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I Went on a 60-Day Duolingo Streak Before My Trip to France—Here's How It Went

Immersion truly is the best way to learn a new language

Courtesy of Duolingo

"Shoe-ette," I repeated back in my very American accent. When will I ever need to know the word owl in France? I thought. 

When a representative for Duolingo asked me if I'd be interested in trying Super Duolingo—the app's premium subscription—to nail down the basics of either French or Spanish (my choice!) before putting my language skills to the test in a predominantly French- or Spanish-speaking destination, I was all in. 

I took a semester of French in high school and four semesters in college, but, having only gone to France once before (and nearly 10 years ago at that), my phrases were limited to "Je m'appelle Elizabeth" ("My name is Elizabeth"); "Comment ça va?" ("How are you?); “J’étudié le français pour trois années” (“I studied French for three years”); and “J’aime le fromage” ("I like cheese”). 

Given the opportunity, I chose to brush up on my French. The kicker? I had to go on a 60-day streak. As someone who forgets to drink water and frequently ignores her gentle Plant Nanny notifications reminding her to hydrate, I was a little doubtful of my ability to stick to it.

Last November, Duolingo launched the latest version of its app: a wholly revamped home screen designed as a guided learning path with ordered lessons that are "grounded in [the concept of] spaced repetition," according to the site.  

While frequent app users may initially be confused by the new format, the lesson content has not changed. There are 199 units for French learners. Each unit features a guidebook of grammar tips and key phrases, plus seven or eight "levels" that teach users various concepts such as vocabulary, verb tenses, and number agreement. Some of the levels in a unit are lessons containing a mix of exercises—listening, reading comprehension, speaking, writing, and matching pairs—while others review concepts that had been introduced in prior units.

"It's more effective to space out practice for a particular concept than to cram," wrote Duolingo in a blog post announcing the new learning path. "When you initially learn a concept, you'll want to revisit it fairly soon after, but then you can gradually expand the time between practice sessions. This strategy helps concepts stick in your memory long-term."

The new update also built personalized practice lessons and stories—short vignettes that Duolingo users read before answering comprehension questions—into the home screen's guided path as levels. In doing so, learners can more easily access the stories and review material without jumping around the app, as was the case in its previous version.

At the end of the 60 days, I had completed 21 units, which covered everything from basic French phrases and greetings such as "comment ça va?" (how are you doing?) and "au revoir," to conjugating common verbs like "to live" and "to be" in the present tense, to discussing travel plans and ordering popular food and drink items (think croissants and a glass of wine).

I didn't need to be worried about breaking my streak. Duolingo has been gamified into a competition, with each participant battling it out in 30-person leagues to earn more "XP" points than the rest. There are 10 leagues in all—leagues being Duolingo's version of a weekly leaderboard—and those ranking towards the top each week move onto the next level.

There are a few ways you can earn XP points, the most basic of which is simply completing a lesson. Practicing between 6 a.m. and noon unlocks the early bird chest, which can be "claimed" in the evening to double the XP points earned per lesson for 15 minutes. You can also practice your mistakes in a separate tab and do timed challenges to get more points.

A competitive side of me I didn't know existed came out while I was playing. Occasionally, Duolingo would offer me a surprise 15-minute XP boost, which got me to practice French longer than I had initially planned, hoping to advance to the next league.

Competition aside, the app encourages learners to use the app with monthly challenges that land you an exclusive badge after earning 1,000 XP, and badges won for accomplishing personal milestones: completing lessons without any mistakes, practicing on both Saturday and Sunday, and learning 2,000 words in a single course, for instance.

And if that wasn't enough to encourage me to practice, Duolingo also sent me notifications reminding me to log in and keep my streak going, even late at night, when I was getting ready for bed. While there were times I groggily conjugated verbs close to midnight, I completed the 60-day challenge, feeling more prepared than ever for a un verre du vin (glass of wine).

