It’s currently only available in the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German courses. The Stories feature is an entertaining way to get some reading practice and exposure to conversational language. This is the main Learn tab it’s where you’ll find skills to practice and level up. There are a handful of extra features that you can access from the Duolingo home screen. I do see the value in teaching accurate spelling, but let me type sloppily in English, please. Many other learning apps (looking at you Fluenz) are unforgiving when it comes to typos, and I find it frustrating and demotivating. I found that it was pretty good at detecting typos and awarding points even if you typed something incorrectly. There’s even an entire twitter account dedicated to these quirky gems.Īnother thing Duolingo does to keep you from failing too often is that it permits typos. This wasn’t the first interesting sentence I came across. I should say here that the sentences you’ll come across and will need to translate can be bizarre, and sometimes they’re downright philosophical. It’s necessary to use this feature quite a bit, especially when starting out. I like this feature - if there’s just one word you don’t know, you don’t have to give up on the whole sentence. Some people also have a problem with the volume of the audio, sometimes it’s just too quiet. Text-to-speech audio has the advantage of being easier to slow down without warping the audio, but you won’t get the natural feel you’d get from a native speaker and there may be some blatant mistakes. Robots are getting better all the time at sounding like people, but they still aren’t. ![]() Though I wasn’t able to come up with a list of which, Duolingo uses text-to-speech technology for many of its courses. Some of the audio in the Italian course placed stress on the wrong syllable or was too quiet, and the Chinese sounded very robotic. It’s worth noting right away that the audio quality available for each language varies quite a bit. You can listen to the audio as many times as you like, and the turtle icon plays a slowed-down version of the word or phrase. This is one way you’ll practice listening in the app. After selecting a color, you’ll get to hear a voice say the word in the target language. This is an example of an exercise Duolingo uses to teach vocabulary. Mateo and I both found these exercises fun and easy to use. The learner practices each skill through a series of basic exercises. If you’re not ready to take such a big leap, you can also take tests for individual skills to quickly level them up. Luckily, you can get around this by testing out of skills.Ĭompleting checkpoint challenges opens up a new section of skills you can test. Since there are so many similarities between Italian and Spanish, much of the beginning Italian material was a bit too easy for me, which made the exercises very repetitive. While the progression of the skills feels natural, there may be times when the material doesn’t move as quickly as you’d like it to. The progression of skills is different from language to language, but the progression is mostly intuitive - later skills build on those that come before. Above are the first skills you see for beginning Chinese. There are “skills” that you can level-up by completing exercises. SkillsĪfter selecting your path, you come across the main Duolingo screen.Īt its core, the way you progress through Duolingo is very straightforward. I managed to get a handful of the questions correct and thought I might just be able to game the system, but Duolingo saw right through me and I was placed at the very beginning.įor both Italian and Chinese I skipped the placement test and started at Greeting 1. ![]() I took the placement test for French, despite being a complete beginner, just to see how it worked. The placement test only takes about five minutes and is designed to get harder or easier based on your answers. LessonsĪfter you’ve chosen a language, you have the option to take a placement test or start as a beginner. ![]() You can also see right away just how many languages there are to choose from, which got me excited. ![]() Mateo hit the nail on the head by saying, “it makes learning feel casual.” There’s nothing too serious about Duolingo, and this is immediately evident.
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