I first signed up to Duolingo around 12 years ago, tried a few lessons, got bored, and deleted the app. Fast forward 9 years and my daughter has started secondary school and is now learning German. She’s given a Duolingo account through her school and is encouraged to do some lessons to reinforce what they’re learning in class.

Of course, she resisted.

I told her that I would also start learning some German with her in a hope that she would see me making progress and feel the need to keep up.

I’d learned a little bit of German before at an old job which had some offices based in Germany and Austria, so it didn’t take too long to get into a rhythm.

Before I knew it I’d built up a streak of around 400 days but my daughter had quit trying to maintain any sort of consistency a long time ago, so why was I still learning German?!

I decided to switch to French (with the occasional dip into some of the non-language courses) seeing as I studied French at school and was pretty good at it already.

Another year passed and I’m now in the region of a 750 day streak.

But can I speak French (or German) any better? Probably not.

Sure, I know lots of words, and I know a bunch of useless phrases such as “my grandmother loves my dog,” but that 750 day streak was meaningless. Most days I would only do a ‘lesson’ at the very end of the day when I receive some sort of nagging notification that I might lose my streak and I would quickly zip through the lesson without anything really sinking in. It became more of a chore than something which I was enjoying.

But I was getting close to 1000. I told myself that when I make it to 1000 I would quit.

I’m guessing this is how addiction works.

Luckily for me, this was around the time that Duolingo launched their chess course, so I made the switch and continued my streak. The app was now feeling like a game rather than a learning platform, but the annoyance of trying to keep the streak was still there and fairly soon it wasn’t even enjoyable to play chess anymore.

But I persisted and on 30th December 2025 I finally reached a streak of 1000 days.

…

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I deleted the app on the 31st.