Duolingo - What I think about it

Hello dear readers.

Many of you might have heard of Duolingo, a completely free language learning app. It became quite popular in the language learning community and there are many reasons therefore. I personally did learn with Duolingo and therefore am going to analyse this website. Let me first introduce it to you, how it works, what services it provides to you and later on I am going to tell you what I think about, whether I would recommend it to you.

Duolingo is completely free. You do not have to pay anything. This is done because the founders want to create a "free-knowledge-world" where you do not have to pay for anything. The content Duolingo provides is created by volunteers and you can easily create a language course there by yourself too. Notice that this is the Desktop version. There are also versions available for Android, Windows Phone and iOS but they differe a bit from each other and from the pc-version but are mainly the same. 

The language Courses are divided into three stages: 

1. Hatching, where you can not learn the language but see how far languages have developed yet and you can activate a function that will notify you as soon as the course reaches the second stage
2. Beta Stage, here you can actually learn with the course but there are some errors, some bugs and it is still under developement. It might be good to learn but not as specialized as the third stage.
3. Full language course. This is the actual language course you might want to do. They have still got some bugs and will get updates but rarely.

First of all you have to create yourself a profile and select your mother tongue. Than you have to choose the course you want to do. But here is a major problem of Duolingo: There are more than 20 languages available for learning! But only for English learners. When I started learnign Swedish, I had to realize that I have to choose the English - Swedish course because for German people there are only French, English and Spanish to learn. For other languages there are less. So if you are comfortable in reading English, there will not be a problem, but if you do, there will.

You can choose the following languages (For English speakers):

1. Spanish
2. French
3. German
4. Italian
5. Portuguese
6. Russian
7. Dutch
8. Swedish
9. Irish
10. Turkish
11. Danish
12. Bokmål (Norwegian)
13. Polish
14. Hebrew
15. Esperanto
16. Ukrainian
17. Vietnamese
18. Welsh
19. Hungarian
20. Greek
21. Romanian
22. Swahili (hatching) 
23. Czech (hatching)
24. Hindi (hatching)
25. Korean (hatching)
26. Klingon (hatching)
27. Indonesian (hatching)

As you see there are almost only european languages and many languages you might expect (Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Japanese) are not included. 

Now to the function of Duolingo.

The overlay is done quite simple. I chose Polish as an example to show how it is done. First of all you can do either a placement test if you allready have got some knowledge in the language or you start with the basics. 

on the right handed side you can see your progress. At the beginning you can choose how much experience points (xp) you want to aquire per day (1-50) to reach your daily goal. This helps you to stay motivated during the time of learning. Below there is a leaderboard where you can see the progress of your friends.
The single lessons are divided into seperate areas like food, clothing, verbs, plurals, etc..

Let us take a further look on one lesson:

There are, depending on the lesson, certain different sublessons. You can find grammatical explanations undearneath. You can also allready test out your knowledge using the yellow button if you want to skip the chapter.
After ending the lesson you are able to go on with the next one and you will be able to do more lessons.







The concept of Duolingo is very simple. You only have to translate texts from one language to the other. Sometimes you have to write down what is spoken, sometimes you have to click on pictures resembling the given word. There are also multiple choise exercises for translations.

(here a example for a Swedish sentence you shall translate). New words are marked in yellow.
A great thing is that you do not have to write every word 100% correctly, typos are also counted. Another great feature is the Discuss button down below where you can read what other people wrote about the lesson or specific idioms. When you do a correct translation, your progress will continue, if you did it wrong, you have to repeat the sentence or a variation afterwards.


After completing a lesson you earn xp for your daily goal. If you reach your daily goal. Your streak (the yellow flame in the first picture) will go on, if you don`t, the counter will start again from zero onwards. You also receive lingots (the red gems) from which you can buy yourself special offers like a streak-freezer or new skins for the owl called Lingo. This is all done to help you staying motivated.

Another major function is the repitition of lessons. Your strenght bars shrink with time and you have to repeat them in order to stay at an expert level. This really helps you to remind the vocabulary and you can also strengthen some lessons by doing other ones that include these. For example you strengthen "People" and "Adjectives 1" at once because the first one includes many adjectives.


Now to my opinion.
I learned a lot with Duolingo when starting with Swedish and I still do, because it is really fun to do and it helps me staying motivated. To test it, I also did some exercices in Russian, Turkish, French and German (just for fun, as I am a
native german speaker) and I soon realized a major issue you have got with Duolingo:

It is really good to learn languages thate are closely related to your own (swedish - english) for example because of the similar structures. Your brain will automatically assimilate them. But there lies the problem. For example at turkish there is a completely different word order, it is agglutanitive (adds suffixes and prefixes instead of prepositions, etc.). So you can not assimilate the new order easily because you have to give the translations in a correct English manner. So you have to change between two different systems while learning one of them.

For learning languages that are part of the Indoeuropean language family (for example russian and french) I can really recommend Duolingo. It is great fun and it deals with really interesting content. You have got lessons dealing with sports, some with travel, family and co, but you do not have to repeat them.

But be warned! The sentences you have to translate are not often good. Sometimes it mixes words together like: "The turtle eats the child's food" or "There is a man with a knife behind the curtain".

That is sometimes funny but often confusing because you can not guess the words out of the context.

So concluding I can say that I really like Duolingo for learning Swedish. I have got my problems with it while learning turkish but maybe you won`t. I think it is good to get some basic vocabulary and some basic knowledge of easy structures. And the greatest feature is the price: nothing! Absolutely available for free.

"We should learn languages because language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly."                                                                                                                   -Kató Lomb

Thank you a lot for reading my blog. If you have got questions, recommendations, critics and tips for me, write them down into the comment section, thank you.
- Alex