Duolingo

One of the aims of this blog is to flag and gather together all the useful resources that are out there on the big wide web for anyone trying to learn German. I'll note the strengths and weaknesses of any utilities and also mark anything that should be avoided.

the first such resource I'd like to talk about is Duolingo. When I first read about it I was amazed that it existed. A structured, gamified learning material that is completely free, and available on web and mobile? It sounded far too good to be true, but real it is. The resource is not specifically for German, but features a range of languages that can be learnt by a speaker of any of the others. The range at the moment includes French, Portuguese and Spanish and there appear to be others in the pipeline.

So how does it work? First you create an account, and tell it what language you want to learn, and which language you can already speak. Once you have done this you get taken to the skills tree.

The start of the skill tree

The skill tree a a tiered set of subjects. All of which need to be completed to advance to the next step, so on completing 'Basics 1', you get access to 'Basics 2' and 'Phrases', but you must compete both of these to move on to the next tier. The subjects then contain anything from two to seven (or maybe more, but seven is the highest I have seen) lessons. 

The lessons themselves are each formed of around 15 to 20 questions. These will often be to translate (in my case) an English phrase into German, or a German phrase into English. The translations give a little bit of wiggle room as to the interpretations of a sentence or any individual word. However it pays strict attention to those things that are harder to remember, such as the gender of nouns or pluralisations. 

During each level you have a number of lives. If you answer all the questions without losing all of your lives you complete the lesson and can move on to the next. If you lose all of your lives then an owl does a sad face and you have to start from the beginning. 

There are incentives along the way in the form of lingots, an in game currency that can be used to unlock bonus lessons and XP that is given for every competed level. This XP is effectively your running score, that you can track against other users, if you are of a competitive bent. It also provides gentle nudges via e-mail (that can be turned off) to keep your streak of consecutive days played going.

A sample question

The whole adds up to engaging experience that, when at its best enables you to learn without realising it, your desire to get to the next level being more of a driving force than the growth in your vocabulary. It isn't all good however. Much of the wiggle room surrounding particular sentences is crowd sourced (by a user not having a correct answer accepted). As a result I have read of the interpretations becoming more mechanical towards the end of the skill tree. As more people use the tool though, this may become less of a problem. 

A more serious pedagogical issue is that although it takes pluralisation, cases and gender quite seriously in the answers there isn't a structured way of learning them, instead it is a case of translating enough sentences that you learn the concepts through osmosis. There are some tips and hints on the subject pages, but they often lack the detail required to get the ideas stuck in your mind.

That doesn't stop Duolingo being a great learning tool, but it does mean that it's probably not sufficient on it's own to learn an entire language. That said, it doesn't truly stand alone though, as anyone using it can access the internet and thus all the other resources. If you are planning or currently attempting to learn German it should definitely be part of your repertoire, even if only for a quick lesson or two while on the bus.