Oops I had a 10 hour shift yesterday and didn’t get around to Duolingo-ing. RIP my streak ;-;
I dropped my streak on Tuesday and kind of forgot to play all week, whoops. Will probably get started again on Monday, hopefully I didn’t forget everything I learned.
Hey, I have a question for everyone. Initially I had a ‘Strengthen’ practice button, but now it’s this one-minute timed thing that I don’t really like and is basically useless for broad refreshers. Anyone happen to know how to get the other command back? Or is it one of those, ‘can’t use beyond a point’ deals?
Looks like you may be part of an A/B test. Other people reported it here. Sounds like the worst kind of A/B test honestly: an incredibly disruptive one. See the comment by burner0 on that page if you want to check if you are indeed part of it.
Looks like timed quizzes are also a thing you can (could?) purchase with Lingots, but either that is no longer the case or I need to learn more words before it appears.
A lot of those posts are 4 months old. According to a recent one on there, no one has Progress Quizzes anymore.
Are you talking about the “Strengthen Skills” button on the right, in the Daily Goal section? If you’re on the mobile app it’s just a blue barbell in the corner.
When I choose it, it gives me an option of a timed practice or not timed practice (on the browser).
It used to be a barbell. now it’s a stopwatch.
I use the android client via emulator. It does not give me an option. One day it just straight up replaced the other one.
Huh, that’s weird. My android never had the option for timed practice. I hope that’s not another “feature” they’re rolling out for everybody.
Okay now it’s screwing with me. It still has the stopwatch icon, but now it’s the untimed practice. Duo, the hell.
FYI to anyone who is concerned about losing their streak. I think the standard Streak Freeze power-up doesn’t actually take into effect until your streak would actually be lost. I bought one yesterday and it wasn’t used up today. You’d think they’d word it so that was obvious, but…
And the better your streak is, the more lingots you’ll earn to buy that power-up, so eventually you’ll never lose your streak. I think every 10 days gets you 1/10 of the total in lingots? i.e. 50 day streak is 5, 60 is 6, 70 is 7 etc.
It’s been about three months since this started, so I think it’s worthwhile to bump this thread in case anybody missed out on joining this group or joined the forum since then.
Makes sense!
Also I have SERIOUSLY been fucking up studying recently, especially on Duolingo :’( But on the bright side, I’m getting back into Wanikani and am surprised to find that I remembered a real decent amount of the kanji – way more than I expected after a 3-ish month hiatus. I guess that means it kinda works for me, huh? I’m thinking of taking the plunge and paying for the rest of it now 
A friend of mine who knows way more Japanese than me also recommended it, so there’s that too…
I feel that at some point I’m going to need to properly learn grammar before diving in to kanji, since Duolingo just threw me a major curveball by starting to use a new tense (I think?) in Activity 2 (which is over 2/3 through all of the lessons). And since Duolingo is all about memorizing how things seem to go together rather than being told how it works first, it was a sudden brick wall for me. I can probably get past it in time, but it’ll take a while to understand how it’s supposed to work.
I don’t think I’ll stick with Japanese within Duolingo for long after I reach the end. I might go back to try and properly memorize more words and their pronunciation (at the very least, I really ought to remember how to count to 9 and remember the kanji for 10s, 100s, etc.), but otherwise it’ll probably be better to move on. I guess I could keep my streak up even while continuing to learn with something else though.
But hey, at least Duolingo made one major improvement in the past few months: when you are constructing sentences, fragments are pronounced when you tap them.