Duolingo has a scaling difficulty algorithm (I think) and I like it

@jack.russelle · 2025-10-24 09:52 · ASEAN HIVE COMMUNITY

I was gifted a super-Duolingo package a few months ago and while learning Thai on it was not an option oddly, there were some other languages I was interested in, in particular Spanish because so much of the world speaks it, certainly a lot more than who speak Thai.

There are times when I am progressing through the chapters though that things get really tough and I get frustrated and then don't really feel like continuing because it is just in my mind, too damn hard.

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Duolingo can tell if you are having an easy time of it and then scales things up but every now and then it makes it so hard that the only reason why I am getting anything correct is because you can hover over certain words and it will give away the answer. You are meant to use this sparingly but it doesn't stop you from using it as much as you want. When I start to do this, I don't really feel like any progress is being made.

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These are not the difficult lessons by the way, this is what you end up with after you take a day off or start getting a lot of things wrong and like me, want to throw your phone across the room and swear off the Spanish language because you got the same thing incorrect for the 30th time in a row.

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What ended up happening after that frustrating portion of the lesson "tree" was I logged back in because mama didn't raise no quitter, and all of a sudden the lessons, which were previously kicking my ass, were substantially easier.

I like that it does this because honestly, if it just stayed super difficult and I was getting everything wrong, I would probably have just given up. The lessons and the rewards paths were a lot easier than they were just a few days prior and I really feel as though Duolingo does this on purpose even though I have no proof of this other than my own experience.

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Normally the daily requirements for getting all the daily objectives complete are much more difficult than this but this, was exactly what I needed on a day right after the lessons were kicking my butt and making me feel like I wasn't learning anything.

So the end result is that I kept going and was feeling as though ok, maybe I actually have learned something. Duolingo must do this on purpose because I didn't choose for it to all of a sudden become a bunch easier.

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I feel as though they must have an absolutely massive amount of audio clips to put you through because normally I really struggled with the listening portion of it but when I got to this one, I understood around 90% of all that was being said.

So does this mean that Duolingo works? I have no idea, I am not far enough into it to really know but I do like that it is intelligent enough, or programmed well enough to step it back a notch if you are getting things wrong over and over again.

I would have quit if they didn't do this so kudos to you Duolingo, this is a really nice feature that seems to be built in.

If you do have a chance to get gifted a premium Duolingo package I think that you should have a look at it. There are a lot of languages to learn in there but for me I'm only going to focus one one of them. From what I hear it is fantastic for learning English.

#apps #duolingo #language #spanish #learning #education
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