I recently started learning Vietnamese using Duolingo. Probably not the most efficient way, but I've always thought of it as a way to quickly get my foot in the door and start learning. Using Duolingo has been a pretty frustrating experience for me. Let me explain why.
In video games, there's a concept of easing a player into new ideas. This can take the shape of a tutorial, where ideas are introduced in a structured way, or in progressively harder challenges, with each one building off the previous. Games that do not adequately prepare the player for challenges to come are usually considered un-fun.
With Duolingo, I’m often put in situations where I’m introduced to new phrases or concepts without any sort of prompting as to what they mean. This frustration is made more apparent because sometimes Duolingo does this right. It highlights a phrase in purple, signaling that it’s new. For some reason, just acknowledging that this is something you haven’t seen before makes it feel better, even though no extra information is actually provided.
This whole thing got me thinking about how to properly learn. I've always thought learning should be like building a building. You want strong fundamentals, core concepts you can always lean on, and everything built on top should be structured and thought through, like a planned lesson from a teacher or a multicourse meal at omakase. But I’m also wondering if that’s how babies learn. In my head, babies are incredibly good at taking random noise and forming structure from it.
All this to say, is this a skill issue? Is my frustration unjustified and just a sign that I need to “get good” at processing unstructured information? My gut tells me it’s something in between. We take unstructured information to learn what we don’t know, then go back to fill in the gaps with solid concepts.
Duolingo still has a ways to go as a language learning platform. Everything in it feels like a random knowledge check rather than a test of application. I’d be excited for the day when we can practice chatting with an AI language expert who can adjust to different levels of mastery and give feedback when something sounds off. I’m sure someone there is already thinking about it.