Learning a new language to any degree of proficiency requires motivation. It's easy to start and hard to continue if you're not willing to put in the effort.
There's a valid argument to be made that gamification helps to provide that motivation, but the argument doesn't hold up if the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using the app.
In other words, gamification isn't inherently bad, but their motivations don't appear to be good.
So I agree they go over the top with it, _but_ I reached fluency in Spanish in about 2.5 years and Duolingo was an indispensable part of it.
> if the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using the app
Learning a language to fluency requires real commitment, and I’d say an app could never possibly do it on its own. One of the most key things Duolingo gave me was consistency and a lack of an excuse to constantly practice and learn. But you also have to (and I did) use the language daily, watch content in the target language, travel and speak with locals in the language, etc. I’m not sure where Duolingo ever claimed that it alone was enough to actually reach proficiency or fluency.
Duolingo’s gamification and streaks and leaderboards gave me a reason to put a lot of effort into learning the language, and I don’t know where I’d be without it. There’s a lot of things about Duolingo I don’t love but I’m incredibly grateful that it exists.
Yeah but the thing is people would stop use that if they already proficient on such language so duolingo give you a little incentive to make you as fast as possible to master language
Agreed. Duolingo started out on the right foot: they had gamification, but not too much of it, and they clearly cared about helping you learn. For a long time it was the most highly recommended app for learning new languages and that wasn't just naivete, it actually did work.
That's changed gradually over the last few years as they switched from using gamification in pursuit of learning to using a veneer of learning as a pitch to get people to try their game.
I sort of wonder whether they realized gamification works for certain kinds of tasks, but not for others, and then decided to design their language learning app for gamification, rather than designing a gamification system to support language learning. In other words, I don't think Duolingo's system can really make you fluent in a language, but what it seems to excel in is making you use Duolingo every day. In other other words, you always hear people talking about how long their streak is ("500 days!") rather than how well they speak the language.
It requires habit more than motivation. I was bored during covid and started Japanese and four years later im still keeping it going. I lost my motivation multiple times during those years (because good god what an ridiculous language coming from a European one), but my habit kept me going until i found my motivation again.
Exactly. For projects taking multiple years, eventually motivation will run dry. Good habits is what compels you to do the thing when you don't feel like doing the thing.
internal motivation means that someones acts without external stimuli, their drive comes from within, its internal. External motivation means that an external stimuli is used to make someone act. I.e. a monetary reward, or validation etc. When someone is internally motivated, they can have a stable state. When external motivation is introduced, it can replace the internal motivation and will. Now what happens when you then lose the external motivation, the external stimuli again? The internal motivation is gone and this means all motivation is gone, the act stops.
On top of this, some people say motivation is cheap, discipline is what matters.
In the case of language learning, the external motivation provided by gamification is supplanted by the external motivation of having access to conversations, music, movies and literature that you previously didn't have access to, or required third party interpretation to appreciate. Being able to converse directly is a massive boon in the right situations, such as when travelling where you need to know the language to get around, or when your coworkers natively speak that language but not your own.
Discipline is well and good, and if you're willing to put in the effort to become better disciplined to push through difficult things, I agree that you're probably better off. I do not agree that someone who already has that level of discipline would be hurt by a gamified system, though. The rewards of gamification on their own are fairly minimal, as they merely provide a (possibly false) sense of progress independent of their own assessment of how they are doing.
Replacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards cheapens the activity and makes it less enjoyable. Awarding me badges for brushing my teeth and taking out the trash is a great way to help me do boring tasks. Awarding me badges for having deep, meaningful conversations with my partner . . . not so helpful. Alfie Kohn has collected decades of studies and written about that in his book Punished by Rewards. It's one of the books I try to give away to friends and coworkers who are interested in the subject. The pro-gamification folks seem to want to pretend that they're doing something totally different this time and they can ignore all the previous data.
I disagree with this in principle. Gamification is something we should be very wary of because it is inherently bad. It reduces what you care about in an activity to points and a progress bar.
Instead of sticking with language learning because you have some intrinsic reason to want to learn it (or even a external one such as wanting a new job) you're substituting that with whatever Duolingo puts for their gamification. To the degree you engage with and are motivated by the gamification you are substituting your own metrics of success and progress for points and streaks.
