My Beef with Duolingo

I feel like everyone has been obsessed with Duolingo lately. Whenever one of my friends wants to learn Italian or any other language, they start by downloading the app. Usually, that’s the only thing they do. I have been guilty of this myself. In high school, I declared myself determined to learn Russian. The only step I took to get closer to achieving this goal was downloading Duolingo and keeping my streak on the app consistent. Duolingo’s playful structure, combined with its daily challenges, is extremely motivating. It makes learning fun. However, how much does one truly learn, when using Duolingo? I never learned even a little bit of Russian, though I diligently listened to the green owl Duo, the app’s mascot, every time he reminded me to continue practising my language skills.

I wouldn’t say that Duolingo does not work at all, but I think we should manage our expectations when using it. Some readers might consider this obvious. They might think nobody truly believes that, through the app alone, they will be able to achieve fluency in a language. I would disagree. One quick visit to the Duolingo website and we will see the studies provided by the company, in which it claims that the app is an effective tool to learn languages quickly. There is even a study that compares the reading and listening skills learned through Duolingo to those learned in five semesters at university. Clearly, the message the company wants to send is that Duolingo, by itself, works well for language learning. I do not want to prove these studies wrong, but to explain why the app didn’t work for me.

My first issue with Duolingo is that it does not teach enough grammar and syntax. Users are given sentences to fill in with the right verbs, but there are no long explanations of verb conjugations, or of the rules of grammar. Especially if you are trying to learn a language that is very different in its structure from your mother tongue, this can be a significant problem. For instance, an English person learning Italian must learn the language’s grammatical and syntactic rules to understand how to structure correct sentences. When I first started learning English, my teachers stressed the importance of learning how to think in English, instead of translating from Italian to English in my head every time I wanted to say something. Duolingo is almost completely translation-based, and it doesn’t immerse the user in the language they are learning. Also, one does not get to practise writing and speaking skills on Duolingo. Sometimes, the user is asked to record themselves saying a brief sentence, or they are asked to write down something that they hear. These exercises help with pronunciation and spelling, but they are not useful in the development of conversational skills or the ability to express one’s true feelings in a new language.

I think Duolingo should be supplemented with activities which guarantee a deeper immersion into the language. Watching TV shows in French was extremely helpful when I was trying to learn it. I particularly enjoyed watching Gilmore Girls in French because the protagonists, Lorelai and Rory, talk so quickly that it takes a real effort to understand them in a foreign language and feels like a huge achievement when one does. I had already watched the TV show ten times so that helped me understand what was going on. Watching television in a foreign language helps you understand which expressions are used in a colloquial context. We are also lucky, in St Andrews, to have the chance to meet people from different parts of the world. Many societies organise language cafés, which are spaces in which one can meet people from certain places and practice speaking their language. I’ve also found it very helpful to keep a language journal. Every night I write three lines in French about how I am feeling. This has helped me learn how to express myself deeply in the language. Alone, all these little methods do not work, but together, and combined with an in-depth study of grammar, they can make all the difference.

Image from Wikimedia Commons