Duolingo Is Thrashing My Sanity
Duolingo has sucked me in like a crack-dealing demon with a trunk full of foreign language books. I started doing Swedish lessons because I know enough of the language to be dangerous — I’ll surprise the hell out of a Swede when I come hot out of the gates with a flurry of fluid, competent greetings and small talk. But things devolve from there and I break into choppy, simplistic phrases that convey basic ideas in the same way a two year-old might. Without fail, the Swede flips over to English.
The app developers have gamified the ever-loving shit out of this thing, packing it with smooth vibrations, mellifulous dings and whistles, perky animated characters and, of course, XP — experience points. The more you play, the more XP you earn and you begin to move up through various leagues, where the top finishers each week are promoted to the next league and the bottom finishers are relegated. If you want to really learn the language, these features are little more than distractions; for hyper-competitive egomaniacs like yours truly, they are the drums of war.
I’m currently in the Diamond league and apparently, if you finish the week in the top ten, it’s a thing. What that thing is, I’m not sure. A bit of hasty research says that the top ten get some sort of extra rewards or icons or some vapid token of participation. Outside the bottom ten, you just keep pumping away, learning your language at your own pace.
The problem for me — and this happened last Sunday as well — is that at first, I’ll put in just enough work to not get relegated. That’s the goal.
By midweek, however, I’m usually knocking on the door of the top ten, so I put in some extra time, just to build up the cushion between last place and me. If some barn burner Portugese student comes storming in at the last minute and pushes me down the ladder, I’ll still be in the top ten.
Tonight, as the final minutes ticked off the clock, I found myself knocking on the door of the top three! Head down, I refocused my attentions from the nail-biter of an NFL playoff game and applied my full commitment to the Duolingo app.
By the way, a strange and infuriating aspect of Duolingo is that while you can access it via desktop, the point totals are less than they would be if you did the same exercise on the app. What a great, steaming pile of horseshit that is. Users who dare seek comfort in the accuracy and ergonomic payoffs of typing on a keyboard are heavily penalized. So you’ll get more points holding your phone in front of your face, hammering away on the tiny little keyboard, while navigating through the extra gymnastics required to access the additional letters in Swedish.
Anyway, in third place was someone named Madeline and, with ten minutes to go, she was not online. I furiously typed one Swedish phrase after another, barking the spoken language exercises into my phone with palpable excitement.
I ascended to second place.
There was no way in hell I’d take first place again (as I did last week), because the dude in first was 700 points above me and there were now eight minutes left.
Then I saw Madeline had the green dot next to her name, indicating that she was online. I began a new exercise with the wild-eyed tenacity of a lion tearing into the hind quarter of a limping zebra.
Caring nothing for vocabulary retention or any sort of learning, I moved through the exercise rapidly, hoping that I’d tapped into enough momentum to just stay one exercise ahead of the hated Madeline. That was all I needed to do, I reasoned — I already had a 40 point lead on her and if we’re both cranking through 25 point exercises at roughly the same pace, I should have second place all sewn up.
That’s when I saw her pass me in the standings. How could that be? Then I noticed that in one fell swoop, she pasted 75 points on the board. She had an XP boost up her sleeve. God dammit.
An XP boost is something that gives you point multipliers — 2X, 3X, etc. You earn them as you pile up exercises, but it seems like in the final hours, Duolingo turns off the multiplier spigot. Often, if you’re friends with someone, Duolingo will let you send them an XP boost if one of you has reached some sort of milestone.
Four minutes left.
I texted my sister to see if she was with my ten year-old niece, who is one of my Duolingo friends. My sister said that my niece was right there. “Ask her if she can send me an XP boost!” My sister’s “Haha” reply was not well-received. Nor was the news that my niece left her iPad back at the house and they were at a volleyball tournament. I mean, what better time to do some Duolingo than at a damned volleyball tournament?
I started a new lesson, punching whatever answers came to mind, most of which were wrong or typos. I just didn’t care. I saw the clock strike 7 pm and I bailed.
I took third and Madeline from Hell took second. I did get a boatload of XP and a dumb icon to add to my profile but to me, the entire week has been a total, unqualified failure.
Sleep with one eye open, Maddy. I’m coming for you.