Category Archives: Strategy

Actually, this is something that the highly trained professionals at Duolingo have warned about themselves, but I’ll repeat it here. There is one thing you can do, and have a high risk of doing, that could seriously mess up your learning experience. Actually two things, but the first is the worst.

Don’t rush out from the start at a speed you cannot maintain. Well, a little more than you can maintain is probably OK, but I am talking about spending hours racing down the language tree, learning topic after topic on the first day or two. That is fine only if you can spend that much time later too. Because the more you learn, the more you need to repeat.

Repetition is an interesting topic in its own right. Unless you are a super genius, there are basically four ways to learn things: Repetition, association, understanding, or crisis. Repetition is the only one of these that you can control in detail. Science has a pretty good idea of how repetition influences learning, and how often you should repeat (modified by your general ability to learn). Association is something you can try to do, by thinking up images or stories, or it could happen automatically if a word is similar to a word in another language, for instance. The other two are very hard to control.

Learning a language in Duolingo is not like a grocery list. The learning is constructed in a logical way, where you add new features one by one, increasing complexity.  If you race ahead and you are not a super genius, you wake up the next morning and much of what you learned is gone. So you start the app and suddenly you are surrounded by exercises that are way too hard for you. This is really frustrating. Especially the web version is bad in this regard, because if you make a mistake, they will make the current lesson longer. So instead of getting, say, 15 sentences, if you make errors in ten of them you get 25. If you make errors in the new sentences you get, it adds even more, so you could end up with 30 or 40. One unlucky forum writer was unable to finish his daily exercise at all because it just kept growing longer the more he did. Luckily the smartphone app is more forgiving: It will simply ask the same question again at the end of the lesson, until you get it right. Still, that could take some time if you are deep in enemy territory, so to speak.

A similar problem could happen if you take a long break, for instance a vacation without Duolingo. (Who would want that??) In my case, I returned to Turkish after working on another language for a while. Suddenly I found myself “behind enemy lines”, seeing exercises in a language which definitely looked like Turkish but I only understood a little of it. Translating to the language was completely impossible.

What people naturally tend to do in this situation is run away and never come back. What you can do instead is start from the top (or wherever you are confident) and practice individual bubbles (topics). It is not quite like doing it the first time, because Duolingo remembers where you have been and may throw in things you learned later, but most of the exercises should be about that topic. Just work your way down the tree again at a more comfortable speed. You will gradually regain your confidence as the language comes back to you, and you rack up points. (I eventually quit Turkish not long after, but that was mainly because my daily exercises reminded me of what was going on in Turkey at the time.)

I hope this is was useful! Slow and steady wins the race. Or preferably fast and steady, but try not to start a marathon like a sprint, or you will not be able to complete at all.