As a language teacher, I feel I have a responsibility to blog about this…
This past December Apple named Duolingo its 2013 iPhone app of the year. The app teaches Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese to English speakers and English to speakers of those languages and a few others. It does this by using games, complete with points, lives, and lots of repetition. The app is so popular that it draws about 100,000 new users every day.
Seth Stevenson of Slate says the “short session blocks are painless and peppy”. It actually gets people to work on grammar in a painless way. The goal is not to produce flawlessly proficient learners, but to make sure they can have a fairly good conversation and get around. That’s why the app can bypass tiresome conjugation drills and some of the more labor-intensive aspects of language learning.
The app is also a powerful research tool that allows you to understand how to best teach languages and what forms or concepts are best presented in what order depending on the L1 of the learner. I bet many SLA researchers would kill to get their hands on this research!
Duolingo was created by a Guatemalan professor working at Carnegie Mellon. He explains that the app is free because he is targeting users in poor countries who need to learn a language to carve out a better existence for themselves. He recognizes the prohibitive pricing of most language instruction, and wants people to have a free option. He is able to provide this service by ingeniously combining language learning with business: the more proficient users of the program are asked to translate real-world documents from BuzzFeed and CNN. Genius! I will say that as a professional translator, I am a little skeptical of using amateur language learners as translators, but if the reader of the article knows that it is not a professional translation, and understands the message, why not?
This past December Apple named Duolingo its 2013 iPhone app of the year. The app teaches Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese to English speakers and English to speakers of those languages and a few others. It does this by using games, complete with points, lives, and lots of repetition. The app is so popular that it draws about 100,000 new users every day.
Seth Stevenson of Slate says the “short session blocks are painless and peppy”. It actually gets people to work on grammar in a painless way. The goal is not to produce flawlessly proficient learners, but to make sure they can have a fairly good conversation and get around. That’s why the app can bypass tiresome conjugation drills and some of the more labor-intensive aspects of language learning.
The app is also a powerful research tool that allows you to understand how to best teach languages and what forms or concepts are best presented in what order depending on the L1 of the learner. I bet many SLA researchers would kill to get their hands on this research!
Duolingo was created by a Guatemalan professor working at Carnegie Mellon. He explains that the app is free because he is targeting users in poor countries who need to learn a language to carve out a better existence for themselves. He recognizes the prohibitive pricing of most language instruction, and wants people to have a free option. He is able to provide this service by ingeniously combining language learning with business: the more proficient users of the program are asked to translate real-world documents from BuzzFeed and CNN. Genius! I will say that as a professional translator, I am a little skeptical of using amateur language learners as translators, but if the reader of the article knows that it is not a professional translation, and understands the message, why not?