A quick look at Duolingo
/Prologue
I've recently started using Duolingo to learn Portuguese.
Duolingo's "manifesto" is to be universally accessible and to make learning fun.
To the first point, Duolingo is free, and is tested on devices of various sizes and connection speeds. I've used Duolingo on a laptop via their website, as well as their iPhone and iPad apps.
Let's explore that second point a bit.
How does Duolingo aim to go head to head with with online games and other competitors for our attention?
First of all, Duolingo has a fairly frictionless onboarding process. There's no need to sign up to get started. You simply pick a language to learn and go.
After you have performed some exercises, you are prompted to create an account so you can track your progress.
Anatomy of a Learning Experience
Lessons are arranged in a sequence. Two or three new skills (each containing 2-9 lessons) might be available, but skills beyond that are not accessible unless you successfully test out.
Each lesson consists of a series of exercises including word matching, translating the spoken/displayed Portuguese sentence assembling the draggable English words, and typing the Portuguese words for a spoken sentence.
Gamification
Duolingo uses a variety of methods to encourage you to continue. Experience points (XP) are awarded for every successfully completed lesson, and Duolingo allows you to choose how many XP you want to complete to meet your daily goal. It also tracks and rewards your streaks to encourage daily practice.
Duolingo also awards Lingots, a sort of virtual currency you can use to purchase extra lesson packs or items to bling up Duo, the owl avatar that guides you through the program. Note, for example, the fetching velvet jacket and monocle in the two screens above.
All of these success screens are accompanied with a triumphant flourish of trumpets.
Beyond the App
Duolingo also uses email to encourage you to practice. Those emails play upon all of the various incentives within the application: XP, streaks, goals, levels, and the notion that I might want to make an owl avatar happy.
Cute, but does it work?
You might ask, beyond the various incentives and such, how useful is Duolingo for learning a language? I would say they've definitely created a fun and engaging user experience.
The lessons seem to build fairly logically as you progress. New words and concepts are introduced in themed skills, and old words and concepts are periodically brought back up to keep them fresh in the mind.
I've been practicing almost daily, and I do feel that I'm actually learning.
Yes, but...
Duolingo - at least my experience of it learning Portuguese - does have some weaknesses in its teaching methods.
Sometimes when new words are introduced, they are presented like the image at right.
While graphically pleasing, I answered the question "Which is 'the chair'?" by seeing and selecting the chair illustration. This doesn't really teach me that much.
Exercises that involve matching Portuguese words and their English counterparts seem to be much more useful.
Another chief complaint is the large number of fairly useless sentences that are used in the lessons. I suppose one might theoretically need to utter the sentence shown below some day.
And perhaps in Brazil there is a more urgent need to be able to say "The snake is in the boot" than there is in Brooklyn. But generally speaking, I think Duolingo would be more useful if it focused more on more practical phrases and conversational scenarios.
