38 Comments
Testing. If you take the placement test, you can get a lot of points if you are able to pass a lot of skills.
Easy language + timed practice + following lots of people + lots of free time = high XP.
I spent most of the summer sitting on my lazy butt doing this. BURP!
1397
Speed drills and extra credit excluded, they do it 10 XPs at a time! Some people with lots of free time do more than that. From my experience, it is relatively 'easy' to rake in XPs during reviews... Edited (on 9/30/27): back in the Immersion days, a lot of the work was done 1 to 5 XPs at a time!
Hi ID-007, Congratulations on your accomplishments on Duolingo. I don't think I've come across anyone else that has reached level 25 on so many languages. Just curious:
- How long how you been doing Duolingo?
- What's the experience like with so many languages in your mind? Does it get confusing at some point?
I'm not sure my brain will be able to compartmentalize so much if I try them all.
Thanks in advance for any pointers/tips/advice.
- 1397
As in all life domains, quantity does not imply quality! There are people with 'seemingly' more trees at 25 than me; you just have not come across them yet! In my case, I got to 25 in most of those trees during the Immersion days when it was fun doing translation work in areas of interest to me. For me, reaching level 25 gives me enough exposure to a language to pursue it when the need/interest arises. Also, if you check, you would see that Romance languages are predominant among the high scoring trees. That is because I have formal training in that area. For languages of interest (currently 2), I do a lot of work outside of Duolingo; at times, that work ends up quite deep. My foreign language learning goes way back to childhood when I had to learn two languages in parallel (not to mention Latin). In case it was not clear, I do not try to keep up/use all the languages at the same time.
My learning pattern is pretty straightforward. I go through Duolingo trees of new languages, currently Japanese and Czech, while I keep up with/improve 2 other languages (currently Greek and Hebrew) outside of Duolingo. Sometimes when I need a "break," I would go to a finished tree and review it. This has been the case with Slavic and Germanic languages.
Yes, it can get overwhelming when: there are 5 languages for which I want to finish the trees and they are significantly different from each other, and I end up way too deep trying to sort out the use of the definite article along with proper nouns in Koine Greek, and language learning is just a hobby, and my kids want to do other things in their spare time, and my boss is not happy when my hobby interferes with my day job, etc. So, I scale down based on my "free" time but I do admit that I have a great boss!-)
Finally, language learning, like all other subjects in life/school requires time and dedication. As a kid, I did not excel at learning foreign languages, but I had a good memory and logical subjects like grammar and math were always easy for me.
This might be more than you wanted to hear and not specific enough but I hope I gave you enough incentives to keep learning languages and Duolingo is a very good place to start.
Regards, Daniel.
P.S. How many languages you learn is not important but what you do with what you learn is! BTW, you don't know how many trees hide behind each flag; so, it is hard to know who has the most trees...
I find your response interesting. I agree with the first sentence of your P.S. part, and thank you for sharing. I enjoyed reading what you had to say.
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Thank you. You are very kind. Did you mean to imply that you did not agree with the second part of my PS?-) I thought that part was pretty factual and objective...
No. It was just something that stood out to me; I didn't mean to imply that. The second part makes a ton of sense: of course all the trees of others may not be completed if they have used resources like inmersión in the past—something I learned existed yesterday. I thought that was notable—and there is a lot of stuff that you say that is—but I liked that in particular an believe that myself.
- 1397
EnzoKrensky, thanks for clarifying your OR. BTW, my question had a smile behind it!-) Again, thanks for your kind words! Regarding the tree levels, my point was that a level goes with the flag rather than the tree(s) associated with that flag. For example, my English (American) flag has 143K XPs associated with it and it is at level 25. From that information alone, one cannot tell whether I got all those points from one tree (say FR-En) or multiple (say, FR-EN, GER-EN, SP-EN...). I hope this clarifies that point... In my case, it is true that I have reverse trees that I never finished (thus I got the points needed to get to level 25 through Immersion) BUT I also have multiple trees behind several flags. One moral of the story is more of what you already agreed with: quantity does not guarantee quality! An important point though (that is no longer directly relevant to Duolingo users but nevertheless significant) is that translation work is rather 'easy' from a foreign language to one's native/fluent language. It is the other way around where the challenge lies. To get lots of translation XPs points against the English flag, one had to translate from English into one or more other languages. This would make it a real effort for people, like me, who grew up with English. To me, this used to be FUN and worthwhile....
