itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

Kind of fun

but instead i will have to settle for crushing bezos in the pearl league, which i believe to be the top duolingo league

so, i have been continually duolingoing, enough to know that obsidian league is where you go to chill for a week after you've been bad

i always have suspected that some of the other people in the leagues were bots, but on sunday i had an hour left and was desparately scrambling to get out of the demotion zone with 2 or 3 other very conspicuous late stragglers who were climbing up the demotion zone with me. i thought i was in the clear so i quit about 10 minutes before the deadline. big mistake.

*chills in obsidian zone*

I've been spending time in Pearl when I really need a break.

After all these years really finally starting to chafe at the way the gamification works. I can elaborate if you want.

oh please do

Obvious stuff:
Leagues, League Tables, Promotion/Demotion, XPs, Limited Time Bonus Rounds

Slightly less obvious:
No Partial Credit: if you leave a lesson in the middle you have to start over
Not Configurable or Searchable, Vocabulary Is Not Grouped
What Is It Really Teaching After All? Grammar, Vocab? Both? Neither.

I mean I still use it to the get the sights, the sounds, the smells of a language I am unfamiliar with, but there are diminishing returns after a while the more one knows.

Another one: App sometimes doesn’t load or dies in midlesson which is especially problematic given partial credit and time sensitivity issues.

I’m in diamond league for French I have a feeling the leagues are infinite

Feel like a lot of the other apps are getting better while Duo is mostly standing still.

I assign Duolingo to my students for homework, but now there's an annoying thing where if you run out of hearts Duolingo won't let you play for another four hours. Very frustrating when you say, "ok, catch up on your Duolingo homework," and then the app itself boots them out.

gotta feed Duo's parent company some $, gotta send Duo's kids to college

do not let them get away with this! you can play levels you are on or have already completed as "practice" without any hearts and as you complete a practice session you get a heart (or you can watch an ad but that is not something students should have to do any more than it makes you watch so many ads anyway)

Yes. I just had a discussion with one of the Redds about this.

Przepraszam bardzo!

So my first week back in Diamond League is almost over. I did a bit of work to avoid relegation just now, not too much sweat. I also just looked the top of my cohort. Top scorer is 3.5KXP, second and third about 2.4KPXP. If I had started caring earlier in the week I might could have been up there but I had other fish to fry. Which I believe in French is  «J’ai d’autres chat à fouetter.»

Delete extra P from KPXP

Duolingo Plus is now Super Duolingo

New look and name, same fun features!

i reached 301 days of norwegian. not sure i've learned anything.

if a norwegian jumped through your window and asked you where the pretty green dress is, can help them

hvor er det vakre grønne kjolen

oh no i meant i would tell duolingo thath det vakre grønne kjolen er i kleskapet

sorry STÅR i klesskapet. or ligger?

i reached 301 days of norwegian. not sure i've learned anything.

Have you tried anything else? Although you might have to pay.

really have difficulty remembering which is which with skjorte, skjørt, kjøle, kjole, and who can forget kjøre

i should try something else it's just hard because i have too many hobbies to keep up with, i am a jack of all trades and a master of nøne (adhd)

really have difficulty remembering which is which with skjorte, skjørt, kjøle, kjole, and who can forget kjøre

Samme her.

Maybe you should try drops but it might be too easy at this point. Could help you keep those words straight.

maybe i am ok with skjorte because i can hear t-skjorte in my head reminding me that shirt has two syllables and skirt has one.

i think i am better than most at this type of thing, memorizing the difference between two similar things, because i can come up with these mnemonic devices that make no sense to anyone else. the problem is there is no penalty for not getting it right because i check my answers by clicking the words. if i had to do it in writing with no cheating possible i'd probably learn very quickly. or if i was forced to properly learn the vowel pronunciation.

James Redd finished #1 in the Diamond League 9 times!

But it was an empty victory. My name jam is the Glossika app, hope it’s not just an infatuation.

To go diamond platinum, you have to do it 10 times!

I may go for a top 3 diamond this week, just to get my name out there in the league

Basically there is but one trick to it.

Well two tricks, 1+1.

trick to winning the league?

my usual move is to wait to activate the 2x bonus until just before I do the "legendary" 40XP stages

(why do i do this? because i want to learn spanish! haha)

Yes. That is one trick.

Reveal the second trick!

Which for me has recently been replaced by doing the lighting round, which just recently seems to have started acknowledging the 2X.

The other trick is a multi-week strategy.

Don’t burn yourself out every week.

Don’t say “call the other people in the top 3 and ask them to quit Duolingo”, because although that idea makes a lot of sense I have been ordered by several different jurisdictions to cut that out

Xp

Trick two. When the week starts look at the top of the table and see how many crazies there are.

Feel like maybe dropping down to Obsidian, or Pearl even, and then coming back or waiting until later on the restart day, I finish on Sunday night and restart on Monday, all might give one a fighting chance of not having to compete against crazybots.

Last week there was no above a few thousand points so I went for it. This week there is already somebody with 8KP who shows 16KXP for the week.