As one might expect after writing repeatedly about my streak being more than a year with daily Duolingo exercises, it did not take many days before I skipped a day. (I decided to not do any exercises until late in the evening, then slept through that.)<\/p>\n
Duolingo helpfully offered to sell me a streak repair for a noticeable amount of real money. (Around $20 – I am not sure if that was exact since the price\u00a0was quoted in my country’s currency, Norwegian Kroner. But it was pretty close at least.)<\/p>\n
Now that we don’t get huge amounts of lingots every 10 days for a successful streak – actually we don’t get any lingots for streaks at all except possibly for a 1-year streak, as mentioned before – there is zero reason to shell out real money for this. Well, if you have friends you compete with, I suppose you could try to trick them into believing you had not forgotten that day, but that would not even be ethical, even if it worked.<\/p>\n
Actually, with the vast fortune of lingots\u00a0that I have, and them being nearly useless, there was no reason to pay real money in the first place. I did it once before to support Duolingo, but now that I subscribe on a monthly basis I have no interest in giving them more. Quite the opposite. It is quite overpriced compared to other online services I have subscribed to. Google Play Music, with literally millions of songs, costs less. Netflix costs more after the recent price hike; it is also too expensive for common people now. Luckily I am single and fully employed in one of the world’s richest countries, so I can afford to waste a bit of money on supporting good ideas I don’t want to see fail for lack of money. But Duolingo is not actually worth paying that much for, and I can’t shake the feeling that they would probably have three times as many subscribers if they halved the price. But for all I know, they may have done science to it and found out that only idealists pay for these things anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The only real consequence of forgetting a day of Duolingo is that you may forget a few extra words, depending on how active you are normally. Continue reading