Daily Dose of English 149
Streaks
Daily Dose of English 149
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about streaks. Streaks are an interesting thing out there. And the reason I wanna talk about streaks today is because as I'm recording this day, I had a video, I put out a video on the Refold YouTube channel, which is the channel that I make regular YouTube content for about language learning. And I think it's actually a really good video with a good message and a good purpose. And I wanna talk a little bit about it here, live, no editing and see what happens. So a streak is when you do something every single day or it's the number of days that you've done something in a row or number of something that has been successful in a row. So for example, a sports team could be on a winning streak or what else? There's a lot of different things that can happen for streaks. Nothing else is coming to mind other than successful learning. Right, so you could have a streak of 10, 20, 30 days of learning English, and that's a streak you could have. Some of the more famous ones are Duolingo streaks. A lot of people talk about their Duolingo streaks being very, very long, thousands of days even. And that's sort of interesting to me. because streaks are actually not a very good measure of success. And that's what I wanna talk about today, because streaks are a fundamental part of what's called gamification of turning something into more of a game. And they're used absolutely everywhere. If you open like any mobile game or anything like that, there's gonna be some kind of streak or daily goal or something like that that is trying to get you to have a streak. A lot of apps, like I said, Duolingo will do this and their goal is to get you coming back every single day because that will increase how much you spend on the game, how much money you spend. Specifically with apps like that, they'll even offer you the option to fix a streak if it's broken by paying money, which is very messed up and doesn't make any real sense, right? Your streak is for you, not for anybody else. And so you're gonna pay somebody else for you to feel better about your streak, which isn't a great thing in the first place. And that's what I wanna talk about. So there's a couple of problems with streaks, but the first one is that it doesn't really take into account the quality of your learning at all, in the case of language learning. It also, I mean, in a lot of cases, it doesn't actually take into account the quality of the thing, just that you did it or not. So it's a yes or no system there, which can be fine, right, if it's helpful. But the problem with language learning, and like, for example, Duolingo, is that a lot of people will go in for a minute, they'll just do something, and they'll leave. They're not learning anything. They're just trying to maintain their streak. Oh, another one that I've seen it with, um, is with Snapchat. I never used Snapchat. That was not my thing, but pretty much everybody my age and school use it all the time. And I saw people who would every day, they would just send a picture of like the floor to somebody and I'd be like, what are you doing? And they said, Oh, it's to maintain the streak. Like what? You're not saying anything to this person. You're just sending the picture of like the floor or even a black screen. Like I've seen people send black screens and it just says the word streak on it. And that's like seen as normal or was seen as normal. I don't know if it's a thing anymore. I have no idea. I don't know anybody that uses Snapchat. But the same sort of thing goes for language learning. If your only goal is to keep your streak going, that's not actually affecting your language learning. That's just affecting your streak. And so if you want your language learning to be better, your streak might not matter. Rather, your streak doesn't necessarily reflect your language learning quality. And so the example, so I posted this video and somebody made a comment in one of the refold servers and I was responding to it. Because I said in the video that somebody who has learned for four days, then took a break, then five days, has learned for nine out of 10 days. And that is almost the same as somebody who learned for 10 out of 10 days. But person A has a five day streak and person B has a 10 day streak. Those numbers look very different. However, they've learned for 90% of the same amount of time. So there's not a huge difference in the amount of effort and time they put in. It's just that streak that's different. And when you look at that over the course of an entire year, it becomes more obvious. So I gave the example of somebody who learns for two hours every single day. And there's two different timelines. In timeline one, they learn every single day. They don't skip a single day. In timeline two, they skip every Wednesday, let's say. They skip one day a week. Person A, so the person who has a complete unbroken streak, they don't miss any days, they're going to have about 100 hours more than the other person. They have something like 730 hours. No, if it's 365, yeah, like a little over 700 hours, I think. And person B would have a little over 600 hours. So they have about 100 hours difference. but that's about 85% of the same number of hours if you do the math. on this, right? So they're doing about 85% of the same effort into the language. But the big difference, if you look at the streak, is totally different. It's not 85%. Person A has a streak of 365 days, while person B has a streak of six days. That's the maximum streak they're ever going to have because they're always gonna take off this one day a week. And so, Those numbers look so different, right? Somebody with 365 versus six days, right? Obviously, if you look to just those numbers, you'd go, oh, the person with 365 is a better language learner. But that's not really true. They're learning for basically the same amount of time, like 85% the same number of hours, which is what's important. And there's a very high likelihood that person B, the person taking breaks, is more healthy about their language learning. They're taking breaks, they're spending time with their family, whatever it is, they might have a better relationship with language learning and actually continue for longer with this. So they might end up doing this for two, three, four years, whereas person A gets kind of burned out. It's too much and they end up stopping for a couple months. right but there's their highest streak is still 365 it looks way better than the other person and that's the other reason why streaks can be kind of damaging because they they end up elevating the wrong thing that you should be focusing on and So now to talk about my streaks, I have a 1,100 day streak on Anki. I've been using Anki every single day for over 1,000 days. I'm pretty sure I've done some kind of language learning on all those days as well, like apart from Anki. But the only reason I was able to get there is because I didn't care about that. I don't really care. It's not something that I'm focused on. Sort of like with brushing my teeth. I have a streak of, like a decade of brushing my teeth every day, probably, or more, right? Probably over 3,000 days of brushing my teeth every single day because I like to brush my teeth, it feels good, and it's a habit that I just have. That's sort of where Anki and language learning has become for me. I don't necessarily do it because I because I wanna maintain my streak or whatever it is, it's a part of my life that I'm not going to skip because it would be as weird as like not brushing my teeth or eating or something like that. Sure, it's not the same as like physically a necessity like eating or drinking water would be, but it's the same sort of idea. If it becomes such a big part of your life, it's going to become a streak at some point. And so to end this with an alternate, I recommend that you use an idea of success rate or hit rate of some kind. That is where you're just dividing your successful days over a certain number of days. We're currently working on the refold app, which is using six weeks. So it's how many successful days do you have over the last six weeks? And that's your hit rate. And that percentage is going to change because it moves with you. It's always the last six weeks instead of getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so as you increase your hit rate, your hit rate goes from 70%, 80%, 95, 99, eventually it becomes 100%. And that's a streak. And so when you're not focusing on streaks, you eventually do get a good streak, right? Somebody that has 100% hit rate for the course of six weeks or longer, they end up building a large streak without wanting to. And that's where streaks are good because you're not actually caring about the streaks and not focused on them. You naturally will build them up because you get better at the thing that you're doing and the streak isn't what's holding you in. I could talk a little more about streaks, but we've hit the 10 minute mark and I don't want to make this video too long, but you can definitely watch the other video or my video on the Revault YouTube channel about streaks Um, I think you, I think it's called like, um, thousand how to get a thousand day Anki streak or something like that. So you can look it up if you want. And also I'd appreciate your subscription there if you're not already subscribed. I make videos in English there that are made for native speakers, but also for you if you want. So I would definitely appreciate the support there. But that's all that I have for today. Thank you so much for listening to A Daily Dose of English with me, with Ben. And I will see you again tomorrow for another episode. Episode 150, how exciting. I'll see you then. Bye.
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