5 Ways Duolingo Motivates us to Learn Every Day #39
I was born in a country where French is the official language but I am now residing in an English-speaking country. Although we have English classes in my country, after moving into an English-speaking country I had to learn English if I wanted to survive among English people😊.
A few years ago, confident that I could learn a new language, I engaged in learning Spanish, partly because I am a Real Madrid fan so I wanted to be able to watch the press conferences, but also because since I can speak French and English, I thought “speaking Spanish will allow me to speak 3 of the most spoken languages in the world!’’
For Spanish, I wanted to do things differently so I started searching on the internet ‘’how to learn a new language.’’ That’s how I was introduced to Duolingo. I obviously got a lot of suggestions, but Duolingo caught my eyes more than the others and in this article we will see why.
I still cannot hear every single word in those press conferences, but now I can get the big picture of what is said. When it’s a non-native Spanish speaker like Benzema who is speaking, I get more than just the big picture. Even when he is speaking Spanish, his French accent just speaks to me😉. But when it’s someone like Carvajal who was speaking Spanish from his mother’s womb, things get a bit complicated…but I’m getting there.
So I have learnt English in a French-speaking country and in an English-speaking country, and I am learning Spanish from an App. Also, even though I was born in a French-speaking country, I think I can still say that I have learnt French, just differently. We did have French classes at school so…That’s how much experience I have in learning a language. In this article, we are talking about learning from an App, and you will see how it differs from going to a class.
Duolingo is one of the best language learning systems in the world and its success is greatly due to the ability of the system to hook its users. In this article, we are exploring the hooking techniques used by Duolingo to motivate anyone who is learning a new language to practice every day.
1. The leagues
While learning a language, Duolingo puts you in a league where you compete with others who are learning the same language. They use the system used in sport: at the beginning you are in a low league and after a certain period, top learners are promoted to a higher league and the low performers are relegated to a lower league (well, unless you are already at the lowest league). They determine whether you are a top or low performer based on the number of gems you gain completing a lesson. Yeah, that’s how they called them, gems. The more lessons you complete, the more gems you accumulate. You can complete the number of lessons you want in a day, which drives the competition and motivates you to complete as many lessons as possible every day to get to the top of the league. After completing a lesson, you can see whether you went higher in the rankings or not, depending of course on the performance of other leaners too.
The leagues put together people who are learning the same language in the App but you can invite friends to compete with them, which makes the whole learning experience more fun!
2. Series of days
Even tough you can complete as many lessons as you want per day, every day has a goal. The first day you complete a lesson, a series of days is activated so every day as you complete at least one lesson (which is the daily goal), the series of days keeps counting. If you miss one day, the series goes back to zero and you have to start over. So imagine yourself in a series of 95 days of practice, you get back home from a busy day and you are tired. It’s easy for you to say ‘’I’m so tired today, I will just practice tomorrow.’’ But the moment you think about the fact that you will go from 95 days in a row to zero if you don’t practice for about 5 minutes, you won’t understand where the motivation will come from, but you will stand up, grab your phone and get that series to 96!
3. Short time to complete a lesson
Yes, in the previous section I did say ‘’if you don’t practice for about 5 minutes.’’ Duolingo understands that the more tedious a task is, the less motivation we have to perform it, especially if we want to make it a daily activity. So they made the daily lessons so short, yet informative, that you don’t have to ask yourself ‘’do I have enough time to complete a lesson today?’’ I usually study just to complete a lesson to keep my series of days going, but I find myself completing 3 lessons in the following 15 minutes, especially when I look at my position in the league after completing the first lesson, the one I initially came for you remember ?
You are allowed to make 5 mistakes while completing a lesson. If you make more, you have to get more lives to continue the lesson, which you can do by using some of the gems you have accumulated over time.
4. Rewards
They do understand that it happens to all of us to have some days where we don’t have any motivation or any time to complete a lesson. So the more you complete lessons, the more you are rewarded, and not just with gems. You can get a ‘’freeze series” gift you can use to skip a day of practice without losing your series of days. This won’t obviously win you gems so if the other learners perform you will go down in the league ranking, but at least you will keep your hard-earned series.
There are many rewards you earn depending on your performance. Some rewards you get because you have completed a lesson without making a single mistake, others you get because you haven’t skipped a day of practice for a certain number of days, others because you have accumulated a certain number of gems, others because you have been promoted to a high league, others because you have finished top of the league, others because you took a challenge and won and so on. Yes, they do have challenges. For example, you can be given 2 minutes to complete a lesson and if you succeed, you get rewarded. Some challenges have deadlines like, you have to take them today or never. That scarcity of the challenge motivates to take it today or lose it forever. In other words, the scarcity of the challenge motivates you to learn today instead of procrastinating for tomorrow.
5. Gamification
Duolingo makes learning a language fun, which makes it less of a headache to engage in. With every question and answer you give, you can see a progress bar while you are completing a lesson and that need to see the bar full keeps you hooked. You also get feedback from the owl Duo, the mascot of the company, that congratulates you when you give good answers and encourages you to continue when you give wrong ones. In any task we are trying to get done, the dose of motivation that congratulations and encouragements add don’t have to be proven any more.
Duo also usually tells you the number of people who are learning the same language with you, which gives you social proof that many people love their method, so it must be a good one.
Same as when we play a video game and some challenges are only unlocked upon completing some previous challenges, some lessons in Duolingo only become available after completing some previous ones, which adds to the motivation of completing the lessons.
You can also set daily goals, which will make you learn to reach the goal and feed your ego by telling yourself ‘’look at me, I’m a person who reaches my goals!’’
Beyond just having well planned lessons, Duolingo uses a lot of technics used by social media platforms to hook us to our phones. They even send notifications to remind you to keep your series of days going. The difference with social media is that here, you are being hooked to learn. Pretty cool hey! For more information on hooking techniques, I recommend the book Hooked by Nir Eyal.
Gracias por leer me (that’s ‘’Thank you for reading me’’ in Spanish😊).
