Lessons learned from 365 days on Duolingo

At the beginning of 2022 I decided to attempt to learn Italian, the 3rd language I have tried to learn on Duolingo. I am now on day 225 and this is what I have learned...

The motivation

When I decided to attempt to learn a new language for the third time, I didn't really have a huge expectation. I had already tried learning Vietnamese and French in past but ultimately gave up very quickly.

The reasons I gave up on my previous attempts was for separate reasons. At least for Vietnamese the motivation was for a good reason, I wanted to be able to communicate with my engineering collegues in Vietnam. However, the reason I gave up was purely just out of difficulty.

My other attempt at learning a language was French. There wasn't any real reason why I decided to learn French other than I knew some one else that had some french vocabuary, so I figured they could keep me motivated. Unfortunately I ultimately gave up in 2017 only a month after I started. I didn't open the Duolingo app until the start of 2022.

What kept me invested

There was one new feature that kept me hooked but before I reveal that reason, there are few other reasons that I believe made me more invested this time round.

  1. Paying for an annual subscription. In the past when I've used Duolingo, I always used the free plan. I can't even remember if they had a paid subscription, but after a couple days into my Italian journey I decided to pay for the annual subcription. I now had a financial motivation to stick with it so as to get my money's worth.

  2. Having an ambitious goal. I told myself that if I persisted and could get to a level that I thought was good enough to converse with, that I could justify travelling to Italy at the end of the year. I didn't hit that goal as I don't think I am at that level but that goal doesn't really matter anymore. It was able to motivate me enough at the beginning that by the time I realise I wouldn't reach that goal by the end of year, I had already invested so much into the course that it had become a habit.

  3. Not putting any pressure and just having fun. As mentioned in the previous point, I didn't end up reaching my goal but I'm not disappointed. There was no real pressure for me to actually reach it, and all it comes down to is the journey.

Note that these three points can be applied to most habit building or new year resolutions, for example, exercising better. Paying for a gym membership, setting a goal and just having fun on the journey will get you far into building a healthy habit.

So back to that one new feature that kept me hooked on Duolingo. Leaderboards. I would describe myself as somewhat competitive. Not overally where I would get mad if I'm not winning but just enough that I will make an effort. How Duolingo has implemented their leaderboards is really quite facinating. In traditional games, the leaderboard would include everyone that's playing or atleast some subset by a specific classification, whether that's by country, age, etc. For large competitions, when comparing yourself against thousand's of people, even if you're in the top 5%, that could still mean you're no where near the winners.

Duolingo does something different, they only make you compete against 20-25 random users that change each week. This means you have a much greater chance at getting placed in the top 3. By also rotating the users each week, it means you're not competeing with the same people and develop unhealthy rivalries.