A few people I know are regular users of Duolingo, an App designed to help you to learn new languages. It is described on the Duolingo website as “The world’s best way to learn a language”. The App keeps a record of users’ “streaks”, how many consecutive days they complete at least one lesson. I know one person who is on a 600-day streak with the App. This suggests that she has completed lessons on 600 consecutive days without a break, but as she explained to me last week she has missed the odd day in that run. There are ways to “freeze” or “revive” streaks to get around this. I have never used the App so cannot advise any further than this.

I do, however, have an unbroken streak on Wordle stretching back over 500 days. The streak would be over 800 days if hadn’t forgotten to play it on the following days last year: Monday 10 April, Sunday 16 July. For most of that time I was completing the daily Wordle challenge in the same browser, on the same laptop, without creating an account. I created an account during the summer, so can take my streak with me to other devices.

I am also building up a streak with JetPunk quizzes. I have mentioned the site a few times on this Blog since first using it in June 2022. Prompted by my daughter, I finally set up a JetPunk account in October. Now, when I complete quizzes I can earn points. Not all quizzes allow you to do so. There are many that are not eligible for points, especially the very short ones. This quiz, for example (“Countries that Start with O”) only has one answer (Oman), and is not eligible for points. This one, on the other hand (“Countries that Start with R”), only requires you to type four words, and you still get 5 points for it. The words “Republic of the ___” appear for you, so if you type “Congo Romania Russia Rwanda” you will get 5 points, more than one per word. There are other quizzes that take over 30 minutes to complete. And you still only get a maximum of 5 points for them.

My current JetPunk streak is 18 days. I had a longer streak running from 7 October to 13 November (38 days, inclusive), but for no good reason forgot to look at the site on 14 November, so my streak began again on 15 November.

As you collect points on the site, you are promoted through various Levels. I am currently on Level 55, out of a total of 96. This might sound like I’m over halfway to the top level, but it’s not as straightforward as that. 5,000 points gets you to Level 55, which takes at least 1,000 successfully completed quizzes (or 1,250 quizzes if you average scores of 4/5). But you need 41,000 points to get to Level 96, over 8,000 quizzes (or over 10,000 of them if you average 4/5). This means that I am about 12% of the way to the top Level, which will take me more than a year at my current rate of progress. If I had created an account in June 2022, when I first started using JetPunk, I might be there by now.

There’s a strong chance that you have your own streaks, whether or not you keep a record of them. You are reading these words on a screen, so you might be using Apps such as Duolingo and Wordle to build up streaks. Or you might be keeping your own record, as I do with my current streak of playing football every month. I wrote about it here in August. I have just put my name forward for this Friday’s game. All being well, by the end of this week, I will have extended my streak of playing 5-a-side (or similar) to 37 consecutive months. Is there an App for that?