Duolingo is going out of its way to make you feel confident about your abilities. Exercises are often very simple, such as to pick the right translation from three possible alternatives, or pick a missing word from a drop-down menu. When you are asked to translate something into English, the words in the foreign language have individual translations that you can see by hovering your mouse pointer over them. So if you don’t recognize the word, you can easily see it translated, and this is not subtracted from your score. In theory you could hover over each of the words in a sentence you had never seen before and translate it perfectly! The app is even easier, as you have many exercises consisting of just picking the right words from a list and arrange them in the right order. Child’s play indeed!
The problem with this approach is overconfidence: After a few days you start to think you actually have achieved some mastery of the language, while in reality it was all due to the handholding by an overly protective owl. (The green owl is the mascot of Duolingo. Its name is Duo.) Because the batches of questions were so easy when I repeated them, I saw no other choice than to forge ahead, unless I wanted to restrict myself to ten minutes of Duolingo a day for each language. (That was about how long it took me to go through two batches, which nets the 20 XP necessary to continue a “streak”. There are rewards for unbroken streaks of daily attendance, but the rewards are of course purely symbolic. The game is free after all.)
So I got to the first checkpoint of Turkish. The last few batches were kind of a bit harder than the rest, but I was feeling pretty good about my progress. And then I discovered the weightlifting . It is a small unobtrusive dumbbell, on the website it is to the right under the statistics. Clicking on it could not hurt, right? Well, no, except for my pride. Oh man. There went my week of feeling like Superman, down the drain and into the sewer. Who’s the dumbbell now? Those exercises were HARD.
If you follow popular science about learning, you may have heard the phrase “deliberate practice”. It is from the guy who came up with the 10,000 hours rule: If you want to become among the best of the best, you need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. In popular science this has become “you need 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert”, but this refers to more than just an expert, it refers to grandmaster level. And what they call “deliberate practice” is not just “not doing it by accident”. Deliberate practice is hard: It is the zone between your comfort zone and your panic zone. For me, it turned out, this is a very narrow space. Panic ensued, as I looked at complete English sentences that I was supposed to somehow translate into Turkish without any hints. Or spoken Turkish text that I was supposed to spell.
Don’t get me wrong, it is not like the exercises were impossible, at least not in theory. All the words were ones I should already have learned. It was just that I had not just seconds ago seen the exact same words in context and with an easily available translation, the way I usually do. OK, was that word spelled with an s with a small tail, or a c with a small tail, or just a c? And the next letter, was that u or ü or y o i? And that word there, it was completely missing from my memory. Just a gaping hole. It was utterly humiliating, and I quickly realized that I did not know the basics after all. I had simply been given a guided tour of them. If I want to make them my own, I need to put in a lot more work.
But there is a huge gap from the handbells of the regular exercises to the heavy weights of the personalized exercises. If only there was something in between, something that could challenge me but not leave me running in place! As it happens, there was: On the app, there is also a dumbbell icon, in the upper-left corner. And like all exercises on the app, they are easier than on the website. (Especially since I have downloaded a Turkish keyboard which proposes complete words based on the first letters.) I found the personalized exercises on the Duolingo app for Android to be just right for me: More challenging than the standard exercises (even on the website, let alone the app), but still possible to finish fairly quickly.