Duolingo? Completed it, mate

Last night I achieved a minor milestone.

After about two years of chipping away at it, I have finished the Hindi path on Duolingo:

Mobile screenshot of my complete Duolingo Hindi path

Unfortunately this does not quite make me tri-lingual [1]. I may be selling myself a little short, but at this point I can (a) form some very basic sentences, (b) sound out words in Devanagari script, and (c) pick out the occasional word or phrase from conversation.

I've played the Duolingo game before ahead of holidays in Brazil (2014, 2020), Italy (2022) and then India (2023), but this is by far the deepest I've ever gone.

The biggest difference is that this time I also attended an introductory class in-person, which made me realise that Duolingo functions far better as a complementary tool for learning a language, rather than as a primary resource.

I genuinely find its aggressive gamification and owl-induced shaming to be useful in driving regular repetition. Preserving a streak, chasing a goal, reaching the next level, promoting to a higher league - all of it is embarrassingly effective at ensuring that you practice every day, and repetition is key to learning.

But this gamification is also its biggest weakness as a primary or only learning tool. It is so easy to lose track of the learning objective and fall into the trap of the meta-game. Suddenly you find yourself settling on the shortest path to preserve the daily streak, choosing the most XP-efficient exercises to maximise a 10-minute XP boost, delaying your first exercise of the week until late on Monday night to get a less eager group of users for an easier weekly relegation battle. At this point, you're no longer progressing or learning a language at all, but simply training the pattern-recognition required for the game's dopamine hit.

I was stuck in this rut for weeks or months before enrolling in the course, and as soon as I attended just a couple of classes my Duolingo experience was completely transformed. The classes served as an anchor for the learning objective, provided explanations that the app didn't, and simply a different perspective on the Duolingo content which helped pull me out of the game. I would strongly advise that anybody using Duolingo to learn a language find any other avenue of learning - classes, tutors, books, podcasts, YouTube channels - to complement the app for this reason alone.

So what's next?

  • Continue using Duolingo for daily practice. Between the Daily Refresh mode, listening and vocabulary practice exercises, and unlocking "Legendary" status on the whole learning path (I've completed Section 1 but not Section 2) there is still a decent amount of revision to keep me busy, even if I'm not learning anything new.
  • Work through Complete Hindi, a well-regarded resource which continues through to Intermediate level.
  • Explore Mango Languages, a different (paid) app which I recently discovered that I have access to as a member of City of Sydney Library. So far I've started from the beginning with dead-easy basics, but it seems like it could cover more than Duolingo's course does, and I'm enjoying the pronunciation practices that it provides.

  1. $((n+2))-lingual? For however many n you want to decompose Serbo-Croatian into? ↩