Duolingo

Duolingo is a fantastic and now very well known language learning website.

Combining, listening, reading, speaking and writing, this website takes advantage of online multimedia capacity to allow as much input as possible. Students are motivated through a social element where friends can monitor one another’s progress and through a point system for accomplishing lessons.

Another brilliant factor is the way Duolingo shows progress. Because consistency is more important than binge studying, the site rewards consistent daily work with extra virtual prizes and even marks completed lessons as potentially forgotten if they haven’t been reviewed in a long time.

Using authentic materials in the “immersion” section, students are motivated to deal with leveled texts because they are actually translating real materiel and thus actually helping other people who don’t know the language! It’s an awesome system where many learners translate the same piece and comment on one another’s translations to ensure correctness.

Duolingo is structured to be completely at-your-own-pace and on-your-own-time but there is also a school option for teachers to have more control and oversight if desired. The only disadvantage is that lessons are fragmented into vocabulary chunks that often aren’t very applicable to the real world initially. For example, students learn “man,” woman,” “dog,” “cat,” “shoe,” before “my name is” or “I don’t understand.” If you want to learn “survival phrases” rather than the whole language, the organization of the lessons is a disadvantage. The other problem is that grammar is taught primarily implicitly rather than explicitly which is better for young children but less efficient for adults.

Overall, however, Duolingo is a fantastic website which I’ve used to successfully test out of college language classes and have successfully used with my students. Used alone, it isn’t perfect, but in compilation with other materials, it’s a wonderful resource for learning languages.