135 Episode Host | Pan Wenjie
Finishing | Intern reporter Qin Yuxi
"Who else thinks Duolingo is like a tyrant, silently putting pressure on you every day! Is your Duolingo anxiety severe? "In the last two years, we have often seen similar complaints on social media. Duolingo is a language learning app, currently providing learning in more than 40 languages, including Cantonese, it sets levels, leaderboards, various achievements to motivate learning, and can also add friends to supervise or complete tasks together, and its LOGO - green owl "Duoer" is also known as the little green bird.
Duolingo's founder, Luis von Ahn, once said in a TED talk that when designing Duolingo, he had a big problem: how could an app designed to teach compete with addictive platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and games? "Providing education through smartphones is like expecting people to eat broccoli, but next to the broccoli you put the most delicious desserts...... To make people want to learn, Duolingo wants to make broccoli taste like a dessert. As a result, Duolingo has adopted social media and mobile games to stimulate learning and educate around the world, and the secret to that is to use a streak and notification system.
Duolingo's "persuasion" is tantamount to "hunting and killing". If you learn, the little green bird will be overjoyed. If the winning streak satisfies it, it will have a fiery expression. If you don't study, it will become an emoji, and as you drop out of school for a long time, the expression becomes more and more hideous, and the content of persuasion from the coquettish and cute "practice time arrives!" "Persistence is victory!" "Still not going to study?!" To "Can you bear it?" "You don't study at all, do you?" "Ultimatum!" ……
In addition to the little green bird, Duolingo's other master of persuasion who is responsible for SMS bombing is a drag sister with a very poor attitude and even a little weird. "It's me, Sister Drag. If you lose your 29-day winning streak, it won't be very pleasant...... Anyway, it's none of my business, you can do it! "It's me, Sister Drag. Duo'er said that you didn't even pay attention to him. I don't learn a word of English, admire and admire! ”
While being scolded, users talked about it with relish and complained about it in groups on social networks. Duolingo also wastes no time in playing with memes — last Christmas, it launched a special KFC imitation event KFD in Shibuya, Japan, called Krispy Fried Duo, which sells Christmas green fried chicken for a limited time. Many netizens said: I did what I wanted to do the most. An app for learning languages is becoming one of the social currencies of the Internet.
01 Learn how language is gamified
Xu Luqing: I've always studied languages at Duolingo because it was so easy to get started. With the mindset of learning a language seriously fading, it is difficult for me to bring up the energy to sort out a framework very systematically, such as where to start, where to learn, which words to learn, grammar and sentence structure, etc...... Sorting out and learning the framework of the system took up too much time for me, and Duolingo only needed to open the phone and click on it, as if I could really learn something. Overall, learning a language with Duolingo is a bit like a little fun in life – turn it on when you don't know what to do, and you have a little bit of a desire to learn but don't think about it.
The process of using Duolingo does have the coolness and goal motivation that comes with the game. Since leaving school, there has been very little positive and negative feedback in the learning process, neither classmates nor teachers, nor daily homework. When people do something, they need to get some feedback before they can continue, and Duolingo's "gamification" feedback is also one of the feedbacks. I usually play Duolingo and add people I know in real life, and I will have a sense of socialization when I see them checking in, a bit like WeChat's daily step leaderboard, which is actually a kind of gamification design.
Pan Wenjie: When I was a child, my parents would always supervise when I was studying, and I would be scolded if I didn't learn well, but Duolingo uses the gamification mechanism to give positive feedback all the time, and if you do it right, you will immediately say good job or great, and after studying for a period of time, you will be rewarded with double experience points. Such a mechanism will continue to push users to spend more time on the occasion.
Every small step forward is positively motivated, and that's what keeps me going. If it gives me double XP and requires 45 minutes of learning, I'll also consider completing the quest, as if I wanted to use it up when I got a 20% off coupon.
Dong Ziqi: I played on the iPad in 2014, and it didn't have a mobile app yet. Last year, I was chatting with a friend and I found out that she was learning Cantonese in Duolingo and redownloaded it. For me, Duolingo is more of a language game, and I don't expect much from myself, just being able to order food or read the signs when I travel.
