Language Learning as Plastic Surgery: The Illusion of Learning from Gamification & AI Apps like DuoLingo
By: Maha Bali
Editors’ note: This article is an edited version of a blog post Maha Bali wrote earlier this year. Maha is an educator who thinks deeply about learning and teaching. As she’s not a language teacher herself, her article offers a valuable perspective on language learning. You can find more of her thoughts on education on her blog Reflecting Allowed.
Look, I am grateful for DuoLingo. It’s fun and light and easy to use, and I enjoy using it. I’ve been using it for 300 days straight to improve my French and get started on my Spanish. But I’ve come to realize something about it. It’s plastic surgery for language learning, and I’ll tell you why.
First of all, the “plastic surgery” metaphor came up once, early in the days of ChatGPT (so like Feb 2023) when I was giving a workshop and asking people to come up with metaphors that would help describe AI. I loved it. When I was thinking about this article, this metaphor seemed apt. Plastic surgery does something on the surface to make something appear one way, but deep down, it’s not really transformed that much. However, plastic surgery can truly help someone cope with something that they’ve needed to change, so it’s not nothing. It’s just… not… everything.
Second, I need to give context about my language learning. My mother is francophone, but I have studied in English my entire life, and switched schools several times, so I “started” learning French at age 8 or 9, and then I went to another school where it was my classmates’ first year learning French, which meant I “started” learning French again at age 11. Basically, what should have been 5-6 years of French was the same 2-3 years repeated. I did take a summer class in French once but afterwards didn’t study French for a long time. Later at some point after I finished college, I decided to learn a little French and took some classes at the Centre Français. I improved a bit and started emailing a friend of mine in French to practice but stopped for some reason. Most recently, last year, ahead of a trip to Geneva, I decided to brush up on my French so I could cope. Little did I know that pretty much everyone in Geneva speaks English, and my level of French, while already good enough to get by, was barely needed. But still I am glad I chose DuoLingo to improve my French. Oh, and also my kid is taking IGCSE French and I got jealous that her French would become better than mine by the end of it… and also… ummm, maybe we can frame it like, I wanted to improve my French so she and I could practice together? Let’s call it that? And also, strangely, it makes my mom happy… and for some reason I had to make her wait until I was in my 40s to get this good at French. ANYWAY, that was the motivation.
The list of things I did to improve my French are as follows:
- I did DuoLingo daily, free version. The free version has speaking, listening, reading, grammar, and writing. It has nice little stories that help you learn conversation and give you a little writing exercise at the end (corrected with AI, no doubt, which was OK), and it has pure listening exercises that appear to be like a radio show. It was all a lot of fun. Because DuoLingo is gamified, it has a leaderboard and keeps track of users’ successful streaks, which means you compete, and I really got into that kind of thing…
I also had to watch lots of ads, because I used the free version. While I didn’t mind the ads, I did mind the “5 strikes and you’re out” concept. Five mistakes (no matter how big or small the mistake!) and you run out of “heart” icons on the screen so you can’t keep playing. Or you can pay “gems” to refill your hearts (you get the “gems” by watching ads), or you could do a “practice to gain hearts” exercise to get one heart or two max. I learned to do all those… until I discovered a hidden treasure. I could skip ahead in a level by doing a sort of “test” where I could have five mistakes, but they did not reduce my “hearts.” So what I ended up doing when my hearts were low was to actually skip ahead a lot and finish levels early. This means that I engaged LESS with the material, so I did not spend as long learning it, which also meant that I forgot new grammar concepts and vocabulary relatively quickly (easy come, easy go). The competitiveness and gamification and rush and all that made me do something that really ended up hindering my learning: in the test, when I got totally stuck on something, I used Google Translate to help me translate the sentences. Technically, cheating, right? And what I discovered recently is that even though DuoLingo CLAIMS that I have completed B2 level in French, that I could literally go to France now and study anything in French, what really happened is that I have a semblance of B2 level, but I have not truly internalized much of the vocabulary and grammar. Except that I did a few other things to help me improve my French. - I watched Netflix shows in French. I got recommendations of shows from people on social media and watched a few reality TV shows (because I wanted to see how real people talked, not how actors talked) and some series… and I’ve enjoyed this tremendously. I also found out that people talk in different ways than what DuoLingo was teaching me, and also, much much much faster. Which explains why, when we were in Geneva, when I spoke to people in French (I was always capable of expressing myself to a good extent in basic French), when they responded to me, I had trouble catching what they were saying, but my daughter, because she takes French in school, was able to follow what they said. Two things to say here: my French accent sounds more fluent than I am, because I caught the accent from my mom—so people probably hear me speak and think I’m better than I am. Second, when I watched Netflix, I had English or French subtitles on—because I still could not follow what they were saying at normal speed. I keep telling myself I will resist subtitles and try listening without them, or I will go back and listen to the same show again. But I get bored and don’t want to watch the same thing twice; I want to learn without making the effort. Damn you, AI. Yes, I blame AI, not myself :))
- I borrowed magazines from my mom (who unfortunately, unlike me, does not KEEP these things forever, so I only found a few) and downloaded some books on Kindle Unlimited. I learned that in French, literary French used a very odd tense called “passé simple” which was anything but simple… but I found books written in conversational French made for “intermediate level” learners (so B1-B2, my level), so that’s what I read. Kindle reading also has a nice feature where I can highlight a word and find its meaning… which… oh, right, that’s not good for learning languages. You should probably try to let yourself attempt to figure out the meaning from context and check later. Not stop at each word. It’s hard to resist, but I try. I do know that when I’ve done that in offline reading I’ve sometimes completely misunderstood an entire thing because of one word I deduced from context incorrectly. So there’s that.
