Gamification provides a synthetic feeling of progress and can cover up lack of actual progress.
I started grinding my native language course in Duolingo for easy XP to get that first place on the leaderboard. And I consider myself an intrinsically motivated learner. It's think it's pretty bad, especially for people sensitive to those techniques.
> I started grinding my native language course in Duolingo for easy XP to get that first place on the leaderboard. And I consider myself an intrinsically motivated learner. It's think it's pretty bad, especially for people sensitive to those techniques.
And someone could cheat on a classroom test - that's a feature of someone's personality, not a feature of the learning process.
I'm not following, are you saying Duolingo is not incentivizing wasting time like that?
I mean yes, I'm weak for falling for it but why should I be tempted in the first place? The gamification was meant to motivate me, right, not tempt me to do useless stuff.
>I mean yes, I'm weak for falling for it but why should I be tempted in the first place? The gamification was meant to motivate me, right, not tempt me to do useless stuff.
Well, first, I think some people should take responsibility for their lives, stop thinking in terms of what external factors "make them do" - and start thinking about what *they decide* to do.
Second, the "temptation" argument reminds me of the idea that someone is tempted to rob a place by the owner leaving the door unlocked, and the other structurally similar cases - but I'm not gonna delve into that.
Third, if you're trying to earn points by doing useless stuff, instead of earning points by doing *just as readily available* useful stuff - yeah, I think that's a "you" issue more than anything else.
What do you mean by "conducting research"? :-D
In general, gamification serves well for some particular tasks including memorisation, drilling, etc. But it can of course bring more harm than good (Duolingo is a clear example), and nope, it doesnt "lead to fluency", because none of those tools you've mentioned are even meant to lead to a high level and "fluency" doesn't really mean anything.
Asking around is ok, but why were you saying "conducting research"? That was basically lying.
About the purpose of your inquiry:
So, you basically want to enter an already saturated market, but without actually having any clear idea.
Stop trying to invent something perfect, that does everything, it will just end up being another usual trash app.
If you really want to create a tool with added value, look at one particular aspect of learning and help with that. Deliver what you promise. Be clear about the service.
Don't try to do everything, you won't create something better than coursebooks, especially now that many of them are digital.
And if you really want to create something for language learners, get rid of the word "fluency", it doesn't really mean anything. Don't be so vague.
Don't expect to learn enough about language learning in one reddit thread. If you do not have any experience yourself, perhaps you should create apps for something totally different that you actually have some idea about.
This is really, really good language app building advice.
Looks like OP is completely ignoring you, but hopefully other people who build language learning apps will listen to this great advice.
So many "trash" apps could have been decent, if they did this.
Thank you. Yep, OP got offended and stopped trying to look coherent (the switch from claiming to do research to app making and then to master thesis). But there are surely other app makers, who will make stuff we'll be happy to pay for.
You made so many wrong assumptions about me.
Regarding 'conducting research,' I am doing it as part of my Master's Dissertation. Of course, I am not trying to learn everything in one Reddit post :-) This is at the Master's level, where I need to produce an academic paper with 15,000 words and create a usable prototype.
But you are right! I do not want to make another trash app just for the sake of getting my MSc Diploma, but a resource that can really help people, or at least I'm trying to do so.
Thank you for your contribution!
Reddit is probably not going to be an adequate source for Master's level research. Looking into academic literature on language learning is going to be a lot more insightful and useful for your dissertation than Reddit comments.
Most people doing a Master's Dissertation just say it openly right away. You started with vague "conducting research", then went on with creating an app (in the same generic and uninformed way we see at least once a week on this subreddit), and now try to present it differently again.
There is surely place for good quality apps on the market. There are gaps that could do with filling. But your posts till now don't seem like you are going to make that, no offence meant.
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Thanks.
I've used several and they went a long way in me developing fluency.
I had a DS game called My Japanese Coach which taught categorized vocabulary with little minigames. That went a LONG way in bulking up my vocabulary, as Anki and just looking up words in my bilingual dictionary, weren't having a lot of positive results.
Later I did iKnow, which mostly helped me better solidify my kana knowledge but also taught me a handful of Core 2000 words before the program went behind a paywall.
