Finishing Duolingo Trees
Trees on Duolingo are one of the best and worst things ever invented. It depends where you start. If you start by looking in the Duolingo forums, they seem so easy to finish. People claim to have finished the tree sometimes only a day after a course is released. They have, of course, but most of them already knew the language or are good at learning fast. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. I’ve finished two trees on Duolingo, but they were in languages that I’m already more than proficient in, and let’s just say that I wasn’t the cleanest in finishing them, but I got them done. It was a hassle, of course, but not difficult. On the other hand, I’ve had quite a different experience starting from scratch.
I started with Duolingo for learning German, a language which I have long since abandoned for other things but which I was weirdly obsessed with a few years (at least it seems weird now). German has a reputation for being difficult, but it’s probably not that hard. At that time, though, I hadn’t really studied anything besides Spanish in school and Welsh with SSiW, both of which are fairly comprehensive and un-grammary courses, where there’s lots of practice and things make sense. Duolingo, on the other hand, doesn’t give this endless practice. You have to do it yourself. The lessons start off seeming simple. You rush through five on the first day and think This is pretty easy. You might even enjoy yourself. But it’s not going to be that easy in the coming days.
That’s because to succeed on a Duolingo course in a language you know nothing about, you need to be willing to repeat lessons before the bars on them go down. If you don’t understand a word or grammar concept, you’ll pay for it later. Literally. I definitely did in German by bombing lesson after lesson. I reached a point on the tree (I think it was the dative case) where I could not understand what was going on. It was too late for me on German – I had basically given up – but it was not too late for me and Duolingo.
I’m startlingly close to finishing the Turkish tree on Duolingo (by the end of the summer, I’m hoping), and looking back on all that I’ve done to get there, I’ve realized that it’s really a combination of things. I’ll begin with the most obvious: I’ve matured as a language learner. I know what different things mean. I know what cases are. I know what tenses are. I am comfortable and even enjoy finding structures and ways of saying things that are different from my native language. Reading the Duolingo notes no longer seems as much of a mystery. On that note, however, I have learned from my mistakes in German. When I started the Turkish course, I decided that I would redo a lesson until I got it. I would motivate myself intrinsically, not by the strength bars that Duolingo gives you. That’s when I realized that the only real way to get what you want out of Duolingo is to drive the learning yourself, supplementing it and pushing yourself to really learn stuff. After all, a language isn’t just an owl at the bottom of a tree. It’s something to speak, to share, to use. And that can’t come from Duolingo. That can only come from you.
(On a side note, I will say that today after doing four lessons, I have understood for the first time ever how people can finish a tree in a day. Once you do a lot of them, you feel like you could go on forever.)