Charlie Stuart - Blog

The Duolingo Update

Note: This accidentally got posted earlier than I expected. Updated 11/26/2022

For quite a while now, I've been teaching myself Italian. This has been a little difficult as I have no one to talk to, but I've been taking advantage of the resources I have available: using Italian commands for my dog, writing shopping lists, notes to myself, and journal entries in Italian, taking the only Italian courses Drexel offers (ITAL-101 and ITAL-102), and constantly using language learning apps. So far I've tried Babbel, Drops, Duolingo, and Lingodeer At some point I wanna do a blog post comparing and ranking these apps. Until then, I'll quickly say Duolingo is my favorite with Drops in second place. I wasn't a fan of Babbel or Lingodeer.

In September, Duolingo announced that they would be updating their home screen and learning path on November 1st. I am very excited for this update, but I'm also a little concerned. First about how my progress will be affected. I don't exactly use Duolingo the way they recommend. Instead, I go row by row, getting each unit to level 1, then 2, etc all the way to the legendary purple color. I do this with video games too, I like to "complete" everything I can in a level before moving onto the next. The announcement talks about how progress won't be lost, but I'm still concerned about how levels from different lessons will end up being spliced together. Then I'm also a little concerned because I've been dedicated to Duolingo for a long time now, I really hope this change doesn't kill my motivation.

To ease my concerns, I figured I would do a blog post "saving" my progress. First, to provide my unsolicited opinions on the update. Second, I'm proud of what I've accomplished and I'll take my opportunity to brag.

Pre-Update Progress

Note: I didn't receive the update until November 11th. I am writing this post on November 26th based on the screenshot I have from the 11th.

I joined Duolingo in December of 2018. Today, November 11th, 2022, I have a 491 Day Streak and 54183 Total Experience, I'm in my second week in the Obsidian League and have had 17 Top 3 Finishes.

I have only 3 achievements that haven't been maxed out:

The achievements I had maxed out are:

In terms of the actual content, for the Stories, I completed all 51 stories available. As for lessons, I was trying to finish to get to Unit 3 before the update, which I was able to successfully do! Like I mentioned before, I progress by getting a set of skills to Legendary before starting a new set. This leaves me with the following 177 crowns:

Unit 1
Basics 1
Basics 2 Phrases
Food
Plurals Animals Food 2
Possession
Clothing Questions
Bonus Skills
Flirting Idioms
Unit 2
Present 1 Colors
Conjunctions Prepositions
Time
Family Measure
Occupation Household
Adjectives 1
Present 2 Adverbs
Places Objects
People
Clitics 1 Numbers
Determiners
Present 3 Present Perfect
Adjective 2 Infinitive 1
Pronouns Formal You Imperative
Unit 3

Post-Update Progress

Overall, my experience and achievements stayed the same. I'm finally updating this post on November 26th, 2022 (work has been really busy and I'm not allowed to make any updates until January).

In the new learning path, my progress translates to:

I was placed about halfway through Unit 21 at the "Discuss student life" lesson. This matched where I was with Unit 3 starting with the Education lesson. The first crown/level in Education was equivalent to the completed "Discuss student life" lesson. There are 51 units total in the Italian Duolingo course, as opposed to the original 4. I'm still about halfway done the course.

I lost quite a bit of progress on the stories. They're now interlaced with the regular content. I'm okay with it though.

Opinions

I completed Unit 21 and moved onto Unit 22: Talk about travel. I'm not sure how I feel about the update. I don't think I like it, but not enough to stop using the app.

I don't feel like I'm being prepared enough to progress. In the old format, each lesson had 5 levels. Each level has the same number of sub-lessons. I don't know what words Duolingo uses to refer to each section and subsection, but let me put it side by side:

Old Format

New Format

I see how the design is more integrated. It's kinda similar to the approach I had of completing a level then moving onto the next level in the next lesson, then bouncing back to an old level.

I just feel unprepared to complete a unit. The "Unit 21 Review" included lots of education words that I kinda knew, but wasn't prepared for. It typically takes me a few lessons to realize when to use certain words. For example, when do I use classe (class), corso (course), or lezione (lesson/lecture)? When do I use liceo (high school) instead of scuola superiore (high school)? It things like this that get put in the review and I get errors on, but they're not listed in the Unit Guidebook (notes on how to use the new words and grammar rules). It's the things you just learn by using the language more.

This makes it super hard to get the legendary level which I love because 1) I'm a bit of a completionist when it comes to video games and 2) I like purple more than gold. The Legendary trophy now applies to the full unit and it now takes 8 lessons instead of 4. These lessons are significantly harder than they used to. I'm not sure if it's because I have less practice or if they're actually more difficult. I just feel like I'm not ready to go for a legendary trophy for education if I only have one "crown" in "Discuss student life". Even if I were to complete all three levels that exist for "Discuss student life", I still feel unprepared to get the legendary trophy. It makes me a lot less motivated to move on.

I also really liked how skills broke. It allowed me to go back and chose where I'd focus my practice time. Each day, two "completed" (gold/legendary) skills broke. On days where I was "burnt out" and didn't want to struggle through a new lesson, I would go through and repair my broken lessons as practice. During practice, you don't lose hearts, so you're free to make errors and learn from them. You won't get kicked out of a lesson if you run out of hearts. It took a lot of pressure out of learning. Now, there are these built in "Personalized Practice" lessons, but I'm forced to do them at certain times and if I make mistakes, they cost hearts. I can still go backwards and choose which lessons I'd like to practice, but now it's only worth 5xp instead of 20xp even though the type of practice exercises haven't changed. I have not checked if this form of practice earns hearts the way it has in the past. I can also "Practice to earn hearts" which chooses a lesson at random to practice and earns a heart and 15xp.

Overall, I'm a bit disappointed in the update. I'm not gonna stop using Duolingo. I don't think I'd be able to stop even if I wanted to. It would be pretty heartbreaking to break my current 506 day streak. I don't know if I'll do another Duolingo update in the future. I might come back and do a "2 Years on Duolingo" update once I hit a 730 day streak. We'll see where this new format takes me. A dopo, ciao.

I do not own any of the images used in this blogpost. All icons used belong to Duolingo, Inc.

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