
I suppose I could use the weekend to maintain my French, but I am definitely not planning to do 20 exercises in Japanese where my skill tree is already pure gold each day. And I am not happy with how they are lifting the bar from one weekend to the next. It seems like they are using us for lab rats again, to see how far they can push before people give up and delete the app.
If they wanted to do something genuinely useful, they should give a higher XP for the web exercises (for those languages that have web versions – I think all non-Asian languages have this). The web exercises are harder but also contain more explanations, so you learn more from them, but they take longer time. But hey, you can’t expect the people who make Duolingo to be as wise as me. I am really good at things others do, I just happen to suck at the things I do myself. ^_^