Comment on YSK about Darkpatterns.games, a website that rates mobile games on their "Dark patterns"

Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

It’s kinda funny, I’ve become so turned off to these manipulations that the gamification of duolingo just annoys me more than it motivates me. The whole point is to learn a language. Power ups that let you extend the time to complete a timed exercise don’t help with learning a language. Getting to the top of the leaderboard didn’t make a difference either, especially if it was done using xp boosts.

At this point, I just hate that it forces me to spend time watching various meaningless bars fill up after each lesson.

I’ve even missed a couple of days, thinking “oh well, there goes my streak, which also doesn’t really matter”, only to find that they cared more about keeping that than I did and have automatic freezes. Though it wanted me to buy more after the last one, so I’m thinking the next time I miss a day it’ll finally go back to 0.

Oh and yes, duolingo is a pay to win language learning game where you can give them money for boosts in the meaningless gamification shit. Even after buying a year subscription (that I don’t plan on renewing).

They also completely skip any of the foundational stuff and jump right in to phrases that they don’t explain. I’m a few months into Japanese lessons on there and it still hasn’t even mentioned that it’s been teaching the polite form and that other forms exist (which makes things confusing if you try to use other resources that generally use the neutral form).

It might be better for other languages that aren’t so different from English, but I do not suggest duolingo if you want to learn Japanese.

Tbh I don’t suggest learning Japanese at all if you aren’t strong with languages and memorization. There’s a couple thousand kanji symbols you need to learn for everyday communication, and each of those can be combined with others to form words that aren’t always intuitive, and then those words can be strung together into sentences that also aren’t intuitive to interpret.

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