Why I Abandoned My 500+ Day Streak on Duo Lingo... And What I Now Do Instead

A couple of weeks ago, I made a post about learning a new language using three free tools.

Since then, I have refined my method and have cut out one of those tools.

The tool I got rid of was Duolingo, even though I had over a 500-day streak on it.

Actually, I probably would have stopped using it ages ago if it wasn’t for the dopamine hit of continuing the streak.

Unfortunately, even after using it for so long, I felt it had little impact on my ability to learn a language in comparison to the other two tools. The issue is that it is gamified. I know gamification is supposed to make it easier to learn, but I found that instead of learning the language, I leaned towards figuring out how to win the game.

You’d think that by winning the game you would automatically get the learning too, and to some extent you do, but more often than not I was recalling patterns and sounds rather than the meaning of the words.

And I know, and even said in my previous post, that you need to stop and think while playing the game, but that just doesn’t happen most of the time.

So instead, you need tools that you can’t win unless you stop and think about the language.

The other flaw with Duolingo is the course structure.

Usually, I only want to learn enough of a language to make travel easier. Duolingo is not made for this. Instead, it puts you through a structured course aimed at learning the language properly, which is great if that’s what you want to do, but terrible if you need to do hundreds of lessons before learning how to order food in a restaurant.

Here is my solution, which I have been using for a couple of weeks now and it is going well.

The first thing I do is ask ChatGPT, or any AI model, to give me a list of useful words for travelers.

The prompt I use is as follows:

What are the top 100 most useful single words to learn when traveling in "Country"? Focus on politeness, food, money, numbers, transport, and directions.

Of course, you can change 100 to whatever you want. I choose 100 with the settings set for learning 5 new flashcards a day and revising up to 50. This means that it would take me 20 days to get through all the new cards, so I want to start doing this about a month before going to the country.

Once I have my categorized list, I order it by frequency. My follow-up prompt for ChatGPT is "Please order this list by frequency used."

Once I have my words, I enter them into Anki in a way very similar to how I explained it in the previous language learning post. I do at least 5 a day, but preferably 10 or more.

I use Forvo.com to download the audio pronunciation and ChatGPT to create images.

And the last thing I do is listen to at least one lesson from Language Transfer or the Michel Thomas method. If I don't fully understand something in the lesson, I repeat it until I do before moving on to the next one.