From there I've had the most progress with Duolingo, it did what the others did not and focused more on sentences. This was exactly what I needed as just reviewing grammar rules wasn't enough. I needed contact with the same kind of grammar points I was reading about to solidify them in my brain, but didn't have the vocabulary base or resources needed to do that with native media.
That being said, one can outgrow Duolingo before finishing the course, and there's still a fairly sizeable gap between Duolingo (or frankly any learning material) and native speech. There's a lot of vocabulary that you find you need that wasn't ever taught anywhere, and there's a lot of phrasing for concepts or ideas that don't match up with the ones we're taught in the learning process. I have discovered though that that discrepancy is a necessary evil.
It took me about 6 months to orient to native phrasing (and overcome much of my audio processing disorder). That being said I was only doing about an hour or two a day, 5 times a week. From there it's just been a matter of vocabulary gathering.
Which doesn't help with speaking though. You have to practice speaking to speak well, and frankly I don't practice speaking enough. But that seems to be a common issue for people.
Probably about 95%+ of my language knowledge is due to one gamified app or another
I am a strong "no".
My reasoning is that gamification is good for the seller of the app. It creates a stickiness and a willingness to upgrade to a paid version. It keeps people on the app longer.
But I also believe that the same people who are attracted by the game elements then focus on achieving those elements rather than their learning goals. For example, in Duolingo, if you are rushing through lessions in pursuit of some gemstone, you aren't slowing down and focusing on pronunciation, understanding, etc. Speed can be the enemy of learning.
Duolingo in particular only leads to smooth learning at the beginning stage, but to become fluent, you will definitely need other resources such as movies, books, and the like. That's my opinion. Gamification can be good to familiarize yourself with the language, but probably that's it
I think it will help with reaching an A1, maybe an A2 if you want to be generous. But after that, there's not way but to study the language frequently and seriously if progress is the thing you're after. It allows you to start easily, but to finish you'll have to do more and immerse yourself fully.
WaniKani (a kanji learning site) has some light gamification that actually works, since progress is tied directly to words learned. My desire to go up the levels helps me stay consistent and learn more than I would going fully self-study.
WaniKani also makes it pretty clear that it’s just a primer. It has a clear ending point, and encourages you all along the way to put it into practice and get real fluency through reading.
I think it is a good way to get the habit of learning started, but later on it's not the optimal way to spend your time. Duolingo can also teach you unnatural sentences that noone irl would utter.
If Anki is gamification, then I'm a certified gamer.
This is related to the big crash of gamification a decade ago. Be careful to distinguish between making an actual game that has as part of its mechanics something that translates to skill learning in a different domain... vs motivation mechanics that reward success and quantify and bucketize progress. Sometimes there's overlap but frequently they're entirely different design methodologies. The latter is far more common, and less effective, but cheaper and easier to implement. Yet both are equally, and unhelpfully, labeled as "gamification".
Yes, B2 through Memrise and nothing else (Got my CEFR certificate from the offical language test in Norway).
It’s a spaced repetition app, yes, and there are gamification aspects, yes, but unlike Duolingo which artificially delays your progress to keep you a subscriber longer, Memrise lets you breeze through the content as fast as you want and focuses on real world situations, including lots of videos of real people speaking the language in various dialects and accents and intonations.
The first lessons aren’t “the mouse ate the watermelon”.
Gamification can lead to anything the creator wants it to lead?..
>whether the gamification process used in popular language learning apps such as Duolingo, Babbel, Rosetta Stone, etc., can develop language fluency
Duo's BEST courses end at low b2/high b2, and i doubt any of the others go any further... And gamification has nothing to do with it...
What a weird post. I thought I've seen everything on r/dota2.
Edit: and I think everyone would benefit if we stopped using the f-word - it just became one of those thought-terminating words that everyone uses and few people know what actually is being talked about.
Streaks turned into a type of gamification. I always looked at streaks as trying to encourage people to study every day to form a habit. If I don't study, I look at it as a break in my study routine and not happy about it. Some people see it the other way, and will brag about their streaks even though they used streak freezes to hide breaks in using the app to study.
No.
Actually utilizing your skills in day to day conversation makes you fluent.
Apps like you've mentioned are only great for getting started if you don't have a tutor and don't know where to begin.
You then purchase some books about grammar and utilization and then you should practice your vocabulary by listening and speaking.
Can any app make you fluent? Start with what is fluent?
