A Linguist explains how to make duolingo actually work

Too many polyglots and linguists belittle Duolingo. What they fail to realize is Duolingo is a wonderful first step on the ladder towards acquiring a language. I'm grateful it gave me a start in Russian. Sure, after about 4 months I outgrew Duolingo, but it did the job required of it; it got me up and running (well crawling) -- and for free! My personal view is Duo takes you to roughly A2.

Unfortunately, not all languages get the same attention in Duolingo. I was shocked when my friend who is learning German showed me she can see whole grammar explanations in the app. I'm learning Finnish and there's nothing like that. It's a guessing game why the noun form suddenly changed.

As a translator I learned more languages after turning 40 than before or in school. And DuoLingo made it possible.

I love Duolingo! I am on day 840 in Italian. I am not fluent, just enjoying the learning of a new language. I am 71😊

Thank you for not mocking Duolingo. For me Duolingo was like a gateway drug to Turkish. The Turkish course has a lot of flaws, but it's fun, and I still use it. It helped me decide to invest in a pro instructor via Italki.

My husband and I learned French to be able to go around Paris without a group or tour guide. Duolingo worked for us. We would practice what we learned at home with each other everyday and watched shows in French. We were able to go around Paris by ourselves and escape the covid lockdown by watching the news.

What I like about Duolingo is the streak. Somehow it encourages me to keep practicing every day, even after the first few months when I am no longer feeling driven and focused on learning Russian. I am approaching a year long streak, and while I know I have not gotten as far as I could’ve if I’d used many other forms of learning, it has kept me going long after I would’ve quit. I’m so busy with school, homemaking, and my kids, I know I would’ve dropped the habit months ago without a streak.

Duolingo is the reason I have found a love of languages. For years I would get irritated because people would call Duolingo useless when it is far from useless - it's just free. People in the language learning community seem to have a serious problem with free resources as a whole, for whatever reason, and it feels extremely elitist to those who can't afford a 50$ subscription for sub-par lessons. I don't agree with many of the money-snatching moves Duo has made lately, but having Duo as a resource is still better than having no free resources at all. Youtube and Duolingo are the best free resources for language learning.

It hurts me so bad to hear you say people should be more intentional in their language learning. Not because you said it but becase its so true! Why anyone believes that anyone can be native in 6 weeks by taking some miraculous course is beyond me. Truly learning a new language to a native level is arduous work filled with diligent study. Thank you, for bringing light to subject very close to my heart.

In my professional (French and German teacher) opinion, there are only 2 motivations that can lead you to achieve fluency: 1) you REALLY want to and/or 2) you REALLY have to. Having both is a plus. Once the motivation(s) is (are) there, it is a matter of your brain sorting out what you need to become fluent -- a teacher can point out possibilities, but you personally need to figure out how your brain works. Also, the proper motivation gives you the necessary staying power. Without at least one of them, all the money in the world will not help.

I've used Duolingo now for French for an average of at least 1 hour per day (one morning session, one evening session) for the past 207 days, after starting it as a New Years resolution at the beginning of the year. It is absolutely astonishing how much French I've learned in this time. I'm currently starting Section 5, which is approx. 80 units into the 209 total. I came into it just having very basic knowledge of counting to 10 from elementary school French and now I can comprehend French tweets & articles, watch French TV and movies, and listen to music picking up more and more on what is being said as my learning progresses. Even though I may not understand it all, I can identify grammatical devices like the passé composé or future tenses, for example, that are being used on words that I haven't yet learned the meaning of but may be able to piece it together from context clues. Their podcast for French has been extremely helpful too in hearing basic spoken French and learning to comprehend what is being said. I also switched my phone and computer to French, and with that, apps all auto switch so there's a lot of immersion happening. I've heard that their French course has always been their most developed (it was the first to get the new "path" format) and is constantly getting updated. In the most recent update, they have a new feature at the end of the stories (I assume powered by AI) that asks you open response type questions to get you thinking and writing in French that they didn't have before. Examples of the open response are "Did you like this story? Why?" or "What happened in this story?" or "What did [character] do?" and it analyzes your response and gives you bonus xp. I've also noticed that it has started asking me questions in French, rather than English. From what I've heard from friends using it for other languages, the French course definitely is more effective and robust than some other courses, but success in the French course is certainly what you make of it. If you use it for 5 or 15 minutes a day, you'll get very little from it. If you use it consistently and persistently, you'll be shocked at the results.

I thought I was the only person who did this while sitting on the toilet. My take away from this video is that I am not alone. Other people poop and learn.

Duolingo has HIGH VALYRIAN as a language you can learn and that will never not be funny to me.

Duo has been a game-changer for me. It is really ADHD friendly and has been helping me more than anything I've tried so far. These tips are great and I'll certainly be taking them to heart. Thank you!

For me, Duolingo is something fun and productive that I can do in small bits of time. I see it as more of a program that competes with my social media/phone time rather than something that's trying to replace language courses/books/more traditional methods. So happy to hear a linguist that isn't bashing it since it is so widespread and accessible!

A lot of good advice. What helped me to make Duolingo actually work was turning off the word bank and typing my answers in my target language. There is a 'keyboard' option for that. I learn almost nothing from selecting sentence chunks in the correct order, but actively writing out my own sentences is entirely different. I also always use the browser version of Duolingo, not the app version. Both versions are actually quite different. Because most people use the app, many annoying changes such as the hearts system haven't made it into the browser version (at least not yet).

I'm glad I've been doing 90% of what you said already. I currently speak 5 languages and I decided to take on Russian because some of my coworkers speak it and I get to practice for free. Here is something that helped me evolve really fast besides practicing with natives: whenever I do the dishes I like to put down my phone and think of myself in the future as someone extremely rich and giving an interview in a TV show like The Daily Show or Stephen Colbert, and then I just start yapping about my life, oftentimes its just in my head but that helps A LOT to build up confidence and to assess your shortcomings. Plus you can start at an easy level with the first vocabulary you learn like "I was born in X", "I moved to Y when I was X years old", "I am rich because of Z"

Probably the most important thing about learning a language is just practicing regularly. Doulingo is really good at that, since one of the main focus is trying to get you to practice everyday. You will certainly learn more doing doulingo everyday for a year, than doing almost anything else very inconsistently.

Great tips. I use Duolngo myself for Spanish and Portuguese, and I recommend it to all my high school French students. Here's something I use to encourage them to use it. A new kid, (from Iran and enrolled only in ELL classes) in grade 8 asked me how he could learn French. Natch, I said to use Duolingo. The following year, his counsellor enrolled him in French 9 when he'd never done a formal class in the language in his life, only Duolingo. He hit the ground running, getting on average around 70% on his tests right from the get go, and doing better than a number of kids who had taken French 8 the previous year. He kept using it and continued to improve throughout the year. Proof positive that it works, and if people put your handy hints into practice, they could benefit even more from it.

I've been learning french on Duo for two years come this April and have recently started Korean. What I can say about my experience is that it provides a safe space for me to learn. I used to be very shy. About my french and would freeze whenever I had to speak it. Duo was the app where I could practice the language without feeling awakard. I agree it is not going to get you to all the way to speaking like a native, but it does keep me engaged. I like having that streak. The gamification aspect of it is catchy. Plus, after a while you naturally start to look for music, books, tv shows...