I have to say I think this is a to each their own type of thing. If the goal is to learn a language there’s no extra credit for your motivations or drive. There’s no uber mensch superiority between a person who leveraged gamification to practice or someone who steeled themselves with a few pages of Nietzsche before settling into a determined five hour rote study session.
I personally find the gamification of Duolingo over the top but I can’t argue it works with people it works with. My 11yo loves it and is top of their class in Spanish from bottom as a result. They’ve taught themselves a decent amount of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean along the way. I know they couldn’t have done it through sheer willpower and authenticity no matter what Kant would think of them - they’re 11 for gods sake. What parent wouldn’t be thrilled their child is becoming fluent in a language and picking up two others? Does it bother me they care about being in diamond league or not? Not in the least. If they were up selling or cross selling maybe. And I use this as a chance to talk about how insidious gamification could be if it were - or if it were in service of sucking their attention for profit ala social media and advertising.
That said, again: I get it this turns off many people. I suspect they’re totally aware of that. But for many people I’m 100% certain it helps keep their engagement over time in the skill they’re hoping to learn even if it somehow makes their success impure in the eyes of others. But for learning a language the success is in the language skill, not the process by which you acquired it.
I think it's more that the process of actually learning a language is much more time consuming than people expect. There's a sort of idea if you haven't done it before that you learn all the grammar rules, learn translations of each word, and then you're good.
But once you get into it you realise that doing this literally is both a massive task and also Sisyphean. Learning it like an algorithm you run through in your mind is way too slow. You have to just listen and interact with it enough that some other strange alien part of your mind can remember and understand it implicitly. It's a weird process to experience, when things "sound right" without knowing why etc.
Duolingo with it's single sentences, and especially how it tries to have 1-1 translations for everything is good, but not sufficient. It's best used as just a part of study, something to get vocab and a sense of basic grammar rules.
Why is it bad? Because their approach hits a plateau. The gamification at that point goes from good to bad. It's why people switch languages and learn like four at a time in Duolingo (bad for the alien brain bits that are trying to develop the one language) rather than stick with the one (because beyond a point it's more of the same level rather than moving up at a good pace)
It also kinda takes you away from going outside Duolingo and seeking out other things because if the gamification works you're doing that plus Duolingo rather than doing what's actually appropriate for your level
I personally find the gamification of Duolingo over the top but I can’t argue it works with people it works with. My 11yo loves it and is top of their class in Spanish from bottom as a result. They’ve taught themselves a decent amount of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean along the way. I know they couldn’t have done it through sheer willpower and authenticity no matter what Kant would think of them - they’re 11 for gods sake. What parent wouldn’t be thrilled their child is becoming fluent in a language and picking up two others? Does it bother me they care about being in diamond league or not? Not in the least. If they were up selling or cross selling maybe. And I use this as a chance to talk about how insidious gamification could be if it were - or if it were in service of sucking their attention for profit ala social media and advertising.
That said, again: I get it this turns off many people. I suspect they’re totally aware of that. But for many people I’m 100% certain it helps keep their engagement over time in the skill they’re hoping to learn even if it somehow makes their success impure in the eyes of others. But for learning a language the success is in the language skill, not the process by which you acquired it.