The Reason Why I Let Go My 300-Day Duolingo Streak

I have been learning Italian with Duolingo for almost a year. But yesterday I made a decision. I decided to let my 308-day Duolingo streak go, intentionally. It wasn’t easy, but I felt it was necessary. Here’s why.

I have been using Duolingo for over 10 years, back when their owl looked a bit… creepy (just Google it if you don’t know how it looked like). As a language learning enthusiast, Duolingo has always been one of my favorite apps and generally one of the very first apps that I downloaded after when I reset/change my smartphone. I have studied English, French, Italian, Norwegian, Korean, and even a bit of Czech on Duolingo. But lately, my focus has been on Italian. Sure the app is fun, educative, even hilarious sometimes and you feel like there is a lot going on in the background to keep you motivated. I appreciate nearly everything about the Duolingo app. Nearly.

It’s obvious that language learning requires dedication and motivation. I know how it might be challenging. Though I dislike the term “life-long process” -it sounds like you need an entire lifetime to learn a language- it’s true that learning a language is a continuous journey. If you want to be fluent in a language, you should be investing your time to it. You should take your time, prioritize your learning, include it into your routine and finally make sure to keep it going. The last one is the hardest one, no doubt. Duolingo has many features that tries to keep you in the game, pun intended. It has a fancy widget showing your current streak, it has Friend Quest feature (which helped me make some amazing friends), dynamic app icon to draw your attention (see the Duolingo icon below after I abandoned my streak), and more…

All these features have one primary goal: keeping you engaged in the Duolingo app. Of course, that’s no surprise. It’s designed to be that way, and it’s perfectly normal. But for me, these features ended up shadowing my learning. I realized this far too late.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but somewhere between the 150th and 200th day of my streak, my focus shifted. My primary goal became maintaining the streak, rather than truly learning Italian. For over three months, I was more concerned with keeping that number going, convincing myself that I was still making progress. What I was really doing was just completing a single exercise each day to keep my streak going. I honestly can’t say what I actually learned in Italian during this time. I was practicing same words, same phrases, and even making same mistakes, which is a red flag.

Starting to make same mistakes when learning a language is a sign that you should first unlearn some things.

So, I decided to make a change and let my streak go. I removed the widget from my phone’s home screen. Now, whenever I unlock my phone, I’m only seeing the weather widget. The streak system had more drawbacks than benefits for me. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop using Duolingo. I’ll keep using it, just without worrying about the streak anymore.

Leaving Duolingo streaks doesn’t mean abandoning learning your favorite language. Instead, it’s a reminder to stay mindful of the tools we use and ensure they serve our goals, not the other way around.

Happy learning!