I'm a game developer, professionally!

You may know me from things like: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, The Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, Gone Home, Bioshock 2, or maybe something else.

Right now I work as a Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy Entertainment in Stockholm, Sweden

Perhaps there are other aspects of my personality that may also be revealed here on this website


Email
johnnemann@dimbulbgames.com
Discord
Johnnemann

Getting 18888xp in Duolingo requires 629 regular lessons, if you're doing them all at boosted double XP (which isn't possible). At a very fast 2 minutes per lesson, that's over 20 hours of lessons. This is a weekly leaderboard.

So obviously people are haxx0ring Duolingo like it's Call of Duty, or have a very unhealthy relationship with it. But the thing is, you can't really blame them, exactly - they've been given all the incentives they need. The question isn't "why the hell would someone cheat at language learning" but rather "why the hell does language learning have a weekly leaderboard and boosted XP challenges?"

And the answer is that Duolingo's incentives are not for you to learn a language. It's for you to hang out in their app as long as possible. In fact, like dating apps1, if you succeed at your job you lose a user. So you don't want to foster a love of language, you don't want to give people building blocks that they can use to move on to master the language through real-world use. You want to give them little levers to push and little rewards when they engage with you. But never, ever satisfaction.


  1. Unless you're polyamorous, which is why all dating apps should cater to poly people above others


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in reply to @johnnemann's post:

Those were my thoughts too! Duolingo isn't interested at all in actually teaching you the language, it only excels in gamifying the process, so you enter each day to their app, do some clicks, watch some ads, or even better for them: pay for the suscription, to remove the artificial barriers they imposed themselves on their system and that doesn't really add anything else of value if you are studying at a normal, human pace. People will tell you usually that you should look for any other app if you want to learn other idioms, and it's for this same reason.

Of couse, they will have to teach you some things here and there, be it to justify themselves or by accident. But after years working through their Chinese course (since November 2020, at least doing two lessons a day) I still don't know how to say pretty basic things, like "orange" or "refrigerator" or "grandmother". I don't know the name of most colors, or animals, and of course they never ever tried starting to teach how to write the characters, not even the most basic info about that.

I'm still super unsure about how to say and read even very simple Chinese sentences. Yet, at lesson fucking 41 of their 57 lessons course, they decide that you should instead learn the sentences in the picture.

https://ibb.co/LSF8mdf

They are a joke and a shame, and at this point I just use their app because now I got the resolution to finish the course that I've started and get at least that feeling of completion. But seriously, look anywhere else before getting involved with them!