“Complain, complain, that’s all you’ve done, ever since we lost” says Leonard Cohen in his song The Captain. And unfortunately it is that time again, as Duolingo keeps losing the qualities that made it the number one educational software of the world. How long they will be able to fend off the competition is uncertain at this rate.
The other day I discovered that on my Android smartphone and tablet, the training exercises have been replaced by 1-minute timed exercises. The duration of the old ones were approximately five minutes by my estimate, and they each gave 10 points, so two of them added up to my 20 points of minimum daily practice. The new timed exercises seem to give a higher point yield per minute: For Japanese, I get about 5 points for each. Japanese is kind of hard though as long as I still need to spell my way through the Hiragana rather than read them fluently. In French, I get around 10 points, or the same as the much longer exercises we had before.
In any case, what we have now is a much higher advertising-to-practice ratio. And as the Swedes say, “Vem är det som tjänar på det?” Who is it that profits from that?
That said, Duolingo claim to gather a lot of information about the effect of various approaches, using A/B testing where some users are given one way of doing things and other users are given another, and they then roll out the most successful approach to everyone. What I am not sure of here is whether the success is for the learners. Financing a service with 150 million users is hard, and perhaps it does require showing ads every 61 seconds. So that could be one reason.
Or it is even possible that neurotypicals learn better under stress. Certainly a lot of them seem to go out of their way to place themselves in stressful situations, whether when playing games, or in traffic, or in their love life. It is as if they don’t really feel alive unless primal emotions are running high. Certainly the amygdala is more active in stressful situations, increasing learning dramatically. Unfortunately, amygdala-learning mostly consists of learning what to avoid. I am not sure Japanese introductions should fall in that category!
For me personally, stress mostly motivates me to find and eliminate the source of the stress, and this does not bode too well for my relationship with Duolingo. But for the time being at least, the timing of this new disturbance could not have been better: I can still do the old type of practice on my brand new iPad, ironically. Admittedly the ability to go directly to forum discussions from an individual exercise does not exist there, and has basically been disabled across the board for Japanese which does not have a web version. I miss that, as there were often helpful comments from people who were much more fluent in the language. But it is not bad enough to abandon my favorite language course right after it came out. So that’s something.
UPDATE: I am happy to announce that you can still get the longer exercises by choosing topics to practice in the skill tree, rather than using the default practice at the overview page. I just scrolled down to the part of the French skills that were all gray (meaning they badly need practice) and just picked one to practice. Sure enough, I got the old long, non-timed practice. It seems to be only when you let the machine pick what to practice, that you get the timed exercise. I did not notice this in Japanese, because I don’t have any topics yet that are below full strength. ^_^;