Elizabeth Preske

I have always said that immersion is the best way to learn a language. I had been to Paris before, but knowing that any attempt to speak French there would be responded to in fold in English, I traveled to France's Burgundy region and Lyon . I spent eight days in France: two days in Burgundy, three days in Lyon, and three days in Paris. 

The experience was, in a word, uncomfortable. It's my personal belief that every traveler visiting a foreign country should learn some essential words and phrases before their trip: Words and phrases such as hi, how are you, I'm doing well, thank you, goodbye. It's presumptuous to assume that everyone you meet abroad speaks English. (I'm reminded of my time in Florence when one Italian food vendor reprimanded my friend who tried ordering a panino in English: "Why are we expected to speak your language in your country when you come to our country expecting us to speak your language?" she lamented.) 

Learning a country's language is a way to respect the culture and the people who live there. But it's easier to say that than to do it. When traveling abroad, I often ask a stranger in English if they speak English. In a place like France, where a good chunk of the people there do speak English, there's comfort in knowing that the likely response to "Parlez-vous Anglais?" ("Do you speak English?") is "yes," and that I can fall back on my native language at any point. 

But I was never going to improve my French if I did that. I needed to be uncomfortable to learn.

My first night in Beaune, when ordering dinner—the cassolette d'escargots (snail casserole) for my partner, some hure de saumon au basilic (salmon head with basil) for me—I recalled Duolingo's unit on ordering food and drink. I knew the words—"je voudrais, il prend" ("I would like," "he'll have")—I had practiced them over and over, but my tongue still got them twisted out of nerves. There's a difference between speaking out loud to a nonjudgmental cartoon owl and to a native French speaker, who I was afraid would not understand a lick of my admittedly terrible accent and whose questions and responses could not be slowed down into clear, compartmental words I could recognize.

The server repeated what I said, correcting my grammar and terrible pronunciation. Unlike in Paris, where I spent four days not long after my fourth semester of college French, my request was answered in French, not English. I was equal parts surprised and flustered. The onus was on me to continue the conversation in French.

"How am I doing?" I asked my partner after our server took down my order and walked away.

"C minus," he said in jest.

The following day, at a pâtisserie a few blocks from my hotel, I ordered a couple of croissants aux amandes , relying on the exact words and phrases I had learned just weeks prior, with just a tad more confidence. “Voudriez-vous la cheque?” the cashier asked.

“Oui, s’il vous plaît” (“Yes, please”). Had she asked me if I wanted the check? Was she speaking to me in Franglais? A line formed behind me, and I didn't want to look stupid. Better to say "yes" to everything, right? 

She handed me the receipt. “Merci beaucoup,” I said. Thanks a lot.

In Dijon, I followed the Parcours de la Chouette , the Owl's Trail, a self-guided walking tour that brings visitors to 22 of the city's biggest attractions, with some 1,600 brass plaques embedded in the pavement leading the way. While I didn't need to know any French to navigate the trail, it was nice to point at plaques—each adorned with a cute little owl—every so often and exclaim, "chouette!" It felt like an accomplishment, however minuscule.

Over the next few days, there was progress—more conversations held entirely in French—but there were setbacks, too. Especially at the end of a long day, when my mental faculties had run dry. I was David Sedaris in "Me Talk Pretty One Day." I was bumbling and inept. There were times when I just wanted to give up. My brain was tired of translating what I wanted to say into the simplest of phrases, from continuously searching my mental Rolodex of essential French words to retrieve the correct phrase for the situation, from the constant feeling of embarrassment. 

At the Gallo-Roman Museum & Amphitheaters in Lyon, I tried ordering two general admission tickets: “Deux billets, s’il vous plaît.” 

The woman behind the admissions desk asked me something I couldn't quite catch. I looked at her dumbfounded. “Desolée,” I mumbled. Sorry . “Je ne comprends pas.” I don't understand.

"Would you like me to speak in English?" she asked.

"Yes, please."

