At time of writing, I am on Day 1335 of learning French on Duolingo. I am very, very good at Duolingo. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean I’m very good at speaking French; in fact, put me in front of a French speaker and I’ll be asking them to slow down and perhaps even draw me a picture.
If you’ve not used the app yourself, let me introduce you to Duo, an exceptionally needy, green owl character who will ruin your life with constant reminders to refresh your language skills daily to maintain your streak and not let your app friends down horribly.
Any amount of your chosen language per day will keep Duo happy (though you will hurtle down the league tables if you don’t accumulate enough points that week).
The modules do incorporate varied topics and test you on reading, speaking, listening and writing language skills…but unless you pay even more for premium premium plus Duolingo, you have to figure out grammatical errors yourself because it won’t tell you exactly why your incorrect answer was wrong.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m learning French or just playing daily French-accented games as quickly as possible in order to win points, receive a pat on the back from a cartoon bird of prey and move on with my day, streak intact.
This month, Duolingo introduced ‘pranks’, the absolute cherry on top of features that are non-conducive to learning. By ‘pranking’ another user, you can have your avatar’s head pop up on their screen for a few moments, blocking their access to the lesson and slowing their progress (seemingly so that you can nip up the league table at their expense in the meantime). I was about to write that there’s a reason no one has thought to barge into an in-service training session, flap around for a bit, then wonder why no one picked anything up but then I remembered that some of us have actually worked for NHS departments.
I digress.
The reason Duolingo comes to mind this month is because it mirrors something we can do remarkably well in MSK practice: staying active (maintaining our streak) without always building towards progress.
This month’s Mag articles show us just how much work is being done to improve practice.
Derek Griffin’s Unfogging Fibromyalgia tackles a condition that remains widely misunderstood; getting to the bottom of the science behind it. Similarly, Julia Gover’s The Back Story asks us to look not at what we know about chronic low back pain, but at how we explain it, and whether our narratives genuinely empower patients. Elsewhere, complexity itself comes under scrutiny. Fraser Philp’s Shoulder Instability: It’s All Getting a Bit Silly highlights how an ever-expanding array of classification systems prove that more structure doesn’t always mean more clarity. Tom Jacobs’ ACL and PFP: Related Risk Factors challenges us to think beyond neat diagnostic silos, showing how interconnected problems often share roots that are easy to miss. And then there’s Mark Reid’s The Private Practice Barometer, which shows us the data as to how we are actually working and the impact that is having on private clinicians - because learning doesn’t just happen in journals.
Taken together, these articles represent what we have been doing well: questioning assumptions, revisiting explanations and trying to make sense of increasing complexity. But they also quietly expose where we could do better: by prioritising understanding over accumulation, coherence over completeness, and communication over mere correctness.
Because, as with my French, it’s one thing to keep the streak alive. It’s another to be truly fluent.
