I’m a little miffed at Duolingo for torpedoing my progress this week. I had set the goal of hitting 100,000 XP in a week. Let’s put aside the whether that’s nuts or not — after a few years of using the app, I wanted to push it boundaries. I got to 92,000 points and found myself yanked from the leaderboard. I’m not sure if it was algorithmic or an administrative reaction to a user complaint , but it was really disheartening since I had invested not an insignificant amount of time owling my way up all week. I’m not the one that gamified Duolingo — they are — so it seems ingenuous of them to react poorly to someone gaming the game.
How could anyone crank up that sort of score without using automation? It’s not too hard. I’ve got ten languages going in the app and have finished all course material for three of them. Each review exercise yields 20 points, 60 with 3x bonuses going, and the difficulty varies wildly between languages. The amount of content in the review exercises is very limited – this is a particular shortcoming of how Duolingo has evolved. While it should have some kind of heuristics to keep testing the most difficult or least recent material, it just keeps serving up a limited rotation of exercises, so of course anyone would become good at them over time.
With a choice of ten languages, if I want to drive the score up, I just have to look for which language has the highest yielding review exercise on a given day. In this case, I already had a score around 12,000 (mostly from regular lessons rather than review exercises) or so on Thursday, when I noticed a particularly unbalanced exercise come up for Russian. Three clicks yields 60 points. Can I do 3 clicks in 3 seconds? Yes I can, and so could anyone who cared to do so. Could I watch two back-to-back episodes of Deep Space Nine while doing this instead of, say, knitting? Yes, it doesn’t require a lot of attention, but I will say that my clicking fingers got a workout.
Coming in with a 3x bonus and extending it with a morning bonus, the various daily bonuses (which were achieved by doing the review itself), and spending some gems at five minutes, and then doing the same with the 2x bonus in the evening, I racked up something like 70,000 points in a day.
I’m not saying this is something that I recommend – it’s a bit boring and it isn’t a good fit for my usual learning pattern, but gosh darn it I wanted to see the score reach 100,000 for the same reason that people like to see their car’s odometer flip.
Well, that experience has cooled me off on Duolingo. I still think it has its merits, but I’m inclined to turn off the scoring and if the streak blows up over some vacation, so be it. I’d like to get Bengali back in my head and although they don’t offer Bengali for English speakers, they do offer English for Bengali speakers, which is usable, although there is very little audio content in Bengali. I also though about trying the Russian course from French, but for some reason that combination is not available (the reverse is, but I’m stronger in French than Russian, so not so keen to try that out). So, I’m not wiping Duolingo from my phone, but it’s safe to say that the owl has lost some goodwill over this episode.