Open Duolingo and you'll see its slogans, such as "What do you get out of 15 minutes of social networking?" You can learn something from Duolingo", sometimes feeling ashamed. I also found some interesting things in the process, for example, I studied Japanese before, and I knew that bread in Japanese is written as katakana パン (pronounced as pan), but I don't know why this is pronounced pan, because there is no such word in English, and I didn't know that bread in French is pain until later. In addition, there are some homophonic memes, such as the Chinese "太運" and the French "太說 (très bon") pronunciation. I also noticed that my children learn to speak "here", which is somewhere between the French word "ici" and the English word this, which is very interesting.
If we have to commute or scroll through our phones in a noisy environment, studying is less likely than hanging out because constantly switching between social apps is very exhausting and tiring. Russell's The Road to Happiness mentions the misery of commuting and explains why commuting exhausts all modern energy:
"Urban office workers not only have to endure noise when they go to work, but also when they commute, and many people learn not to hear, but in order to keep the noise unconscious, the subconscious mind usually takes a lot of effort to torture the person. Another cause of mental fatigue that goes unnoticed is that we have to deal with strangers a lot. It is natural for people, like other animals, to observe strange people and decide whether to treat them with kindness or contempt, and of course those who use the subway to commute during rush hour have inherited this nature. ”
In other words, suppressing growing hostility towards strangers is actually very draining on your nerves, and if you can turn this energy into motivation to study, you may be able to spend your commute better. I think this is a good application scenario for Duolingo.
Pan Wenjie: Jane McGonigal's Game Changing the World is a book about gamification, and she says, "All great games are about the hard work that we choose and enjoy. McGonigal believes that the definition of the game is the goal, rules, feedback system and resource participation of the four core elements, the goal refers to the specific effect that the player strives to achieve, the rules for the player to achieve the goal to make a limit, the feedback system is through points, levels, scores, progress bars and other forms to tell the player how far from the realistic goal, voluntary participation requires all people who play the game to understand and be willing to accept the goal rules and feedback, in this way, Players can then see the game's deliberately designed high-pressure challenges as safe and enjoyable work.
In the past, people may think of games as a flood beast, but McGonigal believes that games will not lead us to the demise of civilization, and even reshape human civilization. She believes that in the future, people can integrate games more closely into their daily lives, and gamification can make people more satisfied with social connections and more confident of success.
Lin Ziren: When it comes to gamification in foreign language learning, although I didn't use many neighboring countries, when I was in middle school, my English teacher also used a lot of game elements to help us improve our English. For example, in almost every class, we play a game of "role play": after school, we partner up with a classmate and write a script based on the words and phrases we learned that day, and then act them out through dialogue in the next lesson. In addition to pronunciation and performance, it also tests the ability to conceive context, as new words and phrases are included as much as possible. Then the teacher will give a small red flower to the group that plays the best according to everyone's performance, which is very motivating our enthusiasm for learning English at that time. In addition, we have also played voice contests and Spelling Bee games, which are very good for us to review and consolidate the knowledge of foreign languages, and gamification is really a very important part of learning foreign languages.
Yin Qinglu: It is very popular to use 100 words when taking the college entrance examination, which is a bit similar to the nature of Duolingo's game, and 100 words will use some unbelievable pictures to help you memorize some words, and there is also an addictive idea when memorizing: "I have memorized so much, then I will memorize ten more, dozens more", which is also a gamified feeling.
Pan Wenjie: Learning has a problem of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. A few years ago, I used Duolingo to learn Italian for a while, and when the motivation to learn Italian disappeared, I didn't want to learn it no matter how much Sister Tu and Duo'er urged me to learn it. Recently, Japanese and Koreans have started to appear in my daily life, and I suddenly want to learn Japanese and Korean. If you want to learn a language, many neighboring countries are a good choice, but if you don't want to learn it in your heart, it won't be useful to reward or urge it with all the bells and whistles, because you don't care.
Gamification has been criticized for similar reasons. This type of criticism argues that gamification is simply the practice of stimulating dopamine to form a constant engagement, and that such stimulation is only an extrinsic motivation with no deep or meaningful reason, and that learning can only be sustained if there is a strong desire to do so.
