Duolingo was a machine designed to make me feel superficially productive. Experience points and gems – regardless of what they did or what they meant – I gobbled them up like a deranged turkey.

Those fuzzy feelings were reinforced by all the video game shit Duolingo constantly fed me.

I had a baseline knowledge of Spanish (hola, amigos!) so I was breezing through with close to 100% accuracy, a gigantic ego boost that came with fuzzy feelings of achievement. I spent roughly an hour every morning, blasting through the early lessons. Steven Sacco, a retired language professor, spent 300 hours learning Swedish on Duolingo but still managed to fail the final exam of an introductory university course. One found Duolingo was equally as effective as learning in a classroom. Multiple studies speak to its effectiveness as a learning tool. Saturday Night Live even did a sketch on it back in 2019. Duolingo, along with its patented green owl mascot, has penetrated popular culture to its core. It was named Apple's best app of 2013 and has well over 50 million users. So I made a little deal with myself: For the first 30 minutes or so, as soon as I woke up, I'd dive into Duolingo.ĭuolingo, an app designed to help people learn any of 40 languages, is extremely popular. Not necessarily work stuff, but exercise stuff, life stuff. It was good! I was getting lots of stuff done.

Thanks to jetlag (from the aforementioned overseas trip) I'd been waking up super early, around 5 or 6 a.m. It was also a decision tied to a productivity kick.

Owl duolingo