Good vs. Best

People have a very natural desire for perfection - we want the best version of things, we want to perform the best, etc. We often want this even to a problematic degree; we want things to be perfect badly enough that we end up hurting ourselves in some way.

We talk about this problem with sayings like "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," or with jokes about people who spend more time planning than doing. We fight it with concepts like Minimum Viable Products. I know I got a lot more productive around the house once I heard the phrase, "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly" - the idea being that, say, washing half of the dishes now is far better than washing none of them; if you can muster up the effort to do some housework, don't let the inability to muster up the effort to do all of the housework stop you.

But for all the good these ideas have done me, I think I do overuse them sometimes. Giving myself permission to do a poor job at something has definitely led to me doing work that wouldn't have gotten done at all otherwise - but it's also definitely led to me not doing a good job at something that I might have otherwise.

This is a problem, but I think as problems go it's a pretty interesting one. It's always fun to try to find more efficient approaches to problems, and that's basically what this is, just in a meta sense; it's the question of the most efficient approach to efficiency. Even better, spending too much time on solving this problem could bring things to an even more meta layer, where I'm being inefficient in my efforts to efficiently solve the problem of efficient problem solving in my life! But I think it's fun to noodle on in spare time.

For one example, we can return to the well of my efforts in studying Japanese. On days I don't feel much like studying, I'll usually just do my Anki flashcards. This is undoubtedly better than not doing my Anki flashcards, especially because when I get behind on them, they wind up becoming the only form of studying that I do even on days when I would go further - if I have like 600 cards to do, it's hard convince myself to do anything else until they're done, but it's also hard to convince myself to do more than one or two hundred in one sitting. But I haven't spent much time asking the question of if Anki is really the best use of my time anymore; if I'm only doing one thing, would it be better to read a manga, or watch an anime? But if I'm not only doing one thing, then Anki is definitely an important thing to include, and I can't do Anki without making sure to do it every day... see, it's a conundrum.

The thing that makes me think about all this is actually Duolingo. Duolingo has undergone some fascinating changes since Cassie and I started using it a couple years ago; they've added new exercise types, they've reorganized how they order lessons, they've added a bunch. In many ways, I think it's significantly better than it used to be, and one of the best apps to use if you're only going to use one. No other app that I've used - I've used several, but definitely not nearly all of them - touches on all the skills it does. It's especially noteworthy that it includes speaking practice now.

BUT.

No other app that I've used has been so gamified, and I think Duolingo gamifies itself to a detrimental degree. It is so, so possible to do Duolingo every day, have a massive streak, and to have learned absolutely nothing. It's entirely up to you to learn with it; if you hold yourself to standards that the app definitely does not, you can learn a lot; but if your primary goal is just to maintain your streaks and do your daily quests, you're only going to be learning how to game the system.

I'm trying to use it more to hit the skills that it has drills for, like speaking, but it pushes so hard for all its gamey B.S. that it's legitimately distracting. I'm not at all trying to maintain my streak, which means every time I open the app there's all these annoying "motivational" messages. I try to avoid distracting myself with my phone, but Duolingo does this thing where they change the app icon regularly in an intentional effort to draw your attention to it when you're doing something else on your phone - which I think is leading to me uninstalling it and only using Duolingo on my computer. It's just funny that all the things they're doing to push engagement I think are ultimately distracting from language learning - ostensibly the point of the app!

P.S. I would also be remiss if I didn't talk here about how Duolingo horribly misrepresents a lot of Japanese grammatical concepts, to such a degree that I do not recommend anybody use it for their primary or maybe even secondary source of Japanese instruction; I think it'll hurt more than it helps. It's great for practice drills and reinforcement as long as you already know how sentences work and what words mean, but if it's your only source of knowledge, you're going to think that "がほしい" is one word and a verb, and it is neither of those things. (Describing ほしい as a verb is at least somewhat understandable, but if you don't know, take my word for it: treating が like it's attached to ほしい is indefensible.)