Yin Qinglu: If I learn from Duolingo, if I don't really want to learn, then no matter how angrily it urges me, I won't click on it, just like I won't want to click on the WeChat icon even if it shows 99+.
When I was in college, I was a junior college student, and although I studied Japanese as a second language because I liked Japanese music and animation, I didn't go deeper, but I had a very strong external motivation - I needed Japanese language to study in Japan, so I started to study Japanese systematically. Therefore, I think the most effective way to learn a language systematically is to force myself to study with exams, and I went to Japan after taking the N2 and N1 exams in Japan at that time. When I arrived in Japan, I found that N1 was completely inadequate, because I rarely practiced oral expression, and I had to communicate with many people every day, and my professor's interviews and lectures were all in Japanese, so I had to learn Japanese in a "rag-and-rubb" way, saying whatever I met and writing down what I read. My Japanese learning experience is completely different from Duolingo's intrinsically driven model, but the learning of everyday language may be similar to Duolingo's.
02 Knows a lot of words but doesn't speak a foreign language
Lin Ziren: I originally thought that learning a foreign language through electronic devices could not really restore the essence of foreign language learning, but since the introduction of ChatGPT, I have to retract this view. Because it is now possible to practice a foreign language by talking to ChatGPT, which responds very quickly and speaks a very standard foreign language, today's electronic devices can solve the pain point of "communication" in foreign language learning very well. However, for me, learning a foreign language is still a very old-fashioned thing, and it is difficult to rely entirely on electronic devices, for example, I am the kind of person who has to write down by hand and repeat the words repeatedly, so I still need material things as an aid.
When it comes to the Japanese learning experience that Kiyoru just talked about, I remember talking about this phenomenon in my university linguistics course: foreign language speakers tend to be fluent in the language only in certain situations. For those who have studied abroad, the main purpose of learning a foreign language is to use it in an academic environment, so sometimes they are more comfortable in the use of academic foreign languages, but they will be a little overwhelmed in life scenarios, because these words, phrases and expressions, we basically have not learned in the classroom, or in our foreign language learning, for example, it is difficult to accurately describe your physical condition to the doctor when you see a doctor abroad, I think this is a very common situation in foreign language learning. Duolingo should be more focused on everyday conversations.
Yin Qinglu: The time when I feel most comfortable speaking Japanese is when I am in a formal setting. For example, when I do an interview, I feel most relaxed when the interview has already started, not only because I am in an academic language environment, but also because what I really care about is not how to greet people freely, but to return to the interview questions I want to ask. Speaking of Duolingo's daily characteristics, two days ago, I scrolled through Xiaohongshu and saw a girl in Duolingo who learned a Cantonese sentence: "I want to eat this shrimp dumpling, please help me have one", she immediately used it, I think it is amazing, this is an experience I didn't get in Japanese textbooks.
Pan Wenjie: There may be a certain lag in the teaching materials. When I used to learn English, the textbooks were very polite, and when I met the foreign teacher, I told her a lot of polite words like "would you please be so nice as to", and the foreign teacher smiled, and I felt like an old antique at that time. The advantage of online learning is that it is constantly iteratively updating the course content, and at the same time, it is more colloquial, which is suitable for more relaxed learning.
Yin Qinglu: I remember when I was studying in Japan, I used a lot of honorifics in my email to my professors, such as "I really disturbed you when you wrote to you in your busy schedule" and "If you ...... I'm going to feel very lucky", the senior quickly helped me change it after reading it, saying that there was no need to write it like this.
Lin Ziren: Now there are actually many accounts on Xiaohongshu that will collect some cuts in British and American film and television dramas, and then teach you some words and expressions used in daily life abroad, as well as some slang, if you want to learn everyday language, Xiaohongshu is very useful. I remember that when I was a student, I could only watch a lot of foreign movies and television dramas on my own, and then copy them word by word, which is very convenient now, for example, an expression, it will pick out a few different lines, and help you remember this expression through dialogue and repetition in different contexts, and a slang phrase I recently learned is "jump on the bandwagon".
Yin Qinglu: There are also many scenario-based English teaching on Xiaohongshu, for example, a girl filmed "If you want to get off the bus in the middle of a taxi, how can the driver say 'just leave me here'", giving examples of many non-everyday English expressions, such as "stop the car without me" and so on, which is very funny.
