I had no idea it would last for almost 800 days in a row. After all, for a lot of my classmates, the teacher leading us to the computer lab every Thursday afternoon was just a chance for them to play computer games during school. My 8th Spanish teacher, who I shall call Mrs. B-A, had a tendency to play favorites, and she very much favored me and my best friend, for we were always on task and not distracted by the temptations of a computer.
Maybe it was this admiration she had in me that motivated me to start using Duolingo outside of the normal Thursday afternoon sessions. Or maybe it’s simply because I straight up became addicted.
I still don’t think I ever really got enough of the “da-ding” sound that filled my ears with ecstasy whenever I completed an exercise. Or of the sound at the end of a series of exercises that would ring out triumphantly, as if I had just won gold in the Olympics. Maybe it was the magical nature of these sounds that kept me going. Or maybe it was because of those whimsical sounds that I was addicted.
Fast forward a year, and I was in 9th grade. My Duolingo streak that I worked on every day to keep alive was around 250 straight days at that point. I had recently had a few close calls of not remembering to complete my daily goal before midnight, so I needed to come up with a better strategy so that I wouldn’t lose it. There was no way I would let myself lose the streak. No. Definitely no way.
At that point, having my streak reset to zero would mean losing almost a year’s worth of effort. It would mean losing part of my identity at that point, as I had devoted so much consistent work to reaching such an impressive milestone. Or maybe I just didn’t want the streak to end because I was addicted to watching the orange meter spin around each time I added to my streak.
My friends thought I was a special type of weird for maintaining such a long Duolingo streak, or really, for even having one at all. However, I took pride in blasting my phone volume every time I was doing Duolingo around them because I knew it annoyed them. My favorite part was actually telling them how long my streak had gotten. One of them would usually ask each week, probably because they were waiting for me to admit that it had ended, but I choose to believe that it’s because they were secretly impressed with how devoted I was to it. Devotion…or addiction, I honestly didn’t know my motivation at that point.
This is the part where I should probably admit that it got a little out of hand. I was now in 10th grade, and the free time I had after school was more limited than in past years. I found ways to do Duolingo during lunch, but sometimes I was too busy interacting with my friends during lunch to remember to do it, so I often found other times to do it. I did it during silent reading in English, sneakily angling the book cover just right so that the teacher couldn’t see my phone out. I did it during computer programming while the teacher was on the other side of the room helping other students. Heck, I even did it during PE class in the locker room after changing into my PE uniform because I knew I had to be efficient with my time. That, or I was just obsessed with keeping my streak alive.
It’s kind of funny though, looking back. Most of my classmates, when sneaking their phone, would be playing games like “Clash Royale” or snapchatting their friends, but I was using it to learn a new language. Because of this contrast, I could justify what I was doing, and that only emboldened my addiction to the app.
Finally though, near the end of January of 2019 it all ended. I was on a trip to Disneyland with my school band, and I was having so much fun with my friends that I forgot all about Duolingo. Poof, the next day my streak of almost 800 days was wiped clear, all the way down 0. At first, I thought there had been a mistake because I thought I had bought a “streak freeze”, which does what it sounds like it does for one day, but I realized that I had forgotten to buy it for that day. When reality hit, and I stared at the lifeless, greyed out zero that had taken over the three digit number that used to be proudly displayed in lively orange font across the top, I honestly didn’t know what to do, and all I could do was just stare at it over and over again.
My desperation to get my streak back was so apparent that I even made a last ditch effort and filled out a bug report on Duolingo’s website…I never did hear back. I knew I wasn’t going to start a new streak because I was aware that it would take over two years to build back what I had lost. That thought now signals to me that at that point I had just been doing Duolingo for the sole purpose of maintaining my streak and that’s it. It wasn’t to learn Spanish, or because it was assigned for homework, and it wasn’t even because of the superb sound effects that it offered. It was solely because I was addicted to extending my streak each day.
I have to acknowledge that it did help me learn Spanish though. I always breezed through my Spanish classes in high school, and I don’t think I could say the same had I not done Duolingo for seven hundred-something days straight. Eventually, I came to terms with losing my streak, and something that helped forget about it was realizing that I had lost my streak while having too much fun at the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’. So, like at least I didn’t lose it because I was bogged down with chemistry homework, or something lame like that.
Has anyone else found Duolingo this addicting or have similar stories like this?
Also, I wrote this for a school assignment which is why it seems to be written a bit weird. Just wanted to post it here as well haha
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