Duolingo's reign of terror is over and I'm walking away - Alexander Brown

I have never been someone who gives up on things easily.

Alexander Brown has had enough of learning French. Picture: Getty Images

Whether it's relationships, cakes that have already started collapsing, or cycling to an event in the hope that the rain will stop, I am not good at walking away.

This has involved horrendous no carb diets, dreadful books by Philip Roth, or even just continuing to support Tottenham Hotspur.

I am relentlessly competitive, an optimist, and stubborn to a fault, leaving me engaging with things that are bad for me long after I have stopped enjoying them.

None of this is exemplified more than the plague of my life, the burden I carry with me everywhere I go, the most annoying cartoon character since Scrappy-Doo.

I am of course talking about the bastard bird of Duolingo, an app used by more than eight million people every day, and presumably hated by at least half of them.

Now I am not against learning languages. I lived in Switzerland for a short time, and like all former Erasmus students embrace any chance to bore people about it. I really found myself, you know?

But for me, Duolingo was not learning, it was remembering I had to do it right before bed and sleepily staring at a screen in a daze repeating the same few words.

Instead of abandoning screen time to read or relax, I would have to open my phone and remember how to ask for things in a country I am considerably less likely to visit during a pandemic.

I would put in my ten minutes a day not because I was enthusiastic to learn or could feel my skills developing, but simply to maintain a streak.

That streak, a device that turns the act of learning into a bitter rivalry, with all the support and love of an overly demanding teacher.

I have found myself in the surreal situation of going to a date’s house only to see the time and need to do my French lessons quietly and quickly for fear of losing my streak, like a bilingual Cinderella.

At multiple parties I have gone to the bathroom to do lines, strictly of the French variety.

There is no rest, there is no respite. You do the minutes or you lose your streak and drop down leader boards you didn’t even know existed.

Drop and give me 20 phrases private, you disgust moi. Oh and if you want it back, it asks you to pay actual money to maintain a streak that actually has no real bearing on your own learning.

So I’m walking away. I’m turning my back on the bird and its hold over me.

It’s not that I don’t want to learn a language, I’m just not going to do something that bores me just to win anymore.

I want to read when I get in bed, write creatively, or do literally anything other than saying “he/she eats the apple” in French.

Perhaps I’ll get a tutor, maybe I won’t. But learning through fear isn’t really learning, and frankly if I never have to whisper a French sentence into my phone while commuting again, it will still be too soon.