Why Gamified Language Learning Apps Stall You at Beginner Chinese

You have held a four-hundred-day streak, you can order 牛肉面 without hesitation, and you can introduce yourself to a stranger and ask for the bill — and yet the news headline above the noodle shop still looks like a wall of pictograms, and somewhere around month nine you started to suspect the green owl was the only one in the building congratulating you. The streak, it turns out, had been measuring the wrong thing all along.