Pan Wenjie: I really encountered this kind of scene, I said a long sentence to the driver at that time, he couldn't understand it, and the two foreigners next to me directly said "stop". Therefore, learning a foreign language in a real life situation is not the same as learning a foreign language from textbooks. Unlike foreigners, who learn language directly from everyday life, we learn words and grammar first, and then put them into sentence structures one by one, but foreigners may only want to be able to communicate normally in daily life. A shepherd's vocabulary may not be as high as yours, but people can speak it normally, which is interesting.
03 All exams and questions are a game
Pan Wenjie: This spring, I noticed that Duolingo's owl "Duo'er" had a different icon, and it looked very sad, it turned out that "Duo'er" had hay fever (seasonal allergic rhinitis) during that time period. At that time, users around the world saw the change in this icon and discussed it together on social media.
Xu Luqing: I think this kind of anthropomorphism is quite effective. Years ago, I used scallops to memorize Japanese words, and the prompts of such apps were often very official, and their messages were like a piece of software talking to me. The reason why Duolingo's anthropomorphic approach has been widely discussed or complained about is precisely because it is seen as an avatar with a real personality, and the user's ridicule of "it will drag you to learn" also reflects the human emotion injected into it. I have observed that whether it is a video or a podcast on Bilibili, they all want to highlight that they are not just an electronic product, but a "person" with personal personality and emotions, so that everyone can feel more connected.
Lin Ziren: We all experienced the Internet in the late 90s and early 2000s, and the openness of technology made us think that "through the Internet, we can truly integrate everyone into a global village", but the Internet has become very fragmented and has a strong sense of barriers and isolation. What makes Duolingo special is that it is a global app, and Chinese users can use this product with users from various countries basically without barriers, complain about Duo'er together, and laugh at all kinds of Duo'er emojis together. I think it's hard to feel this feeling of being part of a global cultural event in other Internet products, but in that sense, Duolingo is really a very important social currency, and the importance of it lies in the fact that we can talk about it with people from other countries.
Yin Qinglu: Regarding the fact that Duolingo has become a social currency, I think Duolingo is very similar to the lululemon sweatpants, Salomon sneakers, and Stanley water glasses in the white women's aesthetic that we talked about before. This is a place where we can connect with globalization, and this place is often only consumer goods that are not too restricted.
Pan Wenjie: Discussing Duolingo on social networks, will this be a kind of mutual recognition of the questioners? Playing Duolingo first shows that we are not in an immersive language environment, and if I could go directly to Japan to learn Japanese, I wouldn't have to play Duolingo anymore. Secondly, Duolingo also proved that I was still trying to learn a foreign language despite commuting to work.
Dong Ziqi: In fact, all exams and questions are a kind of game, I still like to do questions, I will help him do the extracurricular questions brought by my classmates in the first grade, and I will finish all the summer homework in the afternoon of the first day, I think doing Duolingo questions is also a similar feeling. Maybe this also reflects the emptiness of my extracurricular life, which is why I like to find some pleasure in this kind of thing so much. Maybe a lot of problem solvers will feel the same way as me, when you find that you do this well, you will want to continue to do it, and you will be fascinated by it.
Pan Wenjie: Doing questions is really a game. There is a variety show called "Detective Academy", the core is to do questions, several school boys in the show are doing a variety of questions in each issue, and viewers who like this show will feel that instead of watching those "nine leaky fish" (nine-year compulsory education fish that have missed the net), it is better to watch these handsome and good students. I like that variety show very much.
Xu Luqing: In the past, there were some variety shows that answered questions, and everyone came to answer the questions of the examiner, and when they watched it, they would compete to see which one of them or the contestants could answer faster, such as "The Strongest Brain" and "Chinese Poetry Conference". Slumdog Millionaire is a quiz movie that is very entertaining.
Yin Qinglu: There is a problem-solver in Japan named Mizusa, who graduated from Tokyo University and is still handsome. In the show, he didn't answer the questions in a hurry like others, every time he answered calmly and leisurely, and he could answer correctly every time, he was simply my male god at that time.