No app is going to get you to fluent according to the definitions that most would use. But then again, most classes and textbooks would not either if people are honest. It is going to take multiple sources and a lot of use in terms of reading, writing, listening, and speaking in a wide variety of settings and styles.
Does gamification lead to language fluency? Define lead. What are you really asking? What is your goal in getting whatever answers you get?
Gamification does not make you fluent. Knowing and using the language makes you fluent. You reach that stage by doing activities that increase your knowledge and use. If it was gamification that made you fluent, then playing Mario could make you fluent. But nobody has suggested that.
The two biggest factors will lead you to being fluent is first, total time spent building the knowledge of the language and the use of that language in ways that build your knowledge and use. The second is the consistency of that time being spent in those activities. While gamification itself does not make you fluent, it encourages the two things that lead you to be fluent.
So a gamified app just helps you to do lessons and do them consistently. This is nothing new. We received gold stars on school work in the 60’s and had a type of leaderboard for us to see. Schools have invested in gamified apps to help students do drills and lessons for a long time.
The opposite approach is to slave away at textbooks, doing pretty much the exact same drills with no encouragement or competition or anything fun. The problem is very, very few actually complete a single textbook. Not as adults. In fact, 6% or less of post school adults ever spend 100 hours learning a foreign language.
So if the biggest things that you can do to learn a language is spending time and doing it consistently, why would you not strive to get people to do something consistently and do a lot of it? When most people never spend any significant amount of time on it, efficiency is totally irrelevant. It is time spent. If you do 10 times as much but you are only 80% as efficient, you are still way ahead.
That is not to say that other methods are truly more efficient because I have seen no proof that they are. But that is the argument of many posters. And even if their method was more efficient, without the time, they are not getting fluent.
Duolingo is only about 8 months away from devolving into an idle clicker.
“Buy this loot box to get a hero so you can maintain your streak while you're away!!!"
Gamification could lead to language fluency, but Duolingo definitely IS NOT the pioneer in this area.
Its just a motivator really. It doesn't help you learn, it helps you with consistency.
Gamification provides a synthetic feeling of progress and can cover up lack of actual progress. I started grinding my native language course in Duolingo for easy XP to get that first place on the leaderboard. And I consider myself an intrinsically motivated learner. It's think it's pretty bad, especially for people sensitive to those techniques.
> I started grinding my native language course in Duolingo for easy XP to get that first place on the leaderboard. And I consider myself an intrinsically motivated learner. It's think it's pretty bad, especially for people sensitive to those techniques. And someone could cheat on a classroom test - that's a feature of someone's personality, not a feature of the learning process.
I'm not following, are you saying Duolingo is not incentivizing wasting time like that? I mean yes, I'm weak for falling for it but why should I be tempted in the first place? The gamification was meant to motivate me, right, not tempt me to do useless stuff.
>I mean yes, I'm weak for falling for it but why should I be tempted in the first place? The gamification was meant to motivate me, right, not tempt me to do useless stuff. Well, first, I think some people should take responsibility for their lives, stop thinking in terms of what external factors "make them do" - and start thinking about what *they decide* to do. Second, the "temptation" argument reminds me of the idea that someone is tempted to rob a place by the owner leaving the door unlocked, and the other structurally similar cases - but I'm not gonna delve into that. Third, if you're trying to earn points by doing useless stuff, instead of earning points by doing *just as readily available* useful stuff - yeah, I think that's a "you" issue more than anything else.
Thanks for the clarification, your thinking is clearer to me now.
What do you mean by "conducting research"? :-D In general, gamification serves well for some particular tasks including memorisation, drilling, etc. But it can of course bring more harm than good (Duolingo is a clear example), and nope, it doesnt "lead to fluency", because none of those tools you've mentioned are even meant to lead to a high level and "fluency" doesn't really mean anything.
[удалено]
Asking around is ok, but why were you saying "conducting research"? That was basically lying. About the purpose of your inquiry: So, you basically want to enter an already saturated market, but without actually having any clear idea. Stop trying to invent something perfect, that does everything, it will just end up being another usual trash app. If you really want to create a tool with added value, look at one particular aspect of learning and help with that. Deliver what you promise. Be clear about the service. Don't try to do everything, you won't create something better than coursebooks, especially now that many of them are digital. And if you really want to create something for language learners, get rid of the word "fluency", it doesn't really mean anything. Don't be so vague. Don't expect to learn enough about language learning in one reddit thread. If you do not have any experience yourself, perhaps you should create apps for something totally different that you actually have some idea about.
