Watch out for the Duolingo owl
About a year and a half ago, Mikaela and I decided to try to learn Japanese together. Mikaela may have loftier goals, but I was mostly taking it on as a fun activity we could do together. As such, I didn’t exactly want something that would require a lot of commitment, in either time nor money. Which is part of the reason that we landed upon Duolingo as our education platform, a free language learning software that is fairly popular.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that Duolingo is one part teaching application, one part battle royale and one part having-too-clingyof- a-friend simulator.
Things start off innocently enough. You are quickly introduced to a cute green owl, Duo, that serves double duty as the app’s mascot and your virtual trainer and you are walked through the learning system. Duolingo attempts to keep its users engaged by formatting their lessons through the scope of a video game. You earn experience points for completing lessons and you lose lives every time you get a question wrong. It’s a simple system, but I think it does a decent job of keeping one committed.
All of this works just as I had expected, and for the most part, I was enjoying the experience. I think a lot of what the app offers is pretty good, especially if you are just looking to dabble like I am. What caught me off guard was the competitive aspect of Duolingo’s system.
Because all those experience points you are earning have a use. They are being tallied against twenty to thirty other users on a weekly basis, with the top performers being promoted to the next league and those on the bottom being demoted to the prior one.
While I did not pay it too much mind at the beginning, as I started soaring up the rankings, it started to grab more of my attention. My competitive nature was taking over, and rather than structuring my time spent on the app around what I needed or wanted to learn, I was trying to find the quickest way that I could get points.
This method soon became a necessity once I reached the top league. It seems that everyone that makes it that far must have been playing similar strategies to reach this point, and one must continue to do so if you wish to remain there. Which honestly became a detriment to my learning, especially over the last two months. Because of how busy I have been, I’ve barely touched the app during that time frame, with the knowledge that I’ll maintain my Diamond League status if I don’t participate at all during the week.
Which then brings us to the third part of the beast that is Duolingo. Even when you are using the app on a regular basis, you will still receive a decent amount of reminders through push notifications and emails. These are easy enough to ignore; it’s pretty standard procedure in a world where everything is dying to get even thirty seconds of your time so it can throw an ad at you.
But over these last two months, the messaging has evolved to some- thing altogether different. The push notifications on my phone have changed from good-natured notices reminding me to do my daily lesson to downright manipulative. And that green owl tries every play in the playbook.
I’ll receive messages, sometimes three or four a day, about how people are passing me on the leaderboard, trying to play to my competitiveness or envy. I’ll get one saying how Duo is sad that he hasn’t seen me in awhile, attempting to use my guilt or the weird feeling of not wanting to disappoint the cute little owl. But if you ignore those, it’ll even get passive-aggressive, stating, “Well, it seems that these notifications aren’t working, so we are going to turn them off for awhile.” I called their bluff, and sure enough, I received another notification the next day. It was all a ploy to try to get me to use the app again.
Maybe I should just do a lesson to appease the unnatural thing, or delete the app for now, but I feel like I’ve dug myself in too deep here. I need to stand my ground. But how far will the digital demon owl go? I don’t know…but I shudder to imagine.
I jest, of course. But seriously though, if you do end up using the app, beware of Duo. He’s not as nice as he seems.
A C ERTAIN POINT OF V IEW
NATHANIEL U NDERWOOD REPORTER
