hello 👋
wanna know my favourite part of Duolingo?
it’s smashing out a bunch of lessons, soaring to the top of your league…
only to get blown out of the water by some random churning out close to 600,000 XP in just a few days...
fair play?
or something more untoward? 🤔
sadly, it’s often the latter.
a very real problem on Duolingo,
one that dissuades even the most passionate of owl fans
it begins with a C and ends with a G
you know what it is (you saw it in the subject line)...
CHEATING
it’s a tale as old as time.
it afflicts anything with even a modicum of competition
from professional sports to family games night 🎲
if winning (and losing) is at stake, some will inevitably resort to any and all means to secure a favourable outcome
and yes, this stretches to even our humble language learning app 🦉
there's cheating all around us...
browse through the Duolingo subreddit and you'll find yourself drowning in indignant "cheating" posts...
they draw attention to those shady users exploiting holes in Duolingo's coding, throwing together some simple browser-based scripts to automatically complete their lessons
the result: an impossible rocket up the leaderboard that not even NASA could match 🚀
these users aren't doing anything of value
there’s no learning
no substance
just hollow, meaningless points
so what IS the point? 🤷
my friend, i do not know.
it’s a question i’ve been trying to answer for as long as i’ve been putting the Duo to my Lingo
god, how many emails have i received about this very issue over the years? 🙈
how many bots have i been made aware of?
“yes,” i say to those aggrieved users,
“your suspicions are correct. they are cheating. it’s a thing. and there’s nothing i can do about it"
i can only hazard the usual guesses as to why they cheat:
- they like winning
- they like beating the system
- they’re agents of chaos that just want to see the world burn
whatever the reason, it just happens
it's an unavoidable reality of life in the same way that water is wet and the sun is hot
there’s not a fat lot we can do about it
all we can do is gracefully accept the fact that...
competing on Duolingo isn't always helpful
in this climate,
with these conditions,
what point is there in competing?
some added motivation?
perhaps.
fuel for the fire?
maybe.
but, like the genuine athletes who go toe-to-toe with the dopeazoids, it’s not a level playing field 🙅
even farming XP in legitimate ways (triple XP boosts and Match Madness is the favoured combo) you don’t stand a chance against the bots 🤖
that’s why i stopped caring long ago 🧘
why waste time on a competition filled with such disparity?
it's about as sensical as gritting an icy road with water 🤕
all it serves is to undermine the very reason most of us came to Duolingo in the first place:
to learn a language
there is a better way
one that involves significantly less grind and more genuine progress
it's the approach i've been taking to learning German 🇩🇪
one that adapts to my busy schedule, allowing me to fill all the main buckets of language learning, whilst also letting me lead a smooth and fulfilling life
there's no competition
no grinding
no sweating
no frustration
no vulnerability to nefarious scripts
just an easy, carefree, effortless approach to learning that yields real results.
Duolingo plays a part
LingQ features heavily as well (and it's currently 50% OFF by the way...)
but it's the strategy itself that really steals the show...
next week, I'll tell you all about it 🫡
🤪 Weird Duolingo 🤪
Let’s kick off the new year with some real words of wisdom…
Shoutout to Jan Adriaan for sending in this peach:
Keep them clean, mis amigos. Your success depends on it. 🛀
|
Seen a mental sentence? Let me know... and it could feature in a future newsletter!
