Gamification
I have a trip planned in May to the French speaking part of Switzerland and since my French is pretty much limited to Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?, I decided to learn some French.
I had tried Babbel previously but it had never stuck. I’ve used Coursera and loved it but those are online college courses and I wasn’t looking for that much rigor (I was thinking more pidgin French). That led me to try Duolingo.
The first thing you notice about Duolingo is its emphasis on gamification. The lessons are intentionally bite-sized, often taking less than two minutes to complete. Perfect for the short attention span theatre that is the smartphone. And every answer you get right is celebrated by the cartoon character that introduced the question. Get five right in a row and two more characters pop up to give you a special mention. Get ten right in a row? Stand back! It’s corny but works. Reminds me of this exchange with the Milk Carton Kids on Austin City Limits:
Since I was doing Duolingo for French I decided to add Chinese. There was a time when I was semi-conversant in Mandarin so those lessons were mostly review. Duolingo is wrapped around a gamification shell but its content is very similar to any “Learn a language in 15 minutes a day” approach. That is, the content ain’t great. I can’t tell you how many times I translated / read / wrote / listened to this sentence: My last name is Wang and your last name is Wang too. If they were going to burn a sentence into my brain you’d think it would be something along the lines of Could you point where the bathroom is or Excuse me, but I think your hair is on fire.
Setting that aside, its interesting how Duolingo’s emphasis changes as you get deeper into a language. At first the Duolingo emphasis is to get you to come back, so they’re constantly emphasizing the benefit of consecutive days. Starts with how much more likely you are to complete training and moves to you’re now better than xx% of our users! I don’t want to say that worked on me, but there was one day I laid down for the night, realized I missed Duolingo, got up and got it in before today became tomorrow. Phew!
Going through lessons you earn points and gems. Points allow you to compare yourself with other learners (more on that later). Gems allow you to qualify for lessons that garner more points and also to gain forgiveness for certain mistakes. You can even use real money to buy extra gems (although it’s not clear to me why you would want to). Speaking of real money, you can use Duolingo for free but expect to get bombarded with reminders how much better life would be if you would subscribe. Another strategy that worked on me.
Because I was taking two languages, I was earning a lot of points. This caused me to shoot to the top of the learner list. I quickly jumped into the Sapphire League. No idea what it is but woo hoo! Pretty sure I’m headed for the Duolingo Hall of Fame! At this point Duolingo changes its emphasis from “getting you to come back” to “getting you to stay longer”. Those quick two minute lessons become “stay 15 minutes and earn more points”. Why wouldn’t you? It’s worth more points!
This isn’t the result of happenstance. Here is a blog from Jorge Mazal, their chief product officer. I apologize for its TL;DR size but a quick summary: their initial growth was meteoric but then it started to stall. This led to two missions: stress gamification as a way to get retention rates along the lines of digital games and find the “Northern Star” metric they could follow to determine the success / failure of their various approaches. If you have the time, it’s an interesting read:
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth
One approach they didn’t take was to ask me. Unfortunate, since I think there are some gamification things they could do better. At some point they changed the app emoji on my phone to one “on fire” to indicate my Duolingo success. That was a nice (cute) differentiator and at what I would assume to be low cost. They should do this every once and awhile (a sapphire one, for instance). The emoji characters that come out and celebrate your success are limited and at some point they become more noise than satisfying. Again at what I assume would be low cost they could expand the variety there. And as you mature in the language, they should congratulate you in that language. (Mes sincères félicitations!! Bien joué!! 你的中文真棒!)
Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So the real test for Duolingo will be when I get off the plane in Geneva, get my bag and head towards the passport control booth where I’ll look the clerk straight in the eyes and confidently state My last name is Wang and your last name is Wang too.
