【Sisters Slave (2019)】

The Sisters Slave (2019)Duolingo owl is ruining my life. So why do I feel so pressured to learn from it?

Like many other disappointments to the public education system, I spent seven years studying Spanish and barely retained any of it. The little remnants that still float around my memory are disjointed and just out of reach — I remember the words and their purpose, but can't seem to string them into a coherent conversation.

The pieces are all there.They're just scrambled.

I started Spanish lessons on Duolingo months ago, but my enthusiasm wore off. When I stopped ascending two levels a night, the notifications began.

SEE ALSO: The Duolingo owl is out for vengeance in these threatening memes

Unlike my high school Spanish teacher, whose reach only extended to 50 minutes of class time a day, Duolingo is alwayswith me. It lurks in the shadows of my phone, waiting for me to practice, and striking when it's most personally inconvenient. Whether I'm navigating rush hour traffic or sitting through an excruciating first date, Duolingo's push notifications remind me to spend five minutes on my daily lesson precisely when I don't have five minutes.

It's an internet-wide experience: Duolingo's passive-aggressive notifications became a meme, and the company even leaned into it by bringing the threatening owl to life in this year's April Fools' Day prank.

Granted, Duolingo users canturn these notifications off, and if you ignore them for long enough, the app will send you the ultimate passive aggressive alert: "These reminders don't seem to be working. We'll stop sending them for now." But allowing that to happen is even worse — you're just admitting defeat and accepting your failure to progress.

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Despite my annoyance with the overwhelming notifications, I still feel pressured keep going with Duolingo. I used to dread vocabulary quizzes and writing assignments, but somehow my high school Spanish teacher never instilled the same anxiety and guilt that skipping a Duolingo practice session does.

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To get to the bottom of this, I reached out to Rosanny Genao, who was my Spanish teacher for two years of high school, to figure out why an anthropomorphic green owl scares me more than she ever did.

"You're not really encouraging people by sending messages that are going to generate more anxiety," Genao explained in a phone call. "I feel like if you're getting notifications all the time, it's almost like you're getting harassed."

The actual notifications aren't even that threatening — it's the personal disappointment that follows.

There are no stakes when it comes to learning with an app. There's no risk of failing a midterm, or lowering your GPA, or losing credits and repeating a required class. You won't miss out on walking at graduation if you skip a few nights of Duolingo practice.

At the same time, you're the only person holding yourself back if you don't keep going. Nobody will hold you accountable for not memorizing past tense conjugations except yourself; if you decide to stop educating yourself, that's on you.

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"Duolingo consistently makes me feel like a failure," my friend Rebecca texted when I joked about the owl's menacing reminders. "I feel like you could track my depression by looking at my Duolingo history."

It's a commonly held sentiment.

"Every time Duolingo sends the 'we'll stop sending you these reminders because they don't seem to be working' notification my heart breaks," @bicesrceis tweeted. "Stop reminding me how much of a failure I am."

"Not only am I a disappointment to my parents but now I’m also a disappointment to the Duolingo owl," @jaz_ham said a good month before the murderous owl went viral.

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According to Genao, we're too used to finding immediate answers. In the age of Amazon Prime and Google Translate, who wants to spend timeon absorbing and understanding a new language when you can learn it all in an instant?

"It's the technology era," Genao said, referring to the neurotic people like me who finish ten levels a week before crashing and burning, doomed to never achieve bilingual glory. "We want everything, all the information as quickly and effective[ly] as possible. And we want to be done."

The immense pressure to learn comes from the immediate validation of completing a level. Practice more, and you're awarded more lingots. Acquire enough lingots and you can buy power-ups that'll freeze your streak for a day, outfits for the owl to wear, and bonus lessons that'll teach you idioms and flirtatious phrases.

Aside from the bonus lessons, none of these purchases have real-world value, and unless you're planning a Love Actually-type romance with a Portuguese woman in rural France, learning to flirt may not hold much weight either. The knowledge that you achievedsomething is still there, though.

If it's any solace, following Duolingo's orders won't actually make you bilingual.

You can't truly acquire a second language by pairing matching phrases. There are two branches of bilingualism: simultaneous bilingualism, which means the speaker was spoken to in both languages from birth, and sequential or successive bilingualism, which means the speaker learned a second language later in childhood or adulthood.

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A paper from MIT and the University of Ottawa notes that when it comes to multilingualism, "most of this language learning occurs in untutored, naturalistic settings and throughout the lifespan of an individual."

Even though language learning apps may have flashcards, visuals, and speaking components, they don't compare to immersing yourself in another culture. You don't just hardwire your brain to start thinking in another language.

"It takes about five years if you really want to be bilingual," Genao explained. "It depends on the person but unless you are immersed in the language by going to that country where it's spoken, it takes at least three years to become somewhat proficient in it."

Which only adds to the fact that there are literally no stakes in ignoring Duolingo's pushy practice alerts. Still, knowing that your own lack of motivation keeping you from moving forward is enough of a guilt trip. A human teacher, Genao says, will keep you accountable for learning. If you're unmotivated, you have someone to push you to continue.

"Whatever is that benchmark for the expectations you have, you set those goals on your own on an app," she said. "Where a teacher might demand a lot more from you."

Not learning is a failure to yourself, and depending on the type of person you are, is worse than any teacher's disappointing lecture. You may have lofty goals, but confronting your own ambition is terrifying in itself. For me, realizing that I'd never be conversational just from an app was absolutely freeing.

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That's not to say that you should give up on learning altogether. Learning Dutch phrases got me through a semester abroad, and getting into Korean has made grocery shopping for traditional family recipes significantly easier. But at the end of the day, Genao says nothing will accelerate language learning like daily conversations with a native speaker.

I'm less self-deprecating when it comes to ignoring Duolingo's push notifications now, but it doesn't mean I'm deleting the app altogether. Duolingo, thankfully, will not come to my house in the dead of night to torture me into memorizing vocabulary, but I keep the app around as a self-flagellating reminder to try it again one day.

There will always be a slight pang of guilt for not paying more attention in Señora Genao's class every time I clear my notifications.

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