Anyone who wants to learn a new language quickly, for fun, and for free has most likely stumbled upon the Duolingo app. But can this green bird help you learn?
For those who don’t know, Duolingo is a free language-learning app for anyone with a phone or computer. It advertises itself with a green owl mascot named ‘Duo’ that greets you with daily reminders to do lessons to continue learning the foreign language of your choice. Each lesson is relatively simple and includes a small quiz at the end of each unit. While motivational and easy to use, its lessons tend to lack what you would receive in a classroom.
“Duolingo doesn’t teach how to conjugate or how the syntax works, at least for my Spanish. In my experience, my high school class has done a far better job at teaching me and helping me understand the language.” Said Iris McGovern, a user of the app and fellow student of Quartz Hill High School. Many others agree that Duolingo cannot help users properly write the language they learn. In Spanish, it is essential to conjugate verbs when talking about specific people. The app doesn’t specify how this is done, confusing users in correctly interpreting sentences and phrases between various pronouns. Though it lacks information on how to write languages formally, there is still a lot Duolingo can teach you.
Duolingo’s website shows that it will help you improve your reading and listening skills in a foreign language, allowing you to excel even at the college level. As expressed by Iris, this leaves out writing and speaking that language. The study also fails to show proof of the practicality of their lessons in characters and symbols from other languages like Hindi or Japanese. The study only observed users who learned French or Spanish, two common languages, but nowhere near the variety of languages Duolingo makes available. Even with the app being unable to teach the user how to speak and write, users still find it fun just doing daily lessons and learning little by little.
“It allows me to learn languages other than the ones academically given…Overall, I enjoy it. It allows me to easily learn at my own pace,” said Kaylee Hernandez, an active user of Duolingo who is currently practicing Japanese and Spanish. Duolingo provides various languages to practice and try; you can even learn to read and understand multiple languages simultaneously, like Kaylee. The app also allows you to switch between languages if you struggle with one or lose interest. Duolingo is flexible with its users and is easy to use. Even if the app can’t help you thoroughly learn a new language, you can still have fun learning and understanding new languages with it. So, if you want to watch a foreign film without turning on subtitles or read a novel in a foreign language, spending a few hours on Duolingo over a few weeks can help you work toward those goals.
