While Duolingo does have more than a few issues, it’s hard to complain about something that’s free. That said, some people would prefer using their study time on more practical sentences.Īnother issue is that Duolingo completely ignores the culture of the language you’re learning. While it’s completely silly, you are at least learning to construct sentences, and they might even make you smile. You can find some pretty funny ones on this twitter account. While many of the sentences are normal enough, there are quite a few that you would never use in real life. Speechling can help a lot with this, and I’d suggest checking it out.Īnother issue involves the types of sentences that Duolingo teaches. If you try this with Duolingo, you’re going to sound ridiculous. In either case, sentences can end up sounding extremely unnatural.Īn important part of language learning is listening to and mimicking natural language. Other languages use text-to-speech audio, which means humans never actually said the words you’re listening to. For sentences in some languages, it sounds as if each word was recorded individually as opposed to recording sentences as a whole. One thing that I found to be really frustrating is the audio used in the Duolingo courses. Most exercises are pretty similar: there’s lots of translating, matching pictures to words, and some listening practice.
The exercises aren’t particularly hard, and you’ll probably be able to fly through most of them. Luckily, you can click on the words of a sentence to see a translation. Some important words may be first introduced with pictures, but others will show up for the first time in an exercise where you’re supposed to translate a sentence. Most of the material is taught simply through repetitive exercises. These are short mini units centered around a specific topic, such as family, emotions, routines, or weather.īecause of the way that the Skills are organized, you’ll likely end up learning some fairly obscure vocabulary before more important essentials.ĭuolingo also doesn’t have typical lessons like you may expect from a language learning platform. The fact that they’ve opened the doors for so many people to begin learning a new language is really an amazing thing.ĭuolingo organizes its content around Skills. They’ve even had some fun by adding fantasy languages like High Valyrian and Klingon. With over 30 languages available, the number of users on Duolingo is truly staggering. There are currently over 21 million students learning Spanish on Duolingo. The fact that it’s completely free to use has opened up language learning to people all over the world, regardless of their economic situation. (Our rating of Duolingo increased to 4 stars as they’ve made some improvements since this video was published.) Duolingo is a great way to get introduced to learning a new language, and millions of people have done just that.
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