itt: stories of yr attempts to master tongues via DUOLINGO

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Which for me has recently been replaced by doing the lighting round, which just recently seems to have started acknowledging the 2X.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

So saving my stuff for a future week. Although I did get a big bonus from a Friend Challenge (new feature) so I racked up a bunch of points just so not as to get relegated.

But just chasing points is an empty pursuit and doesn't lead to further understanding, at least based on my anecdotal evidence.

Last week I won with about 4KXP and the other people behind me had 2KXP.

My ultimate objective is to become widely known as dr diamond

Doctor Diamante!

no soy medico.

:(

pero me gusta estudiar español!

*stares blankly for an impossibly long time*

Pobrecito

i still believe that there must be a level beyond diamond

QUEEN BEE!

👸 🐝

League Repair? No thanks.

Just thought of the most obvious dumb and bare minimum way to preserve streak everyday

Also somebody told me the other day about preply, which seems to be very similar to italki.

Major revamp rollout

How do I shot 2X boosts?

some new minigames (see how many you can match) and "daily quests" and animations and stuff...and now I am not merely Duo Plus. I am Super Duo

they added a "perfect lesson boost" for 100 gems, which gives you +10xp for perfect lesson for the next 15 minutes.

honestly, sounds like the kind of thing i would only use if i was falling off of diamond league on sunday night and i was feeling desperate

in other words - hell yeah! when you're feeling the heat in duolingo, you will take any advantage available

But have you seen the Nu-Nu Duo yet? I kind of hate the Match Mini-Game. It goes too fast for my brane.

yeah, i was kind of stressed out by the end of it! but if this is how i can finally tell people that i would like another orange juice please and that the green dresses are very pretty, this is what i have to do.

Think maybe I am kind of liking this new upgrade. We will see.

Some courses got longer, some way longer.

Some voices got treble, some voices got bass.

https://blog.duolingo.com/new-duolingo-home-screen-design/

https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/6448984613773-Guide-to-understanding-Duolingo-s-new-learning-path

Guidebook

At the start of each unit is a guidebook packed with grammar tips and useful phrases. The guidebook can be accessed any time, even when you complete the unit. NOTE: Guidebooks are not available for all languages.

Basically think I may prefer this new path version. Not really missing the tips and notes that much since I found them hard to use and ulitimately gave up on them. Wonder if anyone is going to go ahead a write the guidebook for any of the smaller languages, that would be really nice, but I am doubtful.

What we have here is failure to communicate BILINGUALLY!

(Strother Martin, I know, I know)

The new pathfinder version, which only I seem to have in my circle of friends, basically flattens out the tree which is why any uncompleted tree gets much longer. Still mostly enjoying it, eliminates some of the illusion of choice.

Really enjoying the Finnish course right now

Currently have 7777 XP for the week- four sevens clash!

I addition to the new single path layout, there is also a feature for some languages to be able to save words and study them through Word Play, although the app sometimes gets confused about which language it is looking at

Seems to be on for Italian, Portuguese and Turkish, although this last one gets mixed up and will take words from other languages.

Don’t know if I should tell you how many XPs I have this week.

It was north of 16K but I can’t sustain that.

In other news, now the single path version allows an easier, low-scoring practice on the individual stepping stones which I find useful, although I usually only do it right behind wherever I am in the path.

top guy in my league right now has 15K points this week, with another day to go. El hombre se encanta estudiar espańol mucho.

i'm still a little confused by the "single path layout" you're talking about james! i did update my app (to super duper lingo) a few weeks ago and some things changed, but for Spanish the overall layout looks the same. Here's a screenshot of where I am now. It's probably what everyone does but I like to build up my skills to _LEGENDARY_ before going on. my usual practice is to level up 3-4 different skills in waves, like this:

https://i.imgur.com/GrSEG4T.jpg

When I level one up to 4, I'll bring the next one to 3, the next to 2, and then a new one up to 1, then back to the 4 to bring it to 5/legendary, etc. it's slow but I find that it helps me to retain what I'm learning when I do a few different skills at once rather than focusing in on one.