My experience learning German with Duolingo - A taste of gamification

I first found out the idea of gamification through this video:

I didn’t think much about it at the time, but after starting learning German with Duolingo I realized gamification of language learning is what that website does.

Forgive my level 2 French, learning two languages at the same time is just too much.

The learning materials are arranged into “skills”, which are further divided into several lessons. When completed, the skill icons turn gold and it feels good to look at a page full of gold icons, just like getting achievements in games. One difference is that in games, achievements are usually permanent, you kill that tough boss once and it will be recorded on your profile forever. Not so with Duolingo, it takes into account that memories decay, if you don’t reinforce them, you forget what you’ve learned. If you want to keep those icons shiny, you have to do exercises to strengthen the skills from time to time.

Shiny!

There is an experience and level system, which makes as little sense as most RPG level systems. By video game logic, you can become the greatest swordsman in the world by repeatingly killing goblins, chickens and rats. Of course it makes no sense in the real world. Similarly, you can cheat the system by repeating basic lessons for xp and level up, learning absolutely nothing in the process. Sure, this sort of cheating fools no one but yourself, but it still shows the designers didn’t think it through.

The most important feature in my opinion is the daily goal tracker. It motivates me to keep returning to reach my daily goal, even though there are times that I don’t feel like taking lessons. Soon it became a habit to just return everyday, strengthen one or two skills and taking a new lesson without thinking much about it. At just 20 minutes a day, I managed to devote 40 hours, into learning German within 4 months. Such is the power of habits. Es ist langsam, aber ich lerne täglich.