A SHORT SUMMARY
Pros
- Nice Free Options: This app offers the ease of learning language while at the same time being free
- Wide Vocabulary: Searching for vocabulary is extremely easy
- Easy to Use: Duolingo offers short lessons that can be fun and addicting at the same time
Cons
- Won’t Teach You A Complete Foreign Language
- No Natural Sounding Conversations
Duolingo
A language learning application that can teach you how to speak in a multitude of languages. With the app you can learn Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and many other popular languages. The app makes learning foreign languages easy and fun. It has been given a rave review by The Wall Street Journal who called it “Far and away the best language learning app.”
The app tries to make it fun to learn a foreign language by letting you compete with friends and includes a level system so you can see just how much you are learning.
Duolingo was launched in November of 2011 and quickly became popular due to its innovative way of teaching. The project was started in Pittsburgh by Professor Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University. He was assisted by one of his graduate students, Severin Hacker. Other students were also brought in on the project to develop what is now known today as Duolingo.
Pros
Nice Free Options: This app offers the ease of learning language while at the same time being free. When it says free, it means free. That also means free of ads. If you ever had that annoying free app that always had ads at the bottom, or ads that pop up and block everything on the screen, no need to worry. This app is ad free.
Wide Vocabulary: Searching for vocabulary is extremely easy. You won’t have to browse through a ton of lessons to find the word, phrase or grammatical pattern that you are looking for.
Easy to Use: Duolingo offers short lessons that can be fun and addicting at the same time. Unlike a class where you have to go and sit for hours, you can complete lessons with Duolingo in a very short amount of time. So if you don’t have the time to sit through a whole language class, you can still learn a foreign language by using Duolingo.
Cons
Won’t Teach You A Complete Foreign Language: Duolingo only goes so far when teaching you a foreign language. It is good for beginners but if you are an intermediate student or someone who has taken a foreign language before, you might notice that it is slow.
No Natural Sounding Conversations: Duolingo has a computerized voice system so it can become cumbersome to have to listen to a computer read language instead of someone who knows how to speak the language perfectly. The problem is it teaches you like a computer would, and not like a native speaker would.
In Conclusion
Duolingo is a great application for the beginner who wants to start learning a foreign language. It is easy to use, the lessons are simple to understand, and it has a great setup. The lessons are short enough so you don’t have to set aside hours in order to do them, while being able to teach you some actual foreign language skills. On the other hand, if you are an intermediate student of the foreign language you might feel the app is slow and going over things you already know. The grammar can be incomplete, and the computerized voice may not be the best way to teach someone a foreign language. Overall, Duolingo can help those just beginning to learn a foreign language.