- I sometimes listen to podcasts in French that are meant for language learning. I tried ones not meant for language teaching and struggled. I understand half the words, of course, but the most important words meant to tell the story, I miss those. So it’s no good.
- I check in with my mom and a friend who speaks French on some things I don’t understand or I share funny things I learned about how some French words look like English words but are “false friends” and actually have totally different meanings. I learned that my mom and friend know a different version of French than what people use nowadays—they know a more academic/formal French and not slang or whatever. So, umm, not as useful as I thought.
- I did DuoLingo daily, free version. The free version has speaking, listening, reading, grammar, and writing. It has nice little stories that help you learn conversation and give you a little writing exercise at the end (corrected with AI, no doubt, which was OK), and it has pure listening exercises that appear to be like a radio show. It was all a lot of fun. Because DuoLingo is gamified, it has a leaderboard and keeps track of users’ successful streaks, which means you compete, and I really got into that kind of thing…
The thing I’m trying to say here is that there is a sort of illusion of French fluency here, from how quickly I reached B2 level on Duolingo (I think when I started noticing there were language levels in the app, I was in mid-B1 level)—which is fake. It is supported by Google translate, which I now realize, has resulted in words I ended up never learning because I kept translating instead of trying to learn. But I also blame the “limited hearts” (of course, if I paid for the app, I’d get unlimited hearts—but then the app wouldn’t accept my credit card for some reason… I tried). But really, I also think language learning does need social interaction and immersion to some extent and not just interacting with an app.
But I think this entire learning experience has shown me how using shortcuts, especially AI type shortcuts, can be useful short term, to save you when you’re stuck, but speeding through something without savoring it means you miss out on solidifying and internalizing the learning. I also think unthoughtful gamification can make people focus on the wrong thing (how do I get to the next level without losing hearts?) versus the most valuable thing (how can I spend enough time on this concept to master it before moving onto the next?). Real life does not come with subtitles, does not come with a slow-down button (though you could ask politely, sometimes), but it also does not come with a “5 mistakes and you’re out.” Humans are gentler than this. And humans communicate with their entire bodies and tone and can slow down for you and give you another chance when they see you’re trying to speak to them in their language. I should have sought more human-to-human language learning.
I still love DuoLingo though. If I’m going to disconnect from my day and still do something useful, I can spend more time on DuoLingo than Wordle, so there’s that 🙂. And I think it’s great for early level language learning (I know quite a few words and expressions in German and Spanish thanks to Duo) but not as much for more advanced language learning—and it does not have anything beyond the end of B2 level in French, so I got stuck there. The “Daily Refresh” you get when you’re done is horrible; it only has two stories and four exercises, and repeats the same sentences every seven days or so, so I’m not learning anything new and it’s not repeating different things from across the previous lessons. I do sometimes go back and pick out things I had skipped, but the number of experience points (XP) you get for some things is so low it feels like it is not worth the effort. And here the XP are getting in the way of my learning as a strategic learner again!
Have you tried learning languages on your own? My students in the past (those who teach languages) said they hate DuoLingo and prefer HelloTalk where you talk to people in their own language, but for some reason I’m not interested in getting to know strangers that way. I know, hilarious given how many strangers I met through Twitter and social media are now friends and how many of them would probably be willing to speak to me in French to practice if I asked (they’ve offered!). Maybe I take them up on that offer and we try to have a normal conversation with substantive content in French? What do you think?
Maha Bali is Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. She has a PhD in Education from the University of Sheffield, UK. She is co-founder of virtuallyconnecting.org (a grassroots movement that challenges academic gatekeeping at conferences) and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound (an equity-focused, open, connected intercultural learning curriculum).