How to win at Duolingo

Optional - backgrounder on my experience learning languages. I’m someone who likes to learn foreign languages, and I’ve had varied success depending on the approach. I tested well in high school French, but I never really got to a point where I was comfortable speaking it regularly, so I didn’t achieve fluency. Then, in my junior year of college I just took just Chinese 1 and hopped a flight to Beijing for a semester immersion program called CET. I suffered through a cold and romantically smoky February but by Spring Break when I took a slow overnight train from Beijing to Shanghai, and then a really slow, 30+ hour train to Guilin and returned the same way, I basically had logged enough practice hours on the train talking to and playing cards with people that when I got back to the dorms that one of our Chinese roommates listened to me in the hallway and said “Wa, he goes away for a week and now he speaks Chinese.”

It took me realistically 3 years to get to the point where I could speak, read and write to a proficient level, but that first jolt of activity put me on the right path. Years later in 2013 I tried to learn Japanese, but I had a much shorter time, six weeks, and only Rosetta Stone as a language learning tool. I couldn’t get past restaurant pleasantries like hajimemashite はじめまして …nice to meet you. I wasn’t at a point in my life or career where it made sense to do a full immersion program again, and although Duolingo’s iPhone app had launched in 2012, it didn’t have Japanese yet, so I just let it go.

You’ll notice little tricks they play on you where you learn one use for a word and the next time they use it they will use a second meaning for the same word without telling you why they did it. Then in the next question they will give you a multiple choice using that new meaning for that word, revealing that yes, this is the second meaning and it’s ok to use the word this way.

Speed up. After you get through the first checkpoint, or the first 8 skills, raise your weekly goal from ‘casual’ or ‘regular’ to ‘serious’ or ‘insane.’ Don’t get bogged down in how well you are doing, just keep moving, you can always practice what you’ve learned later. I’ve found that practicing with Duolingo is best when you have a lot of public transit in your life; subways in NYC now have reasonable connectivity, and buses and trains are great times to try Duolingo. You will notice in low connectivity the voice of the speaker gets very tinny, as they must be compressing it down to as few bits as possible.

I’ve also gotten really good at playing Duolingo with headphones while walking around the city and even when walking my dog, Lola. I think that multitasking while playing with Duolingo is part of the training, because the better you get at practicing the less you actually look at the screen and the more you start to try to answer by just hearing what’s spoken.

Practice makes for less frustration. Duolingo on mobile runs on a health system, just like a video game, which means when you run out of health you can’t play anymore without building back up or buying more health. I believe in this model for motivating you to practice, but it is built to slow you down, which is good and bad. As much as you can stand, choose to practice to increase your health instead of buying health with gems or watching the SAME ads for Final Fantasy XV over and over again.

Pro-tip: when you run out of health, DO NOT just use Duolingo’s guided practice button in the ‘Health’ navigation tab. You can do this for the first few skills because they start you at the beginning and you probably will benefit from forced practice of the first few skills even if you think you nailed them.

However, as you progress you will start to want to race through these super basic skills because they keep throwing the same silly phrases like ‘the cook cooks chocolate cream’ or ‘I am the girl’ at you unless you forcibly break the user flow and tap back to the ‘Learn’ tab. The Learn tab shows you the entire skills hierarchy, and you can choose from the aggregated practice on your ‘weakest words’ for that entire skill (you can no longer redo individual exercises after you’ve completed a skill).

Use the web for speed. I realized VERY late that you can use the website to bypass the health model as they let you just keep going even if you make a ton of mistakes. You can just zoom through skills using a full keyboard when you start answering in complex sentences, which means fewer fat finger mistakes typing as well. Duolingo is pretty good at knowing when you made a typo and when you’ve actually misused a word, but sometimes you just hit ‘check’ too fast and you’re sunk. The web version is a good tactic for speeding up skills that teach you nouns like Travel, Sports, Medical & Arts, and perhaps the Adjectival skills with the ‘Thumbs-up’ icon.

Grammar takes time to absorb. You’ll want to fail and practice your way through the skills with Light-bulb, Gear, Magnet, umm…Double-headed Janus, and Running-man icons i.e. the ones that teach you abstract objects, subjunctive, conjunctions, pronouns and verb usage, respectively. Make sure you complete these on mobile and take as much time as you need to get them right.

Why are streaks?! Duolingo has a punitive streak concept which is there to help you keep to a daily practice regimen. After you complete a skill your status bars decay from completed gold back on down to a single bar, based on the number of days since you’ve learned it. When your streak is alive, meaning you’ve been hitting your set practice goal for contiguous days, your status decays more slowly. I don’t find the streak concept particularly helpful, because it’s actually better to just directly reward more intense practicing rather than sandbagged diligence. Sometimes maybe your schedule won’t let you practice that day, but that doesn’t mean you’re not learning more in the days when you really practice hard in an attempt to build back your health. Before I realized that I could practice the lessons I wanted, I avoided or raced through practice not really paying attention, and focused my attention only on new skills. I’d suggest that instead of streaks there should be a mastery practice : new skill balance that needs to be maintained which the user understands from the beginning is an integral part of the game.

I was on the LIRR a couple of weekends ago and met someone who had been playing Duolingo Italian for the past two years, and I noticed that his entire Learn tab was gold. My mouth dropped open. His wife, sitting next to him, tried to play it down by saying ‘he still can’t speak Italian.’ I didn’t get a chance to ask him if he used the ‘Test-Out’ of this skill feature which costs 200 gems and keeps the skill gold (complete) for 30 days. The Duolingo store gets a little crazy with ‘Streak Freeze’ and ‘Health Shield’ options to keep you from losing skill status and health. Suffice it to say, be as diligent as you can be and you will avoid turning your language lessons into a game of Dungeon & Dragons.

Just like any good video game, you’re being tricked into thinking you’re almost done. Your early progress will come much faster and will look more impressive in the first half of the skills than in the latter half. You’ll notice that more of the skills will have 8 exercises instead of 4, and you’ll feel like it’s never going to end…until it does.

I’m also going to enjoy myself and re-watch seasons 1 & 2 of Master of None dubbed in Italian on Netflix.

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