In Lyon, half the time (and in Paris, every time) I tried to speak French, the other person would respond in English. But I wasn't offended. If anything, I felt relieved. They were trying to save both of us the time—and in my case, embarrassment—of trying to communicate in a language I barely understood. 

While Duolingo had taught me how to order wine, to ask which train is going to Paris, and to ask how much something costs, it hadn't prepared me for handling travel grievances, the unpredictable—but inevitable—problems that crop up on any given trip. When checking out of my hotel in Beaune, for instance, I had been charged for a 100-Euro bottle of wine I didn't order, and I didn't have the vocabulary to contest the bill. 

During moments like these, I had to accept defeat and revert to English. I was—and still am—at the beginner level, and navigating conflict when I've yet to re-learn how to count higher than 20 is beyond me.

But I had to keep trying.

It still rings true that immersion is the best way to learn a new language—but if you're a new language learner, you still need to study over and over (and over) to get to a place where being fully immersed helps you grow (and, in my case, to kick off a conversation).

Even though I technically had a leg up, having taken French classes before, I wouldn't have stood a chance trying to make my way around the country had I not downloaded Duolingo before my trip. It helped me navigate airports and train stations; say hellos, pleases, and thank yous to everyone I met; purchase museum tickets; and order off menus. (Even if I couldn't decipher a good chunk of the ingredients, I knew enough to know whether I was ordering chicken or beef, and put my faith in French chefs).

Logging into the app for 60 days straight also ensured that the newly learned lessons stuck in my mind—a much better way to prep for a trip abroad than quickly Googling "how do you say 'how much does this cost?' in French" hours before a flight... and then swiftly forgetting the words the moment you need them.

While 60 days wasn't enough to teach me more than the basics, and there were several moments where I felt, frankly, stupid for my inability to speak fluently, it helped me enter conversations with confidence and show the other person respect for their culture. In my experience, I think the stereotype that French people look down on people who don't speak their language is untrue; if anything, when I tried as best I could, I often was met with kindness and a willingness to either help correct my grammar or switch to English because it was simply easier.

And yes, while there are words like "chouette" that maybe the average beginner doesn't need to know, it makes learning fun , and in all likelihood, I'm never going to forget the French word for "owl."

On New Year's Eve, I asked my partner what was one thing he learned about me in 2022 that surprised me. He told me he was surprised I knew how to speak French—a significant improvement from my C minus.

Duolingo. "Introducing the New Duolingo Learning Path." May 6, 2022.

Duolingo. "FAQ: Duolingo's New Learning Path." Accessed January 9, 2023.

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Dear Duolingo: Can you relearn a language you forgot?

Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for language learners. Catch up on past installments here .

Hello hello! My name is Hope Wilson, and I’m a Learning & Curriculum Manager here at Duolingo. Before coming to Duolingo, I studied second language acquisition at The Ohio State University, where I also did some work on language forgetting. So this week’s Dear Duolingo topic is a real trip down memory lane. Get it?? Memory lane?? Eh???

Okay, okay, stop booing at my pun, let’s just get to the question.

This week's question:

Dear Duolingo, Long ago, in high school, I studied French and actually knew it pretty well! Now I'm thinking about either starting with a brand-new language (Spanish?) or going back to French. Is there any advantage to French? I could tell you a few words but not much more, so I feel like I might as well start from the beginning with something else. Merci beaucoup (right?), Language Lost

Dear Language Lost,

I’m delighted to be able to tell you that your French may be forgotten, but it’s not gone. If you go back to French, you’ll be able to re-access memories you likely thought were lost to you, and you’ll progress far more quickly than you did when you were studying French the first time! Much like riding a bicycle, you’ll find that your skills are still there, buried in your brain and muscle memory, and that with a bit of structured practice, you’ll be avoir ing and etre ing like you were in the old days.

Curious why that is? Let’s explore the “savings paradigm” and how it applies to language!