And soon enough we end up here, where Duolingo has gamified their internal numbers and in doing so gamified your "learning".
Why do people prefer games over hard work while learning? Because this is how we used to naturally learn.
Kids having fun playing hide and seek? Wrestling and throwing stones? They are learning hunting/survival skills.
Today with more abstract knowledge needed it is harder, but the concept of making abstract learning a game again, is a very smart one in general. It of course fails, if engagement becomes the metric and not gaining knowledge.
That doesn't make any sense. Gamifying gamification sounds like giving your eng teams streaks for CLs that improve gamification, not just... gamifying more.
I have to say I think this is a to each their own type of thing. If the goal is to learn a language there’s no extra credit for your motivations or drive. There’s no uber mensch superiority between a person who leveraged gamification to practice or someone who steeled themselves with a few pages of Nietzsche before settling into a determined five hour rote study session.
I personally find the gamification of Duolingo over the top but I can’t argue it works with people it works with. My 11yo loves it and is top of their class in Spanish from bottom as a result. They’ve taught themselves a decent amount of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean along the way. I know they couldn’t have done it through sheer willpower and authenticity no matter what Kant would think of them - they’re 11 for gods sake. What parent wouldn’t be thrilled their child is becoming fluent in a language and picking up two others? Does it bother me they care about being in diamond league or not? Not in the least. If they were up selling or cross selling maybe. And I use this as a chance to talk about how insidious gamification could be if it were - or if it were in service of sucking their attention for profit ala social media and advertising.
That said, again: I get it this turns off many people. I suspect they’re totally aware of that. But for many people I’m 100% certain it helps keep their engagement over time in the skill they’re hoping to learn even if it somehow makes their success impure in the eyes of others. But for learning a language the success is in the language skill, not the process by which you acquired it.
I think it's more that the process of actually learning a language is much more time consuming than people expect. There's a sort of idea if you haven't done it before that you learn all the grammar rules, learn translations of each word, and then you're good.
But once you get into it you realise that doing this literally is both a massive task and also Sisyphean. Learning it like an algorithm you run through in your mind is way too slow. You have to just listen and interact with it enough that some other strange alien part of your mind can remember and understand it implicitly. It's a weird process to experience, when things "sound right" without knowing why etc.
Duolingo with it's single sentences, and especially how it tries to have 1-1 translations for everything is good, but not sufficient. It's best used as just a part of study, something to get vocab and a sense of basic grammar rules.
Why is it bad? Because their approach hits a plateau. The gamification at that point goes from good to bad. It's why people switch languages and learn like four at a time in Duolingo (bad for the alien brain bits that are trying to develop the one language) rather than stick with the one (because beyond a point it's more of the same level rather than moving up at a good pace)
It also kinda takes you away from going outside Duolingo and seeking out other things because if the gamification works you're doing that plus Duolingo rather than doing what's actually appropriate for your level
If the gamification is fully disclosed, I don't see the problem. People should be able to agree to game themselves, if it helps them complete a task they otherwise wouldn't finish.
But consent is key. Maybe we need regulation that compels companies to disclose these manipulative techniques in digital services. Give people the chance to opt in or out.
People should be allowed to game themselves. But this isn't language learners setting up little games for themselves to learn more. This is 1 version of gamification pushed on all of it's users, whether or not it would work for them (or at all).
Seems we need to define what is meant by "gamification" in this context.
If we're just talking about tracking and making visible streaks, vocab words learned, tenses mastered, etc. that seems fine; little different than in fitness training where one tracks workouts, miles run, pace improved, weights lifted, etc.. Adding in a few goals and milestones met can be helpful
OTOH, if we're talking about skewing the content to maximize psychological manipulation at the cost of actual learning, that is toxic gamification, and certainly against the user's goals.
Haven't used DuoLingo, so I'm not sure which one we have here?
There's a valid argument to be made that gamification helps to provide that motivation, but the argument doesn't hold up if the users aren't actually becoming proficient by using the app.
In other words, gamification isn't inherently bad, but their motivations don't appear to be good.