Comment by johncole
1 day ago
I appreciate your comment about gamification. I’ve kept a streak alive on other apps for no other reason than keeping a streak alive. Not learning a thing.
1 day ago
I appreciate your comment about gamification. I’ve kept a streak alive on other apps for no other reason than keeping a streak alive. Not learning a thing.
Yeah, this is the biggest gripe we hear about much of the existing language learning landscape. That they're effectively gaming apps masked as language learning apps.
You should still gamify it. Gamification is orthogonal to whether the tool actually works and positively correlated with whether the user actually uses it.
I would argue that games are a great analogue to language learning as well. Contrary to our ideals, people do like to enjoy themselves and are more likely to pick an activity they enjoy than one they don't. Games and puzzles are able to present frustration as enjoyment (provided there is appropriate reward and perceived growth) making them great tools for learning.
However, gamification can only do so much and I'm afraid language learning is a lot like learning to code: many people want to want it but few actually want it. In that case, presenting as a "want it" when you are a "want to want it" is social proof and largely unrelated to whether you are actually learning (as long as the pretense is kept up) — hence the success of Duolingo despite the relatively poor real-world outcomes. In Duolingo's case the streaks are even explicitly considered to be social proof.