The savings paradigm

Have you ever forgotten someone’s name? Or something you wanted to buy at the grocery store? Or where you put your favorite pen? Maybe you retraced your steps, imagining yourself going through the act of putting down that pen. Maybe when you forgot that name, you had a vague sense of what that name was— I know it starts with an "m" — and you tried to reconstruct the sounds you knew. Maybe when trying to remember what you wanted to buy, you went through a mental picture of your refrigerator.

In each of these instances, you aren’t trying to construct new information. Rather, you’re effectively using techniques to find information that you misplaced . At one point, you learned this information and it was fixed in your long-term memory. But when you forget something you’ve learned, the information isn’t destroyed —instead, it’s just inaccessible. It’s like a pen you’ve put in a drawer: It’s still there, but you can’t use it until you pull it out. So the process of relearning is like pulling that pen out of the drawer.

This psychological phenomenon—that relearning can happen rapidly and reliably—is called the savings paradigm or savings method . It was discovered in the late 1800s by a psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus. Ebbinghaus did experiments where he would first memorize lists of information, wait until he’d totally forgotten these lists, then relearn them—and time how long it took him. He reliably found that he’d re learn them way faster than he learned them in the first place: The information was saved .

Can you relearn a language you forgot?

More recently, researchers investigated whether the savings paradigm also applied to language. If you had forgotten a language, could you possibly recover it?

Language, after all, is complex. When you know “a language,” you don’t just know a single thing: you know vocabulary (sometimes thousands and thousands of words!), and you know grammar, and you know pronunciation, and you know a bunch of other things as well. So when you forget a language, it’s more than just forgetting a single date: You forget a bunch of different information. And interestingly, this information isn’t forgotten at the same rate. Specifically, you forget vocabulary faster than you forget grammar.

So scholars have focused in particular on how well people who have forgotten a language are able to relearn vocabulary. And learners are kind of amazing at relearning vocab: People recover vocabulary they’d known while abroad and words they’d learned when taking classes in their home country . There’s even an incredible case where an adoptee was able to relearn words from a language she didn’t know she’d spoken, because she’d lost all memory of it — that’s how powerful relearning can be!

How to relearn a language

So, okay. How do you re-access that saved language knowledge?

Well, you can focus on a few things. As mentioned above, you tend to forget vocabulary more than you forget grammar. So when you’re relearning the language, you actually will probably want to prioritize recovering your vocabulary. You might want to buy a frequency dictionary , which is a dictionary that lists the words of a language from most to least frequent—so you can work on relearning the most-common words first, and then work your way down to rarer ones. (Personally, I love using flashcards to learn vocabulary!) Reading is also an excellent way to recover your vocab, as is watching movies and listening to podcasts in the language. Getting a variety of practice will help reactivate your inactive knowledge!

Another approach you might take is finding conversation partners. It’s an unfortunate fact that sometimes, you just don’t know what you’ve forgotten. It’s not until you start trying to use the language that you find the holes in your memory. (For example, when I was learning Russian, I came back after summer break and sat down in the classroom, totally confident in being able to describe all the cool stuff I’d done over vacation — and then realized I had completely forgotten the word for “summer”! Eek!) So if you push yourself to interact with other people, you’ll find out what you forgot…and the person you’re talking to will likely kindly help you remember!

Most importantly, though, you’ll want to just sit down and start learning! No matter what technique you go for, the most important thing is just to start that process of remembering. Just like there’s no wrong way to learn a language, there’s no wrong way to remember it, either!

Language regained, not lost!

It’s really exciting that you’re coming back to language learning, Language Lost. I'm sure it’ll be an exciting and rewarding process for you — and if you choose to relearn French, I think you’ll be delighted to see just how much you still remember. Your brain has been saving this knowledge, and it should serve you well!

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Lost Your Duolingo Streak? Here’s What You Can Do

Are you desperately trying to figure out how to get your streak back on Duolingo?

We’ve all been there. Losing your streak just because you decided to take a break or had a rough day can be super frustrating.

But, don’t worry. With the help of this quick article, you’ll learn different ways to recover it.

