500 Days of Duolingo

I just got to know that I just hit a 500 day streak on Duolingo 😎 so here's my brain dump on a bunch of things Duolingo has taught me, what it's helped me with, what Duo's gotten right, and ofc what it's not that helpful for.

Firstly, Duolingo was/is half of my personality - so it makes it a fun talking point with fellow Duo enthusiasts. In fact, my entire family is hooked on to the app - we're literally those people in those Duo memes, where people use the app while out clubbing and even in the toilet. I genuinely enjoy each moment I spend on the app, and it's crazy how hooked me and my folks are with it. For us, it's natural for us to do it everyday, and has become part of our routine. If somebody had told me years ago, that I'd consistently learn a language for a couple of minutes everyday without fail for nearly 2 years - I would have found it difficult to believe. I think it goes to say something about people who do it and about their attitude towards other things in life, about their dedication levels and commitment.

Coming to the real intent of the app - language learning. It's questionable if me or my family has really mastered much of the languages we are learning. I guess I'm partly to blame for my own lack of growth since I have switched between 3 languages in the past 500 days. But I guess I have learnt the rudimentary basics of all the three languages I did attempt learning. My dad has made considerable progress in Japanese though, so I think it's mostly a me-problem. In fact, when we visited a Japanese restaurant where all the staff seemed to know Japanese, my dad got to try out his Japanese. To his despair though, turns out the staff were all Indians and were only taught a couple of Japanese phrases for the vibes ✨🥲

I won't talk about how Duolingo is every product manager's go-to-product to learn from, since everybody knows this and lots been said about it online, I won't say much about Duolingo's product excellence. While Duolingo does a great job in habit forming and does spectacularly as a product in gamifying a learning experience, it kind of falters in many places for somebody trying to learn a language. For me specifically, my experience learning Mandarin was quite disappointing. After nearly a year of learning on Duolingo, when I finally decided to learn from an instructor, I realised that I had not properly learnt the tones in Mandarin, and for a tonal language like Mandarin where every letter has 4 different tones, this was really quite a bummer - because I couldn't even tell apart the 4 tones after learning for that long, and everything I said wouldn't be distinguishable because I got the tones wrong.

Overall thoughts, Duolingo may not be the perfect solution to learn a language well. But if you only intent to pick up the basics and navigate a new country or locality, Duo can be your bestie. Will I continue to use Duolingo? Yes, because it's genuinely some of the best moments of my day, and I feel like even if I haven't had the best day in other aspects of my life, I've spent at least a couple of minutes of the day, doing something to learn something and I'm becoming a better version of myself :)