Why it might be time to give up my 550+ days of Duolingo -line

When I started using Duolingo to learn and practice foreign languages ​​in February 2023, I never imagined using the app daily. But recently I hit my 550-day line, which means I have used the app daily for 1.5 years.

While I am a little impressed with the fact that I maintained my line for so long, I have also considered whether it is time to give it up for different reasons, including the fact that I no longer feel that it teaches me what I need to know. Although I always considered Duolingo as one of Best Android -apps For language learning is that my experience makes me doubt this.

1. I no longer feel like I actually learn

I began to pursue my Duolingo line as a way of ensuring that I did not drop from learning mandarin. I added a Duolingo -Widget on the phone’s home screen and made notifications to remind me to complete the line.

But the line does not actually ensure that you learn anything -there is a commitment, similar to a Snapchat line or a Reddit line. A Duolingo line requires you to complete a single lesson to maintain it. Depending on the type of lesson you do, this can be an extremely short period used in the app. This week I finished the lesson and left the app in 42 seconds.

Maintaining my line has made sure I use the app daily, not that I actually learn a new word or character. Repeating the same vocabulary over several lessons to remember the words means that these little pieces of time spent in the app do not introduce you to a new word for several weeks.

If you miss a lesson, Duolingo offers you a “dash freezing” so you don’t lose the line. This makes the feature more forgiving if you have a particularly busy week or just forget to do your lesson.

You get a limited number of dashes freeze for free, and now and then refill these freezes. But you can also buy a freezer to maintain the line. Duolingo will often ask you to refill these freezes to protect your line – I even got the commandment text when I still have freezing equipped.

The app also used to give me five total freezes (instead of just two) because of being part of the Streak Society. But this figure seems to have been reduced to three. You can technically earn currency in the game to buy these refills, but you can also spend money in the real world to buy these gems in the game.

Over time, this has made the line feel more like a pay-to-win mechanic than an actual sign of progress or learning. Sometimes the app does not detect a lesson either, which costs me extra streaks. This, along with the questions of filling my freezes, has the sour of the impression of the stretch mechanic.

I used to complete several lessons a day when I used Duolingo. But as my days became more busy and my chronic migraines got worse, I began to move towards shorter lessons to maintain my line. Because I learn Mandarin, who comes with her own writing system, I have a tab to learn these Chinese characters (known as Hanzi).

I started using this tab because I was addicted to a lot on pinyin (the Chinese phonetic alphabet) to understand what I was reading. But eventually, these short, repetitive lessons became a way to maintain my Duolingo line. This has reduced the amount of new vocabulary that I learn over time.

It almost feels as if I uncovered a Duolingo cheats. But instead of increasing the XP, it just ensures that I have very short lessons. But there is another matter that contributes to my lack of diversity in lessons …

4. Updates to completed devices disturbed my progress

Something that has inhibited my progress with Duolingo is updates that the app does to devices you have completed. For example, while on section 2, unit 17 in my Chinese course, the app rolled out updates to previous devices. This was not occasional word or two, but whole themes and topics.

However, my devices in section 1 are still shown as completed. But when I revise these devices, I find words I’ve never met before. This also happened to my Hanzi lessons. I tried to coordinate the Hanzi exercise with my progress for the main hours, but dozens of new characters were added to devices I had already completed.

I don’t mind the course and lessons being updated, but I wish you could practice on the new vocabulary and the sentence structures of separate lessons. The fact that they are simply folded into your completed lessons makes it very difficult to detect the gaps in my knowledge.

I liked Duolingo in the first few days of using it, and I really felt like I was doing progress. However, when the app began to add so much new vocabulary to older lessons, I began to feel more and more frustrated with the experience.

I tried to solve this by trying to find out if I could reset my courses. But it turns out that the only way to do this is to delete the course and then add it again. However, doing this also deletes all the XP you have earned from completing lessons.

I shouldn’t really worry about the XP on my profile, but the gamified approach Duolingo takes to language learning makes this feel like resetting this calculation would be a loss. I imagine that I would feel the same way if I started a steam game from the beginning, deleted all my unlocked achievements.

At the moment I have 27,219xp for my Chinese course. To consider lessons that serve you between 20 and 40xp, deleting all this would be a bitter pill to swallow.

But besides the gamified elements that make me feel stuck where I am, I also have problems with the way Duolingo is approaching the lessons. The app rarely explains sentence structure or grammatical rules. The only way to find the few grammatical lessons and rules included in a course is to choose the small book icon next to a device banner.

I thought Duolingo’s gamified approach would help me refresh my knowledge of mandarin. As I studied it for two years at the university, I lost a lot of my knowledge by not practicing it for years.

But when I’m just able to choose a few words when I hear Chinese dialogue on TV or my Chinese friend sends me texts that I can hardly understand, I realize that using the app every day for 1.5 years has not given me the knowledge of the language I had hoped for. I still haven’t reached the skill level I had at the university.

Even with existing exposure to mandarin, I am miles behind where I want to be. The app has not been able to expand my knowledge past a few greetings, questions and expressions. But it has not been able to log in every day. So generally, it feels like Duolingo is more aimed at repeated commitment than actual progress.

I may consider switching to memer or another language learning app to see if another approach works better.

I still get a notice every night to complete my Duolingo lesson for the day, but when time goes by, it becomes less fulfilled. I have begun to look in other ways I can learn languages ​​and vocabulary in a more holistic way. But thanks to my growing frustration with Duolingo, it is fast to continue my line regularly less tempting.