Winning the Game of French
In Search of a Better DuoLingo Ending
If you are going to be addicted to something, you could do worse than being addicted to learning French. I don’t mean tolerating it, or even enjoying it. I mean addiction with the grumpy, itchy withdrawal you get not having something like your daily coffee or trip to the gym. A year after we started using their site and app, this is the situation my wife and I find ourselves in thanks to DuoLingo.
The service is an education-tech masterpiece. A perfectly baked cake of game mechanics, scaffolding and software that I would happily pay for. The timed practices are just the right amount of challenging. The chatbots are the promise of a whole new way of learning language. We study in the morning before the gym and at night before bed. We compare scores and talk trash. When you consider there was a time not long ago when I would have paid almost anything not to learn a language, this is a pretty mean feat.
But for all that refinement and sophistication there’s one piece of the experience that is just the slightest bit wanting. For those who don’t know, DuoLingo is organized as a sequential series of vocabulary modules. Mastering one unlocks the next and if you don’t practice, you have to go back and re-master a module again. Getting to the end requires mastering many, many of these modules. In our case, many, many hours of French.
We raced to the end but it wasn’t even close. When my wife got there way ahead of me she sent me a screenshot of what happened. Spoiler alert. This is the ending of DuoLingo.
Ready?
That’s it. It took her six months and she took French in college. Six months of almost daily practice. I’m guessing she was in Final Fantasy XII territory for hours spent.
An owl made of gold looks on with dead eyes.
I have seen the careless ‘Fastest Pace’ icons of fitness trackers and the thoughtless congratulations of to-do lists checked. I know that for all the gamification talk in the mobile app world, there are very few true games with thoughtful endings other than the games themselves. But even the still, misshapen, waving arms of the original Tecmo Bowl victory sequence made me feel more alive than looking at this flag draped owl totem.
“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.” — Pancho Villa
Now maybe the DuoLingo team has been too busy revolutionizing language education, building bots and adding dialects to worry about how it ends. Or maybe learning French is supposed to be its own reward. Or maybe they just haven’t gotten to that story in the backlog yet. Whatever it is, I can’t stop thinking about the possibility I might complete my vocab lessons and find that bird bowling trophy waiting for me.
So DuoLingo team, if you are out there, I’m volunteering three endings I would love to see at the end of my French odyssey. I’m writing them here like a loser fan fiction dream. I’m twenty three modules away. Don’t let it end like this.
Option 1: The Star Wars Episode IV Medal Ceremony Ending
Screaming crowds line the Champs De Elysees as your car makes it’s way to the Arc De Triomphe through clouds of confetti. A military band plays La Marseillaise as you ascend the ceremonial podium to receive The Order of French. Fireworks fill the early night sky. Somewhere far away, your high school French teacher feels inexplicable guilt for having given you a C.
Option 2: The Metal Gear Solid Psycho Mantis Super-Boss Ending
You struggled with the pluperfect tense but that’s behind you now, right? wrong. Finishing your last vocab lesson reveals a boss bot who treats you to a rambling, impatient conversation that digs at every single bit of vocabulary and sentence structure you glossed over to get here. Stalled too long? Start over. Said something stupid? Get ready for him to slap your wrist for spending too much time playing World of Tanks instead of studying. Just like the Mantis would have.
Option 3: The Goodfellas Egg Noodles and Ketchup Ending
The owl breaks the fourth wall and steps forward to tell you that you might have finished vocab but you’re still an average nobody. What you do now is what matters. Fortunately the Owl has some ideas including french films and podcasts you should watch, newspapers you should read and a DuoLingo community made up of those who made it here before you. DuoLingo evolves into an advanced study group / educational social network. Your status? Tres contenu.
