After reaching a 66 day streak on DuoLingo I decided I need to start blogging about it a bit because it’s a really amazing piece of software that has become a part of my life. Like many I was impressed by the Ted Talk back in 2011 about Luis von Ahn, the guy behind ReCaptcha, as I was at the time learning Esperanto via audio books and had hoped it would teach that language as well. When the software came out, I believe in 2013, I signed up and only played a little bit with French since there was no Esperanto option. I quickly got frustrated as I haven’t studied French in years and was never and good at it, so I quite playing.
Then comes December. A coworker that I carpool with is bilingual in Spanish and English and he had checked it out on my recommendation and was really excited about it. We chatted about it at length on night on the way home and I got the urge to check it out again. So I picked Spanish this time and started doing a few lessons here and there. I’d never studied Spanish in any capacity before and honestly didn’t have much of an interest in it, but I somehow got hooked on DuoLingo’s gamification of learning software. Before I knew it I was doing 5 to 10 lessons a day, learning new words each day and strengthening skills. After the Christmas holidays I had about a 10 day streak going on but lost it one day when I got busy. I was really frustrated by that so I started again determined to beat that streak.
It has now been 66 days and I’m still studying away. I’ve been listening to some audio books for added lessons and I’ve even tinkered around with Rosetta Stone, Memrise and Babel Spanish but DuoLingo has been my bread and butter for 2 months now. I even maintained it while on vacation by logging in to do a couple of lessons each day! Right now my big milestone is going to be 100 days but I’m really hoping to do a full 365 without missing a day.
Current Stats:
66 Day Streak
102 Lingots
3473 XP (~5 per day)
415 words (~6.3 per day)
12th tier on lessons (2/7, 1/3)
1st tier on immersion (with 3 upvotes)
Certificate: 1.58/5.0 (about 2 weeks old)
A seasoned Senior Solutions Architect with 20 years of experience in technology design and implementation. Renowned for innovative solutions and strategic insights, he excels in driving complex projects to success. Outside work, he is a passionate fisherman and fish keeper, specializing in planted tanks.