Consistency is key

After using the language learning app 'Duolingo' for 3 months straight, I've come to reflect on how effective it is over a long period of time. How these applications generally work is that they segment your learning in different steps, by teaching you words and phrases that fall under a specific category.

For example: Greetings may be the first category you learn - covering things like how to say 'Hello' and 'Goodbye' in various different ways as well as any attachments you may add. This makes things easy to follow as there's a theme with each 'lesson' that you take and you can associate specific phrases or words to different situations you might use.

What I think Duolingo and many apps do well is they allow you to be exposed to the language that you're trying to learn. Which is important especially if you live in a place without a lot of diversity. So a part of understanding the language is done through listening to the language being spoken or trying to read the words of the language regularly.

This repeated exposure eventually helps you to memorise phrases and words that are being taught. With a quiz-like format you're constantly having to bring those learnings from your memory bank and use them until you're familiar with it. However - while this covers one aspect of being exposed to hearing and reading the language, it cannot provide the valuable experience of using it through speaking or interaction the way that natural dialogue is used in reality.

A feature that a lot of these apps seem to integrate is this concept of Streaks in your learning - such that to get you to check in regularly and help you retain the information, you need to do a lesson a day to revise what you have previously learnt. This helps you stay on track with how consistent you are, but can suck the joy out of learning the language.

With streaks now there's a sense of obligation and responsibility beyond actively pursuing it because you want to. The motivating driver turns from initially coming from a place of wanting to improve to now a place of 'fear' out of halting your streaks and having to rebuild and start again.

It's things like this that really reveal the malicious nature of streaks and their effects on your learning. I found that although it kept me coming back to the app, I found many days that I was simply demotivated and simply breezed through a simple revision which in the grand scheme of things, didn't help my learning out at all.

If I compare my previous streak that I built for over 6 months to 3 months of dedicated consistent learning, I found that those 3 months were clearly more valuable due to how focused and willing I was to undertake that learning. Although I used the app for double the time, having to revise the same things over and over again and being restricted to the learning pace of the app, the benefits simply couldn't compare to using other resources like textbooks and speaking to people in real life.

So this really shows the difference between learning through specialisation versus casual learning. With specialisation, there is intent there and every move is dedicated to the craft. This makes all the more difference in the long run, as it can run true with other things in life - take for example one dedicated bootcamp vs. self-learning online for a year.