If you lost your Duolingo streak, change the date & time or contact the app’s support team via Twitter . In this article, we’ll also cover how to avoid this situation from happening again .

Keep reading to recover your Duolingo streak for free!

#1 Change the Date & Time

Duolingo’s streak can motivate us to continue with our language lessons. But, sometimes life can get pretty hectic, and we can forget to enter the app.

I once lost a streak of 275 days and was super frustrated.

Luckily, I changed the date and time of my device and completed a lesson, and voilà! I got my streak back.

Follow these quick steps to do it:

• Open the Settings menu and go to “General”.
• Tap on “Date & Time”.
• Turn off the switch next to “Set Automatically” and change the date to one day back.

• Go to the Settings menu and select “System”.
• Tap on “Date & Time” and turn off the switch next to “Automatic date & time”.
• Select “Set Date” and change the date to one day back.

Please note that the process of changing the date and time may vary depending on your device’s model.

Then, go back to Duolingo and complete one or two lessons (tip: some users found that using Duolingo offline helped).

After that, you’ll need to close the app and go back to the settings menu and turn on the switch next to “Automatic date & time” or “Set Automatically”.

Moving on, please relaunch Duolingo to see your streak.

The steps above should’ve helped you solve the issue. But, if your streak is still lost, don’t worry. Keep reading to learn more about other ways to recover it.

#2 Contact Duolingo’s Support Team

If changing your date and time didn’t solve the issue, you might want to keep reading.

Hundreds of people have lost their streak due to the difficulties that arose from the pandemic or due to a change in their time zone.

But, the good news is that Duolingo’s support team understands these situations and tries its best to help its users to recover their streak.

Please contact Duolingo’s support team via Twitter and ask if they can help you. Try using this tweet template :

“Hi @duolingo, I had a problem and lost my XX days streak a few days ago. Could you please restore it? My username is <Your Duolingo’s username goes here> “

Bear in mind that your tweet should not exceed 280 characters.

If you don’t want your friends to know that you lost your streak, you can send a DM to @duolingo.

How to Avoid Losing Your Streak on Duolingo

Losing your streak must be one of the most frustrating situations you can experience while learning a new language.

But, what if I told you that you can easily avoid this issue by simply purchasing a streak freeze?

Yes, that’s all it might take.

To do it, you’ll just need to enter the Duolingo shop and buy a “Streak Freeze” that costs 20 Lingots (Duolingo’s virtual coin).

Tip: You can earn more Lingots by completing lessons and meeting your daily XP goal .

Once you’ve bought the streak freeze, it will automatically activate when you miss studying a day. But, please note that your streak won’t increase, it will only stay the same.

You can also avoid losing your streak by becoming a Super Duolingo member. By subscribing to this plan, your streak will be automatically repaired once a month.

Moreover, by getting a Super Duolingo subscription, you’ll be to get unlimited hearts and skill test-outs. You’ll also get mistakes reviews.

Sounds good, huh?

Follow these steps to become a Super Duolingo member.

• Go to the Duolingo shop and tap on the “Try/Get Super” banner at the top of your screen.
• Select the plan you’d like and follow the instructions to subscribe.
• Confirm the purchase.

That about covers it! I hope that this article has helped give you some more confidence in recovering your Duolingo streak.

If you take anything away, please let it be that the easiest way to recover your streak is by changing your date & time to one day back and completing a lesson.

But, if that didn’t work, don’t forget to contact Duolingo’s support team via Twitter. They might solve the issue in no time.

And remember, you can easily avoid this situation from happening again by purchasing a streak freeze.

Thank you so much for reading this quick article. If you ever experience a different issue while learning a new language on Duolingo or while using any other platform , please check out our content. Here at Tech Detective , we love solving all sorts of tech problems.

Have a great day!

Related posts:

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• Why Duolingo Is So Addictive (7 Tactics They Use)
• Lingodeer vs Duolingo: Compared In 7 Different Categories

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