Duolingo’s Music and Math Courses

Ramen Junkie September 20, 2024 No Comments

Man, talk about both exciting and frustrating all at once. Duolingo launched both a Math and Music course recently, but it was iOS only, initially, and I use Android. It would come eventually though, and it apparently has, and I missed it, or at least, missed the announcement, if there was one. I have been periodically checking and they were not there until fairly recently.

I don’t really have a lot of need or interest in the Math course, but I wasn’t in a good place to try out the music course, so I started off on the Math one for a bit. I am already great at math, I mean, seriously, I have probably done more math than most people have, between school and hobbies and work. But hey, why not.

From what I have done, it’s, kind of weird? It’s all pretty basic Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and fractions so far. But there are often these blocks instead of actual numbers. Which I kind of get is intended to encourage counting, but some of the presentation on the groupings isn’t as consistent as it could be. Plus it just, feels like adding an extra counting step to slow you down. And no, I am not individually counting blocks, I used to count as a job, I can count groups very quickly. Which is also why I noticed the occasional inconsistency that almost felt like it was done purposely as a trip.

Maybe it was.

The real fun part though is that, it’s smart enough to recognize “goofy answers”. Like it has a block of squares to shade, 3/5ths or something. You can shade a random assortment of the 100 squares, just so long as it’s 60 total shaded. Or if it gives you an open ended question like “2/6+1/6”. Sure, you could put 3/6, or 1/2, but it will also take 3987/7974.

But enough math nonsense, my real interest is in the Music course. I really want to learn music, it was one of my “Decade resolutions” in 2020. To be done by 2030. I have really been looking forward to the music course.

And I like it. Even if so far it’s just banging out C, D, and E on the scales. It’s that repetition I want so I can better read sheet music.

But oh my God it’s frustrating as hell to actually do.

And not because it’s hard, but because there is a lot of weird lag and stutter. Every few courses you do a song snipped using notes you know, and so many times I miss a few because it… Just… rand… om… ly… stop…s and… stu… tt…ers…. As it slides along.

At the bare minimum, it’s distracting.

I don’t honestly understand WHY either. I would blame processing power, but I have a decent enough phone that can do other rhythm based games, just fine, often at a much much faster BPM.

I feel like part of the problem is the weird “holding” it sometimes asks for on notes. Like if I could just tap the notes to the beat, everything would run fine, but it often requires these half beat holds, which only exacerbates the stuttering issue since it causes more stutter, and means you can’t just move on and get the next note and try to compensate for the stutter.

It’s just really frustrating. I doubt I go very far in the course as is, as much as I really want to.