Is Duolingo any good?

Well, according to www.usesignhouse.com, ‘there are over 500 million registered (Duolingo) users and 37 million are active once a month’. That’s a lot of people, and surely a sign of success. But my question is, how effective is learning a language with Duolingo?

I learnt my languages in different ways: French at school and university, with a year abroad; Spanish by living in Spain for 18 months and having lessons twice a week; German on my own with textbooks and Italian just with Duolingo. All of these methods worked, although my German has always been quite weak, and I no longer practice it. However, I reckon I could bring it back with some effort and a visit to the country.

So how did I get on with Italian Duolingo? I finished the course after about two years of studying for 15 -20 minutes a day, and having French and Spanish under my belt was definitely an advantage. I am now doing Duolingo’s personalised practice, called ‘Daily Refresh’. Looking at my progress, I am aware of all the tenses, and confident in using some of them. I feel I could go to Italy and strike up a conversation but here’s the rub – I can only talk about subjects for which I have the vocabulary. And this is where I think Duolingo lets itself down a bit. I can imagine I’d like to ask someone the way, but I can’t do that as the topic has not been taught. Nor could I walk into a campsite and book a tent pitch, or ask what’s on at the tourist office, or ask for a train timetable. Arguably, I could do most of these tasks on my phone, but I’m learning the language in order to talk to the people when I visit the country. I have lots of vocabulary about animals, food, colours and, apparently, clitic pronouns, but what I’d love is Duolingo’s approach to learning to be built around typical tourist conversations like the ones I’ve mentioned.  

There are many parallels between Duolingo’s approach to learning and LivelyLanguages’. Both teach the language by repetition, imitation, and manipulation of the sentences taught. This is a two-step process with LivelyLanguages, as you can pre-learn the material on your own via the online learning platform Quizlet, and then practice the conversations with others in the Zoom sessions. And all the language is built around either conversations with friends or tourist situations. So, if you’re studying French or Spanish with Duolingo, this marries really well with my LivelyLanguages material. You’ll find Quizlet links on the LivelyLanguages website so you can learn whole conversations and if you’d like to take the language learning a step further, you can attend the conversation sessions on Zoom. They’re not a crucial part to learning a language… but I wish I had them for Italian!

So, in essence, I think that Duolingo is great as far as it goes, and I know I’ve learnt a lot, but I’d enjoy Duolingo even better if the topics were more tourist-based and if there was more conversation practice.

What do you think of Duolingo? Let me know in the comments…