You start out in 'Bronze.' But if you gather enough XP, you can gain promotion to higher and more competitive leagues. I was especially entranced by Duolingo's league system.ĭuolingo allows its users to compete with one another in a series of leagues, similar to the ones you might find in video games like Overwatch or DOTA. By that time I'd become a gaunt, hollowed-out XP addict solely sustained by endlessly accumulating pinball scores in Duolingo.

Diamond don’t know how to order a coffee but I sure can tell you where bookshelf is ♬ Taste It - Iksonīut it barely mattered. I shall become engorged with its hollow, forbidden pleasures. Let me suck at the teat of this bizarre green owl. Duolingo was a machine designed to make me feel superficially productive. I gobbled up experience points and gems, the game's in-app currency, like a deranged turkey. Those fuzzy feelings were reinforced by all the video game shit Duolingo constantly fed me. I had a baseline knowledge of Spanish (hola, amigos!) so I was breezing through with close to 100% accuracy, a gigantic ego boost that came with fuzzy feelings of achievement. I spent roughly an hour every morning, blasting through the early lessons. Steven Sacco, a retired language professor, spent 300 hours learning Swedish on Duolingo but still managed to fail the final exam of an introductory university course. One found Duolingo was equally as effective as learning in a classroom. Multiple studies speak to its effectiveness as a learning tool. Saturday Night Live even did a sketch on it back in 2019. Duolingo, along with its patented green owl mascot, has penetrated popular culture to its core. It was named Apple's best app of 2013 and has well over 50 million users. So I made a little deal with myself: For the first 30 minutes or so, as soon as I woke up, I'd dive into Duolingo.ĭuolingo, an app designed to help people learn any of 40 languages, is extremely popular. Not necessarily work stuff, but exercise stuff, life stuff. It was good! I was getting lots of stuff done. Thanks to jetlag (from the aforementioned overseas trip) I'd been waking up super early, around 5 or 6 a.m. It was also a decision tied to a productivity kick.

Free language apps better than duolingo