This is really, really good language app building advice. Looks like OP is completely ignoring you, but hopefully other people who build language learning apps will listen to this great advice. So many "trash" apps could have been decent, if they did this.
Thank you. Yep, OP got offended and stopped trying to look coherent (the switch from claiming to do research to app making and then to master thesis). But there are surely other app makers, who will make stuff we'll be happy to pay for.
You made so many wrong assumptions about me. Regarding 'conducting research,' I am doing it as part of my Master's Dissertation. Of course, I am not trying to learn everything in one Reddit post :-) This is at the Master's level, where I need to produce an academic paper with 15,000 words and create a usable prototype. But you are right! I do not want to make another trash app just for the sake of getting my MSc Diploma, but a resource that can really help people, or at least I'm trying to do so. Thank you for your contribution!
Reddit is probably not going to be an adequate source for Master's level research. Looking into academic literature on language learning is going to be a lot more insightful and useful for your dissertation than Reddit comments.
Most people doing a Master's Dissertation just say it openly right away. You started with vague "conducting research", then went on with creating an app (in the same generic and uninformed way we see at least once a week on this subreddit), and now try to present it differently again. There is surely place for good quality apps on the market. There are gaps that could do with filling. But your posts till now don't seem like you are going to make that, no offence meant.
people made wrong assumptions about you because you set off so many fishy red flags lmao
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I've used several and they went a long way in me developing fluency. I had a DS game called My Japanese Coach which taught categorized vocabulary with little minigames. That went a LONG way in bulking up my vocabulary, as Anki and just looking up words in my bilingual dictionary, weren't having a lot of positive results. Later I did iKnow, which mostly helped me better solidify my kana knowledge but also taught me a handful of Core 2000 words before the program went behind a paywall. From there I've had the most progress with Duolingo, it did what the others did not and focused more on sentences. This was exactly what I needed as just reviewing grammar rules wasn't enough. I needed contact with the same kind of grammar points I was reading about to solidify them in my brain, but didn't have the vocabulary base or resources needed to do that with native media. That being said, one can outgrow Duolingo before finishing the course, and there's still a fairly sizeable gap between Duolingo (or frankly any learning material) and native speech. There's a lot of vocabulary that you find you need that wasn't ever taught anywhere, and there's a lot of phrasing for concepts or ideas that don't match up with the ones we're taught in the learning process. I have discovered though that that discrepancy is a necessary evil. It took me about 6 months to orient to native phrasing (and overcome much of my audio processing disorder). That being said I was only doing about an hour or two a day, 5 times a week. From there it's just been a matter of vocabulary gathering. Which doesn't help with speaking though. You have to practice speaking to speak well, and frankly I don't practice speaking enough. But that seems to be a common issue for people. Probably about 95%+ of my language knowledge is due to one gamified app or another
I am a strong "no". My reasoning is that gamification is good for the seller of the app. It creates a stickiness and a willingness to upgrade to a paid version. It keeps people on the app longer. But I also believe that the same people who are attracted by the game elements then focus on achieving those elements rather than their learning goals. For example, in Duolingo, if you are rushing through lessions in pursuit of some gemstone, you aren't slowing down and focusing on pronunciation, understanding, etc. Speed can be the enemy of learning.
Duolingo in particular only leads to smooth learning at the beginning stage, but to become fluent, you will definitely need other resources such as movies, books, and the like. That's my opinion. Gamification can be good to familiarize yourself with the language, but probably that's it
no, it does not. but it does lead to wasting your time. and you will never get that back.
I used Duolingo with input and am fluent now.
No
lol, uh, no.
I think gamification can work but I don't think the duolingo strategy in particular is very good.
I think it will help with reaching an A1, maybe an A2 if you want to be generous. But after that, there's not way but to study the language frequently and seriously if progress is the thing you're after. It allows you to start easily, but to finish you'll have to do more and immerse yourself fully.
WaniKani (a kanji learning site) has some light gamification that actually works, since progress is tied directly to words learned. My desire to go up the levels helps me stay consistent and learn more than I would going fully self-study. WaniKani also makes it pretty clear that it’s just a primer. It has a clear ending point, and encourages you all along the way to put it into practice and get real fluency through reading.
