To give up my Duolingo streak

[outofofficeagain]

I’m on 520 days but enough! I’m over it. I find myself doing a hurried match madness at 11:30 which I’m not sure is teaching me very much.

I burn through a lot of streak freezes.

Will I be sad if I just say sod it!

These streak things are beginning to own me! I feel I need to take back control.

I’m on day 910 for French! Also doing bare minimum. I did complete several French classes but have stopped once youngest was born 16 months ago. I don’t want to throw in the towel! Je veux parler français!!

Isn’t that around 5 years? Are you still not fluent 😭

I've got a 2,000+ day streak and I'm not giving it up. I like the discipline of having to show up however I'm feeling. I also managed to accidentally subscribe for a year quite recently so I'm in it for the next 11 months! I don't think I'm learning to speak French very much but I do think it's good for vocabulary and just a nice thing to do each day. Sometimes I rush through one lesson and sometimes I do a few and try to pay more attention. If I gave up I'd learn zero French rather than some French.

I can converse reasonably competently in Spanish but I did do 4 years of language classes alongside it initially. I don't think I'd be able to do so on Duolingo alone.

YANBU

Duolingo doesn't actually teach you a language. The quality of the exercises has also gone down now that they have become an "AI first" company.

I left Duolingo a long time ago. I wasn't enjoying it and I wasn't learning anything. I found that the only useful part of it was the comments people made under the exercises when a sentence was poorly constructed or locals didn't use it that way. But I hear they shut that down too, or it's behind a paywall I believe.

Give it up - the streaks mean nothing. Who cares how many days in a row you've hurriedly clicked on duolingo! Who knows how useful it really is knowing 18 different ways of saying "Mary likes tea but Paul likes coffee" in Portuguese or Norwegian or Gaelic.

The bird cannot hurt you. Kill that streak now. End it. Finish it. Go on, do it.

(I deleted duolingo a few months ago. I regret nothing, no matter what that bird tells you.)

Can you confidently talk to people in the language? If not, find a better method of learning. Duolingo picks the words it wants you to learn. Are they really the ones you need?

Yep, I started in lockdown. I switch between languages so no, I'm not fluent in any of them. I wouldn't expect to be just from Duolingo.

The emails feel like harassment. I too have them sent to my junk folder now. I dip in and out of Duolingo with periods where I'm on it every day, and times when it just doesn't fit in my life, I don't want to feel pressured into doing it. It is an optional activity!
My 11yo ASD DD1 is currently using it to learn Korean. Her choice, something she's sought out independently, and she's very keen. It should be an entirely positive thing... However, a few nights ago I had to manage her having an almighty meltdown going towards bedtime because her phone's curfew had begun, she'd forgotten to do her daily play and now she was going to lose her streak. She shouldn't be made to feel that it matters that much, and she definitely isn't getting that feeling from me or her friends (they don't play, so no peer pressure/competition).

Break the streak OP. Once it's done, the pressure is off and you'll no longer feel beholden to an app.

Whenever I want to give up a daily game habit (and I am very susceptible to dopamine rushes and addictive games) I sit down and look at how much time I have spent on the game and ask myself what I have really achieved with it. This usually gives me the switch to go cold turkey. Until the next bad habit starts up

The amount of time I spend on Duolingo pales into insignificance compared to the amount of time I spend on Mumsnet. That would definitely be an excellent habit to break!

Was learning Welsh. I think it lures you into thinking u are more proficient than u actually are. U can do and pass the tasks but it does not make you independent in my opinion. Say this as a linguist

I do have periods where I quit /cut down mumsnet too🙂

I had a go at Latin although I last did it at school in 1968. I was 7th from top in the ratings so I assume there were not many more than 7 people trying to learn it. 🤣

I got to 1750 and just stopped and I haven’t felt guilty at all. I do go to a weekly language class though. It’s miles better.

I gave up mine. About 10 years ago I gave up candy crush. It’s very liberating. It will still be there and nothing will happen.

I came off Duolingo, unsubscribed from the emails & moved to an online Italian class, then an in person one.

I found Duolingo had given me a reasonable base to start from, but the difference when I was actually having conversations in Italian with real people, including a teacher, was massive.

The streak doesn't bother me, but the leagues did, so I gave them up. I had become too competitive to be top of my league. It became stressful once I realised people were watching me closely to try to beat me. It had to go. This means my progress is much slower now though - infact I think I've gone backwards. I need to try maybe 20 mins a day.

I find the current styling of path tedious. I preferred the old style tree where you could access a few topics at a time to break it up, especially if it was quite a dry, gramatical topic. I did A-level in my main language so I like being able to keep it recalled and add to it, but it also means that the sentence structures are often complex and the 5 hearts don't go far if it's not very intutitive.

I find the league tables and challenges etc do distract me into playing the system rather than focused, productive learning.

Textbooks and teachers also pick the words they want you to learn. There are plenty of flaws in Duolingo but this doesn’t seem like one of them.

It’s like crack. I was in hospital for weeks with sepsis last year. I was at death’s door, but still managed to protect my streak. It’s madness looking back that I was even remotely bothered about it, and could summon my precious little energy every other day to do one lesson and keep it going.

At least when people ask “What will you think is important when you’re lying on your deathbed?” I’ll know the answer is fecking Duolingo!

True. But if I'm trying to learn some Spanish for a holiday I need to know more about restaurants and tourist sites than all the stuff about libraries and universities clearly aimed at American students. It would be useful to be able to pick different scenarios and still learn the same grammar.

I had an over 600 day streak, I gave it up because I wasn’t learning anything suitable, the amount of times in the future I will have to say my bear wears a dress, or my elephant likes oranges in German is probably very low

My monkey drinks milk 🙄.

After I just missed out on 52 weeks in the diamond league by being on holiday and not really doing anything more than a practice lesson a day, I stopped caring so much about getting back into it, but I’m still not ready to jack in my 1100+ streak. However, if they keep putting me into some kind of tag team with a perfect stranger, I might change my mind about that.