Your Streak Means Nothing: Or how Duolingo is ruining language learning
Language learning is a really useful skill, and I'm pretty sure that everyone who's reading this post will already know the reasons why. As for me, I have two main reasons for why: making my brain smarter, and learning and preserving cultures (it's great to have a "global" language like English, but I want to see less of it, please.). This last reason also resonates a lot with me, coming from a region with two languages (Galicia, Spain), with the first one starting to maybe dissappear, thanks in part to it almost not being spoken nor in any media nor the Internet... I will make another post going deeper into this soon.
As of today, I know how to speak fluently in three languages, two of which are my mother tongue (Spanish and Galician), and the other one being English, which I would say I know to use as well as the last two. I have a beginner/medium level of French, I partly know how to use Portuguese thanks to it being so similar to Galician, and I'm on a really beginner level of Esperanto and Dutch. All of this experience has taught me one thing: Duolingo doesn't work.
I might have exaggerated a bit on these last words. Duolingo could work, but only as a game-ish complement to the full learning experience. This is what a lot of people don't realize. Unlike what Duolingo says, you aren't gonna become a full-on native speaker only because you spend 15 minutes every day clicking the correct options on the owl app. If you don't write with your hands, practice in more ways than just choosing words or completing games, or literally any other method, you are not gonna achieve anything. But of course, you aren't gonna lose your great streak... Just some days more and you will know how to be completely fluent. Especially if it's a language with different writing systems like Japanese, Arabic or Russian. Duolingo is like learning using only flashcards for children. Yes, you know that in Spanish "dream" means "sueño", but then you think that you have to say "yo estoy sueño" instead of "yo tengo sueño" (I actually saw this happen). But of course, that doesn't care, since you get the cool right guess jingles and you know how to order random words so that it says "I eat bread." Duolingo advertises itself as your solution, when it's just a game that makes you feel good; since the streak means you are working hard, and definitely not being pressured to continue that game.
This isn't my only problem with Duolingo. They make you PAY for your errors. I understand that they have to somehow make money, but they are locking one of the most important parts of the learning process, which is TRYING AND STARTING AGAIN, behind a paywall. One of the basis for learning literally anything. Instead, you get five hearts, each one for your error. If you fail those five times, you are fucked. And as for checking back on old errors? Nope, you have to pay. Keep trying and losing hearts until you know, or pay us. None of this should be a problem if Duolingo was used as the thing it is, a game, but people (and the company itself, who promotes it) keep thinking it isn't.
Since I learnt my first foreign language, English, I used and combined different methods, which gave perfect results. If you do what I described before, please stop, use another methods, and simply uninstall Duolingo. Forget the streak, and start learning instead of ordering random words for language points. You'll be better off that way.
This post was made for the Agora Road's March Travelouge.