Fluent gamification?

I am lucky enough to have travelled (prior to Covid-19) a lot. However, the place that holds my heart is Italy. My mother is Italian and therefore I am half, and when we travel there I sometimes find it difficult to talk to my cousins. I did Italian classes when I was 5, however, i think I was too young for the challenge, especially when my family spoke a dialect at home. When I went to high school I started to do Italian as a subject, I visited Italy that year and I again found it difficult as I only knew the basics and my family spoke in a dialect.

My friends and I have always wanted to go on a BIG Europe trip in second year university and it felt like the larger proportion of Melbourne 20 year olds were too. Prior to our travel plans being canceled due to Covid-19, I stressed as I was going to live with my Italian family by myself for two weeks and to be honest, I knew no Italian except for hello and goodbye. Thus like many others, my new years resolution was to learn Italian, enough to get me through the trip. Therefore, I decided to have a go at Duolingo as it has 300 million users world wide (& that says something). Duolingo is a free application that has 30 languages plus available to learn with a tap of your finger.

Duolingo promises to teach you a language and to keep this promise they use a range of gamification to engage the student and motivate them to be persistent in learning a new language. Gamification is the use of gaming designs and inputs in non-gaming settings to motivate and inspire individuals to for example, want to learn. On their website they make it clear that their technique for students to learn is gamification with their four principles of; personalised learning, receiving immediate grading therefore the user stays motivated and improves quickly.

Duolingo implements personalised learning due to having lessons customised to your learning and therefore the student receives immediate grading instantly after they complete the challenge and further, they quickly show you what needs improvement. When the student does excel, Duolingo motivates them through rewards such as earning virtual coins, unlocking new challenges and seeing your progress through your score. Due to their studies, it has displayed that 34 hours of practice on Duolingo is the equivalent to a university semester of a language subject.

Thus, I decided to give it a go and yes I did find it engaging but it didn’t really feel motivated to continue once I got something wrong as I felt as though it was a bit repetitive when you got it wrong even if you understood your mistake after 2 seconds. However, I really liked how persistent it was with me if I hadn’t been online that day. A notification would come through at the same time everyday to tell me I hadn’t been active enough that day and I had to learn my Italian. Therefore I would jump on and do my daily requirements. However, I didn’t find it as motivating as I expected as I there wasn’t really much reward for the early days of learning and I feel as though to keep a student engaged, the rewards would have to be evident in the beginning.

Overall, I do like learning on Duolingo and I will hopefully become more fluent in Italian through the application. Below I have attached a video from Duolingo’s youtube if you wanted to find our more about the great learning application.

Ella 🙂