As a teacher, I’ve learned some of the very best strategies for learning. As a self-professed productivity expert, I’ve made it my life’s goal to figure out how to fit more and more into my daily routines. And as someone who loves to travel, I’ve been learning Spanish on Duolingo for the past 1143 days.
Am I fluent? No. Did I only just progress to the second stage of language learning, A2? Yeah. I’m a long way away from being able to sustain a conversation with a native Spaniard, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t try. In the past year, I’ve tried my best to up my language learning with easy habits, commitment, and varied learning strategies.
Here’s how I’ve made real progress this year.
Daily habits – morning and evening
Duo is the company’s mascot; he’s an owl that has been turned into a meme that likes to threaten its users with violence and intimidation if we fail to complete a daily lesson. However, it’s those notifications that have really helped me to forge language learning into a daily habit.
Every day at half 6 in the morning, the owl reminds me to do a lesson – and the same happens in the evening. These notifications are incredibly useful because they’ll either force me to get off social media while eating my cereal before work, or they’ll turn my attention away from the telly at night, upping my productivity levels at times of the day when I’d expect to to be the least productive version of myself.
I specifically chose these times of the day for two reasons:
- No matter how busy I am at work, I’m starting and ending the day with something for me, which I feel promotes wellness.
- Double XP chests. Duolingo likes to gamify its process, which makes the whole thing in itself a lot more addictive, causing customers to come back to their app. Obviously this is good for Duolingo, since retention increases, but it’s also good for you and I, since it’ll mean that we’re learning more. Double XP chests are available, as part of this process, every morning and evening – but only if you practiced between 6pm and midnight for a morning chest, or between 6am and midday for an evening chest. By practicing at these times, I’m increasing the amount of XP that I get with each lesson, helping me to climb Duolingo’s leaderboards, earn achievements and, ultimately, learn more Spanish.
Spaced repetition
Also known as interleaving, spaced repetition is the process of continually going over old content to ensure that it sticks in your brain. This is a powerful process, and if you want more information on it, you can find that here. By continuously returning to something you’ve studied in the past, you’re bypassing a phenomenon known as the forgetting curve.
The forgetting curve is simple. The more time that passes since you last studied something, the less likely you are to remember it. By studying it again and again at regular intervals, the forgetting curve is going to forget all about you – and that new content is going to stay where it belongs (in your brain).
Teachers do this all the time, either in school or through homework that’s been set to recap the day’s work. But how does it relate to Duolingo?
Well, Duo makes it a habit to regularly present old content to you in slightly unfamiliar formats, such as a speaking or listening exercise for something that you may have first learned using its word bank. You also have the opportunity to make a lesson ‘legendary’. This means that you can retake a lesson that you’ve already completed, but this time, do a harder version of it (you might be unable to check what individual words mean, which you can do first time around). It gives you bonus XP for a successful lesson, and the lesson icon will turn gold.
Working legendary challenges into your routine at regular intervals – say, once a week – is a great way for using Duolingo to avoid the forgetting curve through spaced repetition.
Lazy learning
There are times when we all feel demotivated. Sometimes I’ll wake up, or get ready for bed, and the last thing that I want to do is focus. That doesn’t mean that I should avoid my next lesson, but it does mean that I should take it a little bit easier, so that I can get it over and done with quickly without having to strain myself.
Completing a brand new lesson, to learn brand new content, feels strenuous. What’s not strenuous is using the Speaking exercises to talk through old content and practice my conversational skills. While a new lesson will take up to 3 minutes, a speaking exercise can be completed quickly, in just under one minute, meaning that I can get on with my day with very little disruption while ensuring that my language learning doesn’t stop.
As typical business practices go, though, the speaking exercises are available exclusively to the premium version of the app – Super. You can see if Super Duolingo is really worth the money on my article here.
Have you committed to learning a new language this year? Perhaps you’re a Duolingo veteran like me, hoping to step up their learning prowess? Whatever your reasoning, I’d love to hear how you learn best in the comments below.
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Hardly Hamilton 
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