App-titude ‹ Claire Dunnington, Writer

Questions: Which of the apps that I use actually accomplish what they purport to do, and which apps don’t claim to advance a user’s skills in any particular way but actually do?

Considering the first question…

Duolingo:

The premise: advance your knowledge of a language or learn a new one.

The process: short lessons comprised of a mix of vocabulary, forming sentences using a word bank, translating written sentences into English, and transcribing spoke sentences into the language you’re studying.

Does it work?

With languages I already knew (Spanish, Latin), the lessons were great for refreshing my vocabulary and refamiliarizing myself with grammatical concepts, although to get an explanation of any concept one has to go to the Duolingo website – there’s no explicit instruction within the app itself. In one sense, it’s useful to learn inductively and come to your own conclusions about why the preterite tense is used in one case and the imperfect tense in another. However, it’s easy to feel lost without concrete explanations, and sometimes an increase in correct answers doesn’t reflect a better understanding of the language but simply an understanding of specific, repeated questions.

The lessons suffer, too, from their focus on a particular tense or concept. If I’m completing a lesson called “subjunctive mood,” I’m not being asked to distinguish between situations that call for the indicative and those that require the subjunctive (the hardest part!) – all I need is to have the subjunctive endings memorized, and I don’t even really need that, because there will likely be several examples in the first few questions from the lesson. I only need to remember them from there.

With languages I had a small amount of familiarity with (Russian via friends, Mandarin after studying it my freshman year of college), the results were both better and worse. I can read Cyrillic fluently now even if I don’t know what the words mean, and I can pull up a number of useful Mandarin phrases (“I don’t understand,” “What is that?” “Where is the bathroom?”). And much of the Russian that I can read I can also understand, or at least get the gist of. But I can’t generate my own sentences and thoughts, and if you put me in a room with a group of Russian or Mandarin speakers – even if they made an effort to speak slowly – I would have a hard time conversing spontaneously

Rhythm Trainer:

The premise: “Master essential rhythmic skills” by using the app for 15 minutes a day, tapping a finger on your phone’s screen in perfect time with the patterns given to you.

The process: The app plays a sequence of beats – in 3/4 or 4/4 time – while a metronome chirps in the background, and then the user attempts to mimic the sequence perfectly. The metronome continues and the pattern of notes remains on screen; the user’s taps appear below the original sequence in green (if the tap is close enough to being exactly on beat) or red (if it’s too far off). Getting a sequence right triggers a new sequence to appear, while getting it wrong requires repeated it at least twice correctly. If the user misses a particular pattern too many times, the tempo is lowered.

Does it work?

I will confess I typically don’t use Rhythm trainer under the conditions it requires for optimal success: I don’t always use headphones, I sometimes try to do my ten minutes (you only get ten minutes a day with the free version of the app, though it ends up being 11 or 12) on the subway or in a café with music blasting, rationalizing this as an effective way to learn to block out distractions, and I definitely don’t place my entire forearm on a table or other flat surface to tap out the beats. As such, I may not be the ideal case study. Also, I ran through all of the exercises pretty quickly and am now simply repeating them and attempting to stay at 80 bpm, the maximum tempo. The fact that I don’t think it would necessarily be worth it to purchase the app and access more time per day/additional exercises gives away my conclusion: it’s fun, and it probably does improve one’s overall sense of rhythm, but when I’m playing drums – with or without other musicians – two things I don’t have are 1) a metronome; 2) the beats in written form in front of me.

Pomodoro:

The premise: Work for a fixed amount of time, then take a break.

The process: 25 minutes is the default for the “work” period, which is followed by a five-minute break. After four cycles of this, you get a longer, 25-minute break. The name “pomodoro” comes from the analog version of the timer, which is shaped like a tomato, though it doesn’t seem an official “Pomodoro” app exists; the one I use is called “Focus Keeper” and although it clearly seeks to mimic pomodoros (tomato icon, red background for the timer), it isn’t officially associated. Some of the other members of my writing group use the pomodoro method, but with their kitchen timers or iPhones. It seems that “Pomodoro” has joined Band-Aid and Kleenex in the pantheon of brand names that have become stand-ins for the generic item.

Does it work?

It definitely makes sitting down to work – or standing up to fold laundry, or doing any task you’d rather avoid – less intimidating. I use it for writing, practicing music, meditating, and responding to work emails. For writing, I use it more or less as it’s intended, but not as much as intended. That is, my writing muscle is weak right now and I do one pomodoro (“one tomato” is what I log on my writing group’s Slack channel, in the form of the tomato emoji) a day, so the 5-minute break afterward is unnecessary. If I do two, though, I follow the pattern. When I meditate I reset to one of the five-minute breaks, and when I practice music I just blast right through the break and into the next work period. It’s easy to adjust the length of the pomodoro, but for some reason I persist in doing a 25-minute work period, working through the break, and continuing into the next 25-minute period, having to do math to gauge how long I’ve actually been playing.