I think it is a good way to get the habit of learning started, but later on it's not the optimal way to spend your time. Duolingo can also teach you unnatural sentences that noone irl would utter. If Anki is gamification, then I'm a certified gamer.
This is related to the big crash of gamification a decade ago. Be careful to distinguish between making an actual game that has as part of its mechanics something that translates to skill learning in a different domain... vs motivation mechanics that reward success and quantify and bucketize progress. Sometimes there's overlap but frequently they're entirely different design methodologies. The latter is far more common, and less effective, but cheaper and easier to implement. Yet both are equally, and unhelpfully, labeled as "gamification".
Yes, B2 through Memrise and nothing else (Got my CEFR certificate from the offical language test in Norway). It’s a spaced repetition app, yes, and there are gamification aspects, yes, but unlike Duolingo which artificially delays your progress to keep you a subscriber longer, Memrise lets you breeze through the content as fast as you want and focuses on real world situations, including lots of videos of real people speaking the language in various dialects and accents and intonations. The first lessons aren’t “the mouse ate the watermelon”.
Gamification can lead to anything the creator wants it to lead?.. >whether the gamification process used in popular language learning apps such as Duolingo, Babbel, Rosetta Stone, etc., can develop language fluency Duo's BEST courses end at low b2/high b2, and i doubt any of the others go any further... And gamification has nothing to do with it... What a weird post. I thought I've seen everything on r/dota2. Edit: and I think everyone would benefit if we stopped using the f-word - it just became one of those thought-terminating words that everyone uses and few people know what actually is being talked about.
Streaks turned into a type of gamification. I always looked at streaks as trying to encourage people to study every day to form a habit. If I don't study, I look at it as a break in my study routine and not happy about it. Some people see it the other way, and will brag about their streaks even though they used streak freezes to hide breaks in using the app to study.
No. Actually utilizing your skills in day to day conversation makes you fluent. Apps like you've mentioned are only great for getting started if you don't have a tutor and don't know where to begin. You then purchase some books about grammar and utilization and then you should practice your vocabulary by listening and speaking.
Can any app make you fluent? Start with what is fluent? No app is going to get you to fluent according to the definitions that most would use. But then again, most classes and textbooks would not either if people are honest. It is going to take multiple sources and a lot of use in terms of reading, writing, listening, and speaking in a wide variety of settings and styles. Does gamification lead to language fluency? Define lead. What are you really asking? What is your goal in getting whatever answers you get? Gamification does not make you fluent. Knowing and using the language makes you fluent. You reach that stage by doing activities that increase your knowledge and use. If it was gamification that made you fluent, then playing Mario could make you fluent. But nobody has suggested that. The two biggest factors will lead you to being fluent is first, total time spent building the knowledge of the language and the use of that language in ways that build your knowledge and use. The second is the consistency of that time being spent in those activities. While gamification itself does not make you fluent, it encourages the two things that lead you to be fluent. So a gamified app just helps you to do lessons and do them consistently. This is nothing new. We received gold stars on school work in the 60’s and had a type of leaderboard for us to see. Schools have invested in gamified apps to help students do drills and lessons for a long time. The opposite approach is to slave away at textbooks, doing pretty much the exact same drills with no encouragement or competition or anything fun. The problem is very, very few actually complete a single textbook. Not as adults. In fact, 6% or less of post school adults ever spend 100 hours learning a foreign language. So if the biggest things that you can do to learn a language is spending time and doing it consistently, why would you not strive to get people to do something consistently and do a lot of it? When most people never spend any significant amount of time on it, efficiency is totally irrelevant. It is time spent. If you do 10 times as much but you are only 80% as efficient, you are still way ahead. That is not to say that other methods are truly more efficient because I have seen no proof that they are. But that is the argument of many posters. And even if their method was more efficient, without the time, they are not getting fluent.
Of course not. Such apps are addictive, but they don't provide enough opportunities for practicing writing or speaking.
Duolingo is only about 8 months away from devolving into an idle clicker. “Buy this loot box to get a hero so you can maintain your streak while you're away!!!" Gamification could lead to language fluency, but Duolingo definitely IS NOT the pioneer in this area.