Everyone’s done it. At one point or another, we’ve all downloaded Duolingo with grand ambitions of speedy fluency, only to lose interest three days in when we realized that this would take a lot more work than we originally thought, only to then be viciously harassed by the omnipresent Duolingo owl and pushed to delete the app. I’ve done it myself a couple times — first with Spanish, then with French, then with Spanish again, each time quitting after eight days max.
My most recent foray into the cult of Duolingo followed a weekend-long spiral into hyper awareness of my cultural unawareness. It started on a Saturday with the 4 p.m. showing of what was then Marvel’s most recent release: Shang Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings. With much of the movie’s dialogue in Mandarin, despite the thrilling action and Tony Leung’s handsome, handsome face, all I could think about was the boy sitting next to me, or rather, his grandparents. I had gone to the movie with my boyfriend of two years whose mother is from Guangzhou, whose grandparents I love a little too dearly having only spoken an embarrassed, mumbled handful of ni hao’s to each. I asked if I should learn Mandarin as he walked me back to my dorm. He told me I should if I wanted to. That was his way of saying yes. I downloaded Duolingo that night and relearned the bare few things I already knew. The next day we went to the Chinese market in Allston called Super88 — I’d highly recommend — close to where we had talked about living together in a few years, and he ran around the store pointing out snacks from his childhood. That night I went home and spent an hour on Duolingo.
I spent an hour or two on Duolingo every day for the next week. However, the learning pattern could be a little weird. The beginning made sense: five levels with three rounds each of “hello” (你好) and “goodbye” (再见) seemed like a little much, but they were the basics, and a first step into a whole new character system. Numbers, introductions, greetings, food all made sense, as well as “doctor” (医生), but why do they put nationality before a simple “how are you?” (你怎么样) or “yes” (对) and “no” (不是)? I did, however, appreciate that there’s no section for drawing the characters. Learning a new set of characters is stressful as is, and for my specific purposes, pronunciation and vague reading skills are far more important than writing, especially when my phone keyboard just converts the pinyin (pronunciation in the English letter system) into its Mandarin character counterpart. On the Friday at the end of that week, my boyfriend asked in passing if I’d been practicing my “tones.” My what?
The second week I focused on what I newly understood to be tones, the markers above a pinyin’s vowel to indicate how to pronounce it. It made perfect sense after my boyfriend explained it to me, but Duolingo never mentioned it. Even though they emphasize pronunciation, they left out the key tool to success. I spent one or two hours a day again and reached first place in the global ranking accordingly! This was also around the time I realized how useful Mandarin might be for my psychology major and business minor, so motivation stayed high.
I annoyed my boyfriend incessantly the third week by trying to keep up text conversations in Mandarin (to mixed success) and asking him never-ending questions about grammar and pronunciation. My main personality trait, at that point, became my obsession with my Duolingo streak, and as my spam followers can attest, I posted about it very regularly. My usage dropped from a couple hours to an average of around 30-45 minutes that week, but I think that was for the best. Another great feature cropped up as well, when lessons would crack, indicating that it needed more practice. Duolingo advertises this as “spaced repetition” which promotes long-term knowledge as opposed to short-term memory.
My fourth week was much of the same. My daily lessons had become a habit and I genuinely enjoyed completing them. My usage evened out to around 30 minutes, which seems to be the sweet spot of doable but useful. On lower motivation days, the nagging reminds from the app served as a deterrent, if anything, but I still forced myself to complete the lessons. By the 30th day, Duolingo had become a sustainable and enjoyable part of my daily routine, and I plan to continue until I complete the course.
All in all, it was a fun, productive October. I think a reason why most people don’t stick with Duolingo is their lack of motivation. Since I had a solid and personal reason to stay with it, I was much more likely to force myself to actually do my daily lesson, if not go above and beyond. It was also super helpful to have someone to show off my progress to, which made the work feel real and productive.