Eleanor Fields

The first lessons start with basic vocabulary and phrases and advance as you strengthen your memory and comprehension skills. There are quizzes and tests that allow you to advance to higher levels as well as revisit the words or phrases that you’ve missed a lot. When you start to get weaker in certain areas you can go back to old lessons and do a quick review. Overall, the system of progression is very fleshed out and allows you to build your knowledge at a steady pace.

The ways in which you can learn different languages are also pretty efficient. For languages with different alphabets such as the Cyrillic alphabet, there’s an additional tab that allows you to learn new letters and their phonetics. Duolingo also allows you to learn chosen languages through reading, listening, and speaking. Reading and listening are the most prominent in day-to-day learning and speaking, although it is a less prominent feature, is a good skill to practice from time to time. These features give the app a lot of practical functionality for travel and useful skills.

However, there are some ways in which Duolingo can fall short. Learning languages takes a consistent amount of effort that an app can’t always get you to maintain. While there are notifications and reminders that can be set to bring you back every day, those can still be turned off or become more of an inconvenience than anything. So when people stop using the app it takes more motivation to come back and rebuild the skills lost after a break. 

There’s also a noticeable lack of grammar lessons, you are able to build skills in certain sentence formats but there are no ways of being taught certain patterns other than repeating the lessons until you realize what they are. And because every language has different sentence structures and grammar rules, it can be hard to discover why one word can have several spellings or meanings without being told outright. Learning a language can be more irritating and difficult when these types of lessons are absent.

Duolingo as a whole is definitely worth downloading for anyone who has a desire to learn a new language or strengthen their skills in one they already know. While there are some parts of learning in a class that online models can’t always replicate, Duolingo’s efficient learning system still has many ways to help people expand their knowledge. So if you’ve ever wanted to learn another language give this app a try!