The Dark Side of Duolingo
About six months ago, I decided to embark on a mission to learn another language in my free time. I had been traveling Europe for most of the year – my third trip since the end of 2020 – and, even though a fair majority of Europeans speak English, there were many who didn’t. It’s impossible to get steady practice in a new country as a traveler, but along the way, I noticed that a lot of people also spoke German if they didn’t speak English and the language was available in most museums.
I found German on the popular language-learning app called Duolingo and quickly decided that I needed to purchase a pretty cheap yearly subscription if I wanted to take it seriously. I casually practiced every day for about 15-30 minutes. You receive a certain amount of points for completing each lesson and are rewarded gems that serve as in-app currency for those who take learning a new language a little more seriously.
Users are also automatically placed on a weekly leaderboard and placed in certain leagues based on how many times they scored more points than everyone else. It’s set up just for fun, though, or at least it’s supposed to be because users cannot interact with others and everyone is placed into a different spot the following week. Unlike most gaming boards, there is no way to monitor anyone outside the weekly leaderboard and keep tabs. For someone like me who was a regular user, it’s not hard to slowly make the ascent into the coveted Diamond League, but that’s where an entirely new pointless and competitive world opened up in front of my eyes.
The number of points that some of the top people were scoring meant that they were spending almost an entire workday – about 5-7 hours – on Duolingo. There are certain bonus opportunities available that double the number of points per lesson, but combined the duration of those specials only lasts about an hour for the entire day. To provide you with another example of how uncompetitive it’s designed to be, in many cases, the top 25 out of 30 advance to the next round. In the final round, the top 20 are declared winners. I have no idea how many different winners are declared in total, but I think it’s a lot.
I hope I have properly conveyed to you, dear reader, just how pointless this competition was designed to be. Most games and competitions are essentially pointless, but they at least can be fun and you can make friends in the process. But this is at the bottom of the pointless barrel because you can’t interact with anyone or actually learn the language with the amount of time some people were spending racking up points.
I decided to try and hang with these hotshots so I could get a sense of how much effort these people were wasting because each lesson without bonuses is worth 10-20 points. I discovered that you could score some quick points – 40 with a bonus – on the speaking practice sessions, which took about a minute to a minute and a half if you hurried. That’s only 200-400 points in fifteen minutes of bonus time if you stay hyper-focused on speed. Some of these people were scoring over 5,000 points per day.
Each user has a profile that is visible to everyone sharing the same leaderboard, and your daily points over the past week are contrasted with whomever’s profile you opened. I was the only one for weeks who still had a measly five digits for my overall experience points while everyone else had six figures, and most had joined several months after I started. I was intrigued. Who were these people leading such sad existences that they had to be the best at scoring points on a language app at a rate that undermines the entire purpose of being on it in the first place? Keep in mind that these were all still just the qualifying rounds. The top three finishers only receive a couple of hundred in-app currency gyms and that’s it. No fame, no glory.
I couldn’t keep up. I tried, but they were relentless and paranoid that someone was going to overtake their top position. I just didn’t have the time or the energy. I did enough so I could advance to the next round, but that wasn’t difficult since it’s usually the top 25 out of 30 who do. There were times I opened the app just to see if the others were still online. A green dot lights up beside a profile if they are online, and theirs was on green at random times during the day, sometimes for an hour or more at a time.
This went on for three weeks and there were always at least two people each week who racked up an insane amount of points. However, the final round was surprisingly weak and filled with people who understood that none of it mattered and that it was all for fun and personal gain; that learning new words isn’t supposed to be about competition and making it so defeats the purpose of using a language app in the first place. They all had better things to do than waste time trying to rack up as many points as possible.
It’s a beautiful way of thinking and that type of outlook is exactly why I kicked their asses and became king of Duolingo.
