Being cynical, it’s easy to interpret this as a way to boost the monetisation of the app, both in terms of greater ad revenue, and by making the subscription all that more tempting. These are weekly leagues where you compete against other users by gaining XP, earned from finishing lessons and refreshers. This is one change that doesn’t really make much difference to how you use the app, but might make a difference to how much you use it.
While this may have scuppered my mastery target, it’s great to have so much more, and more challenging, material to work towards, and they really help you feel you’re getting closer to being conversationally capable. These aren’t far off doubling the length of the course. In addition to the grammar, lots of new vocabulary and phrase levels have been added. But new course updates have introduced dedicated lessons on grammar, so you can solidify your understanding of the basic rules of the language, and make better use of the other lessons. One of the elements that has been historically lacking in Duolingo French is the way it teaches you grammar – it has largely been kept in the ‘tips’ section, and has been somewhat incomplete. This is the element that has made the most difference to how actually useful Duolingo is. But here I’ll give you a quick summary of the changes, and how they’ve impacted on both the feel and experience of using Duolingo, and my actual knowledge of French. So what has changed in the app since my first post? Quite a lot! It’s worth noting that I’m using the Android version, which seems to lag behind the Apple one, so there may be even more new features I’m not yet aware of. It has been quite an awful year for me in some ways (which I may write about at some point) but knowing each day I had to do just a little bit of French, and coming back to it each and every day, has been kind of grounding. However, I did achieve a 365-day streak (and counting!), which I’m pretty proud of.
However, there have been so many updates both to the course content and to the ‘game-play’ of Duolingo, that I think it would take a serious number of hours each day to fully master and complete the course within a year. To be fair, I had done this in the past, so I had some reason to feel confident.
Note the slightly negative tone of that last sentence: I didn’t actually master Duolingo French. Check out my 30 before 30 post to read my preliminary thoughts on what I had assumed to be a relatively easy goal to achieve. For one of my 30 before 30 goals, I decided to try to master the Duolingo French course. It’s been a great thing to focus on, and having something where you can actually see improvement and track change every day has been a great antidote to lockdown. This past year I’ve been working hard on my French language skills. Building my language skills one day at a time
0 kommentar(er)
