Duolingo: Tips for Diamond League

✍️ Written on 2021-10-12 in 786 words.
Part of languages reflection

Motivation

I just finished a 356 streak on Duolingo. Time to write some Duolingo-related article.

Duolingo has competitive leaderboards. I want to summarize tips how to get the “Legendary” badge.

Background

via duolingo.fandom.com

  • You need to complete at least 10 lessons and must be of age 13 or older to join the leaderboard.

  • Once you finish a lesson, you will necessarily join the leaderboard. You are assigned to a group of 30 people which finished their first lesson of the week around the same time.

  • Within the group of 30 people, you will get a place based on your experience points (XPs). Fundamentally, 10 experience points correspond to finishing one Duolingo lesson (roughly 5–10 minutes of work).

  • The leaderboard is reset on Sunday at 00:00 UTC. You will receive lingots depending on the league.

  • The league advance from {Bronze, Silver, …} to {…, Obsidian, Diamond}. If you finish a week in the top-5, you advance next week into the next higher league. If you finish as one of the bottom-7, you get degraded to the previous league. Otherwise remain at the same level.

Fundamentally, advancing in leagues is competitive, collecting experience points is key, and how does not reach the first place in the top league (= Diamond league)?

Achievements

Diacritics issue on duolingo

A “Legendary” badge on your profile was my motivation to finish #1 in the Diamond League once. But not just mine. Some users even document the moment: “What happened if u finished first place in the diamond league Duolingo app”.

Understanding the constraints

  1. You cannot spend too much time on Duolingo. You still got some life, right?

  2. You don’t want to focus just on experience points (XP). Learning a language is about practicing {reading, writing, speaking, listening}… not finishing questions as fast as possible.

  3. I usually make 20 XPs per day. 7 days a week … this usually gets me 140 XPs. In Diamond league, I have seen leaders finishing with 800 XPs as well as 10,000 XPs.

  4. Some users collect a huge amount of XPs early. Some users want to pass you right before the deadline. You need to react/prepare accordingly.

Tips

  1. It is hard to stay in the Diamond league consistently. It is feasible to remain in Obsidian league over several weeks. Pick a week where you have more time for Duolingo and advance to Diamond league the week before.

  2. The group of 30 people is crucial. Since all people finishing their first lesson this week around the same time, you can control it. Finish your first lesson as late as possible in the target week. Since I still want to maintain my streak, so I finish the first lesson about 24 hours after last-week’s deadline. You are assigned to a group of similar-minded people who are late-submitters as well. Overachievers will be more likely in the early groups.

  3. Distribute work over the week - obviously.

  4. Practice different languages. It is easy in Esperanto to miss some accusative case. In Kiswahili, you mostly just need to recall vocabularies in Kiswahili.

  5. If you finished a complete language tree already, you have more choices which lessons you want to gain XPs with.

  6. There are several measures to get more points. Checkpoints can make you advance fast. The new “Legendary” practice also gives you about 150 XPs in just (roughly) 25 minutes of work.

  7. The result of your achievement might not be visible right away. I got the Legendary badge somewhat during the next week. Be patient!

Resources

Conclusion

Following these tips should ease your way to get the “Legendary” badge.

Good luck!