How to actually learn something with Duolingo

You know him. He haunts your inbox. He stares at you, disappointed, from your phone screen. He nags and he pesters. He is Duo, and he’s a green owl dedicated to getting you to learn languages. Or, at any rate, to spending time on his app.

The sad truth about Duolingo is that it’s not a very good way to learn languages, at least in proportion to the time invested — and compared to its promises. A few times by now I’ve heard or read people complain that they’ve spent ages working through a course on Duolingo, only to find that they could barely speak a sentence of that language when traveling. I’ve seen people post screenshots of Duolingo sentences then admit years later to being incapable even of reading the language, while others joined old-fashioned courses, taught by human beings, and made steady progress towards fluency.

Basically, trying to learn languages on Duolingo is like trying to get your muscles toned by working out with 2 lb weights. Will you feel that you did something? Yeah, sort of. Is it better than doing absolutely nothing? Sure, I guess. Was it the best way to spend an hour? Nah.

So Duolingo is a broken promise. And yet, despite knowing this, I really like it. I love the sense of exploration, the feeling that it can open so many languages to me. I like the ability to just pop in for a bit and play, without much of a commitment. And yes, I even like the gamified aspects of it.

I was inspired by Imogen West-Knights’ recent essay on Duolingo for The Dial to reflect on a question I’ve googled dozens of times, and only found half-answers for: can Duolingo be useful for language learning? And if so, in which situations?

What follows are some of my observations, based on my own, admittedly idiosyncratic, language learning experiences. I want to offer an evaluation of when Duolingo can be surprisingly good, and when it’s completely inadequate. I also want to offer some tips based on what’s helped me make more of the program. All of this is presented as a set of opinions, from someone who has a lot of experience learning languages, with talents in some areas (understanding grammar) and not others (learning vocab). If your brain and experience differ, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

What Duolingo Can Be Good For

• Learning languages in the same family as a language you already know. I haven’t seen anyone say this anywhere, so here I am writing it down. I’ve found Duolingo to be just fabulous at helping me familiarize myself with Italian and Yiddish, since I know other Romance and Germanic languages. For some reason, those ones really get into my head, probably because I don’t have to learn a lot of new vocabulary. What I have to do is internalize variations on vocabulary I already know, and the gamified interface, with its high level of repetition, really works for that. I did the full Italian course in the old version of Duolingo, when I was sick with Covid and then recovering, and I actually found myself thinking in Italian sentences as I walked down the street.

• Reactivating a language you already know, but that has become rusty. My Spanish Duolingo is not far beyond my actual passive Spanish abilities, if at all, but I can always use refreshers on stem-changing verbs for example, or just a sense of the basic idioms of the language, how people actually talk about being thirsty or having plans or whatever it is. (Otherwise I’m likely to translate word-for-word from my most comfortable language, English.)

• Poking around into a language a bit so as to get a feeling for it, in order to evaluate whether it’s worth spending serious time on it. Doing Duolingo Italian made me realise I need to take a proper course in Italian at some point, and I did part of one last summer. Even in the first few classes I learned basic things I did not learn in the entire Duolingo Italian “tree.” But I think other things came faster to me in class because I’d practiced them in Duo. I’ve played with Dutch, Portuguese and Catalan on Duolingo too, but just enough to know they’re not my priorities right now. That’s also useful info.

• Acquiring a passive knowledge of a language, especially as written. Again, it helps if the language has familiar vocabulary or a familiar alphabet, i.e., when you don’t have to put a ton of work into basic comprehension. But I will admit I have found that I can improve my reading ability in a language, even my ability to recognize various verb conjugations (i.e., not just basic phrases), way more than I’d expect with Duo.

• Practicing an alphabet. I rather like Duolingo’s alphabet trainers, which let you trace the letters on the screen in a form something like writing. Here, again, the most effective for me has been Hebrew, an alphabet I had already learned and forgotten and relearned in other contexts. But being able to practice the Hebrew alphabet with Yiddish as well is really cool. The small amount I’ve done with the Arabic alphabet also makes it promising, though that will clearly take more work.

• Practicing a language more intensively by using it as the “home” language while you learn another language. Most Duolingo courses are set up for English speakers. However, if you know, say, French, you can learn German or Italian using French as your home language, which forces you to make sentences in French as well. Catalan is only available right now for Spanish speakers, a great way to train both. And obviously, if you’re learning English you can practice that along with most other languages in the system. I really like this approach as you are basically doubling your language practice.

• Theoretically you could also use Duolingo to support a regular course. This hasn’t worked out for me so far, since the course material and Duolingo’s progression tend to be different. But it would be a way of keeping the language active in between lessons.