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great to read in detail - I had not thought of how several languages could be behind one tree! I appreciate your answers, thank you, so generous!
Well, thank you very much for your elaborate answer and the advice on putting the studied languages to use.
You have one impressive profile! (✧ω✧)
And they have Timed Practice, and for the entire week they did every lesson without a single mistake.
You'd be amazed how much xp a user would obtain when Immersion still existed. ^ ^
To answer your question, I assume doing many skills or placing out. I'm sure there are other ways, but I'm not completely aware of them. Some people have too much time on their hands, which isn't bad. I just wish I had the time in a week to get that much xp. It's quite amazing!
- 1430
That's 571 XP per day, which is perfectly doable. I usually get around 200-250 XP/day at the moment, so your friend would be doing a little over twice what I do.
If one does timed exercises it is quite possible. I have 1700+ XPs this week and that's being on Duolingo here and there--after work.
Thanks everyone. I just thought it odd for anyone to have this many points for one week. I guess not.
Okay, thanks! You just get lots of xp by doing more skills. I actually think that 50 xp is easy :-)
I had a week where I was strengthening about 40-50 lessons a day (400-500xp), so this doesn't sound impossible by any means. But it was taking me several hours a day!
Your friend is either really dedicated or repeating the same simple lessons over and over. (Or perhaps doing a placement test as mentioned by another reply.)
well, you know...your friend could have done some code cheating, but it is also very possible that he/she could have earned all of that as everyone else says pretty quickly and a lot of lessons, or quizzes, or whatever it is that he/she did to achieve so many points... Bye... Your welcome if this helped... I hope it helped...
I once caught someone cheating. He was putting in 30,000 XP a week and had 2,000 followers. (￢_￢)
I don't think they're related. I just think it's funny how he was so popular and thought he could get away with cheating (I was a follower). ^ ^
- 1552
I would say . . . too much free time on their hands >:)
Joking aside it's a lot but not impossible, a couple of hours of timed practice each day.
by testing out of skills on a language that you already know, or one that is similar to one you have already learnt. for instance, if you speak Spanish you would be able to test out of many Portuguese skills as they are very similar
Maybe. I don't think if I really buy that. Spanish and Portuguese may be similar, but being a spanish speaker and taking the portuguese course, I don't think I could have done that. There are a lot of similarities in the languages—especially the grammar, in addition to just basic lexical similarity—but I don't believe it is like that.
I say it because I've done it :P it may help to be a non native speaker, I may pick up on the patterns in grammar easier than a non native speaker? I was able to test out of many portuguese and catalan skills due to already speaking french italian and spanish :)
I don't mean the initial test out, where it determines whether or not you are a beginner, but individual skills
- 965
I was trying to test out the EN-ESP course with the intro comprehension (placement) test based on my current (90% finished) Portuguese tree and learning this Romance language almost for one year.
I failed so misserable! :-(
The DuoLingo (basic) ESP vocabulary is IMHO so different and unknown to me, even from the first tested skills.
I get so many questions wrong (not even counting for the very rare correct ones :-)).
With a 89% lexican similarity between those both languages according to http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/similarities/index.html and Wikipedia I would have expected to perform myself a little bit better and maybe know at least a very very little percentage of Spanish.
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Hi Thomas.Heiss! Spanish is not as straightforward as I expected either! I thought that being fluent in french would allow me to learn spanish in a month or two... well, it took a lot longer, and was a whole new world. So I understand that you couldn't just jump in from Portuguese and skip through the course!
