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Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

> Duolingo is great for practicing and keeping motivated. It has successfully gamifyed language learning, getting users to practice frequently.

I used it for 8 months or so, and came to the conclusion that the gamification was completely counter-productive.

One of the big things in raising kids these days is "external rewards" vs "intrinsic motivation". There have been studies that show that kids who already enjoyed drawing, when given a reward for doing drawing, found drawing by itself less enjoyable afterwards.

Duolingo is all about external rewards: And the reward isn't for learning the language, but for completing lessons. I found myself always trying to race through as many lessons as possible; stopping to investigate a word or phrase, which should be rewarded, was actually discouraged by their system.

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I don't want to bash Duolingo like this, but I can tell you why it's like that.

Because a learning app's KPI is not how much the user actually learned. It's how much the user feels they learned.

Gamification makes you feel you earned "something". And that's the whole point.

> It's how much the user feels they learned.

> Gamification makes you feel you earned "something". And that's the whole point.

The distinction between "learned" in the first paragraph and "earned" in the second is, IMO, crucial. At some point it becomes more about maintaining steaks and suchlike rather than actually learning a language. (Speaking as some who spent a lot of time on Duolingo.)

I think the gamification was a bit part of why I stopped using it. It made it feel more like a chore than something I enjoyed doing.

I also realized that while it wasn't bad for teaching some basic vocabulary it was terrible for grammar and completely fell apart when it started to get into some more complex sentence construction (in Spanish, in my case).

> came to the conclusion that the gamification was completely counter-productive.

Something that boggles my mind when I look at spots like /r/duolingo are the people who care more about the gamification than actually learning. You'll see people talk about their 2 year streak, but they got there by doing the minimum amount of material per day plus many, many streak freezes.

But hey, congrats to them for winning some fake awards.

It's kinda weird to realize how motivated people are by updating a spreadsheet in a complicated way.

I think what you're missing here is that some people do not have the discipline to stick to a daily exercise regimen except when it's gamified like this.

So I think for them it's great, they do learn something instead of nothing at all.

> I think what you're missing here is that some people do not have the discipline to stick to a daily exercise regimen except when it's gamified like this.

It sounds like you're the one missing the whole point.

The goal of learning a language is not grinding on an app, but to have progress. Duolingo's gamification pushes grinding behavior, and not actual progress. Duolingo does not reinforce pushing forward, but does prompt you repeatedly on how to say "I drink milk" regardless whether you're on the app for two weeks or two years. You can be on Duolingo for two years grinding stuff daily and still have nothing to show for. You are prompted to keep your streak up of answering things like "I eat bread" over and over again regardless of language, and if you fail to keep your steak up you're prompted to pay for something to artificially keep it up.

This is not educational. It's a waste of time.

Let me repeat: some people cannot learn faster than this, they need gamification. Hence my statement: Duolingo is better than nothing for these.

> Let me repeat: some people cannot learn faster than this,

You missed the whole point: people do not learn with this approach, regardless of speed.

The only benefit is keeping people engaged in a skinner box while watching ads, and selling them ways around keeping their track record engaged with said skinner box unbroken.

It works for some people, clearly, as stated by some on this very thread. I hope you will not move from "Duolingo is useless for everyone on this earth" to "anyone saying Duolingo is useful for her/him is in denial"...

The issue here is that what you wrote is just not true. I did Ukrainian for a year. I started to be able to understand some of the content around a year in. I started to be able to parse Cyrillic.

I did tried other apps here and there, but none of them stuck for more them two days. Overwhelming majority, like almost all of what I learned is from Duolingo.

The progress was actually very real, painless and fine. I did not expected to be fluent. I improved more then would be possible without it.

I mean, what you wrote is just not true. Even if you play for getting XP, you are forced to progress.

> discipline to stick to a daily exercise regimen except when it's gamified like this

I get that, but I'm talking about a more extreme behavior. There exist people who appear to be in it for *only* the game. My eyes were opened when I saw someone on Reddit bragging about the length of their streak, but they'd done fewer lessons over 2 years than I had done in a month or so. And I'm not exactly speed running. In other words, they're going out of their way to *not* do any Dueling in the name of earning fake gold stars.

That said, I also agree that what you say is a thing. However I don't understand those people. Why anyone would care about earning a badge on a site is beyond me. If it works to get them to do something useful, great. But I still don't understand those people.

I agree it's not great. But assuming they are very bad at learning, then Duolingo make them learn something , kind of by accident. I cannot see this as a negative.

Obviously, for anyone who can learn faster, it's a lot of energy and time wasted, I agree.

> One of the big things in raising kids these days is "external rewards" vs "intrinsic motivation"

I think this is a bit more complicated and what works for some doesn't work for others. But I think to be a successful language learning app (as in successfully teaching language) then they can't just rely on this "immersion" approach. There needs to be study tools too.

> Duolingo is all about external rewards

I definitely agree with this. It seems like a big alignment problem. But I think they could make more money if they better aligned their app with user goals. It could reduce attrition rate, get more paid signups, and more active users. They have "first mover" advantage, but the hype phase is over, there are more competitors in the space, and they need to adapt or fail. Momentum is a pain. It is the reason for a lot of companies' success but also the reason for many (including the same) companies' quick and "unexpected" decline. Hacking is a good early strategy. It can get you to the moon, but it won't keep you there.

I think the issue is that your average Duolingo user doesn't have an intrinsic reason for learning a language -- anecdotally it seems many are just trying to fill their time in a way that's marginally more productive than playing a mobile game or scrolling social media.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

No, Duolingo is not "marginally more productive" than playing mobile games. It's way better. You're learning something useful, albeit very sloely, instead of wasting your time.

I don’t know, it makes me get on everyday and do something - and they are pretty forgiving with the streak piece of the app. I’d rather learn a little everyday than look at one of the overly pedantic texts that the super geniuses of Hacker News will recommend that only work for them and that I’ll close and never look at after day 3.

The amount of people that find learning languages fun on itself is miniscule. Intrinsic motivation only gets so far ... and for most of us it means "no learning at all" or "two monts of learning and then giving up".

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