• Doing something on your phone that is not social media or some kind of game that involves exploding gemstones or angry birds. Hey, we all find ourselves in moments where we really just don’t want to face reality. We’re tired, we want to zone out, we are not decoding a few pages of Ulysses that night. Is practicing how to say “ducks” in Dutch better than getting mad about something online? Yeah. I think it is.

The summary of all this is: Duolingo is fine if you have limited expectations of it. I think if you don’t have a ton of time, or want a better-quality time waster, and know it won’t get you anywhere near fluency, it’s even great. But if you really need to learn how to speak, read, write, and understand a language, Duo won’t do it. I’m sorry but you need an actual class.

How to Use Duolingo More Effectively

Big picture: gamification is what makes Duolingo so addictive, but it’s also what makes it bad at teaching language. The game aspect encourages you to move through the trees as quickly as possible, racking up points, passing levels. (At least they got rid of the leaderboards, those reinforced the worst of these tendencies.) I put it to you that the best way to use Duolingo is to resist its fun, easy, game-like qualities at every stage possible, and to make it harder. This means:

• Read or repeat everything out loud. Everything. Even if it’s not an oral exercise. This is one of the best ways to get the sound of a language into your ears. You can do a word-matching exercise in two seconds by sight, or you can spend a few more seconds actually sounding out the words and have a better chance of learning them.

• Find ways to make simple, repetitive exercises harder. An example: I found that much of the Italian course was so easy that I could “translate” the sentences by sight before the sound had even finished. But what I really want is to become more familiar with spoken Italian. So I started closing my eyes when I clicked to the next exercise, listening just to the spoken phrase and translating it in my head, or just checking if I understand it, before doing it on the screen. Or: if you are not given the word bank for a sentence right away, try thinking of the translation first, or saying it aloud, before clicking on the word bank.

• Try to understand the language as you go. Duo’s grammatical training still, frankly, really sucks. I mean really sucks. I guess the fantasy is that you can learn like a child while doing the exercises, but if you are reading this, you are not a child, you do not have a child’s brain, you have an adult’s brain and you should take advantage of its ability to learn patterns and abstract information. (Even children only pick up languages really fast when they have tons of daily exposure and need to know the new language to survive.) Pick up a textbook, or google the grammatical principle being taught, try to understand it, then return to Duolingo. This makes Duo more fun too, since its perverse refusal to provide any sort of grammatical training for most languages can make it just about impossible to learn certain forms.

• For hard-to-memorize vocabulary, find other ways to pin the words down. Write them out in a notebook, or on cards. Look up vocab on Wiktionary to see if it has cognates in languages you know. I recently started playing around with Swahili on Duolingo, and it’s a lot of fun looking up the Arabic loanwords, since many of them found their way into Turkish, and through that into Romanian or other Balkan languages. (This is why the Romanian word for guest, musafir, is so similar to the Swahili word for traveler, msafiri — they both come from Arabic musāfir. Related to it are Swahili safari, journey, and the British literary journal Wasafiri, which is the plural of msafiri. You get the idea — I could forget everything else, but I won’t forget this word in Swahili.)

• Duolingo lets you fudge a lot — often you can click on words to get a translation and thus get the exercise right, even when you had no idea what it was. You can guess a lot of things right based on what words are available in a word bank, which ones are capitalized and therefore at the start of a sentence, and so on. It doesn’t necessarily mean you could produce those words if needed, or even understand them without help. With Swahili, I’m finding it very helpful to go back to previous sections and practice random lessons in those, sometimes going for the harder, “legendary” status. Learning vocab is one of my weaknesses, but I find that spaced out repetition really helps fix some of the harder words in my brain. I know that Duo does this anyway, but not nearly enough for my taste.

• As with any other form of language learning, try to use the language in other situations. Name things as you see them in the world. Make up little sentences in your head. Imagine how you would greet speakers of that language. If you’re bold enough, torment speakers of that language with your fledgling efforts. Listen to music and see how many words you can identify. (Internet radio is great for this.)

If you have ideas for how to make Duolingo, or other language-learning apps work for you, I’d love to see them in the comments.

Irina

Updates

• Two more podcasts have come out at the London Review of Books — listen to Mary Wellesley and me talking about more of Boccaccio’s Decameron and and Juan Manuel’s Tales of Count Lucanor at the links.

• In my first piece for The Dial I discuss three novels about translators betraying themselves.

• Maybe you can tell I’m all about languages this month. In my latest column at the Times Literary Supplement, I reminisce about some of my favourite language learning novels.