A Quick Look at: Duolingo

Duolingo is a language learning platform. Available through mobile apps as well as on the web, it is completely ad free and free of charge.

Now, what sets Duolingo apart is the ‘gamification’ of its approach. When learning a language, users must complete a tree where each level gets progressively more difficult. To unlock levels, previous levels must have been completed. Users can also ‘compete’ with other users by adding them as friends.

Each level consists of a central theme, such as animals, food or adjectives and common phrases. The levels are a collection of various exercises. These include matching pairs of words, translating full sentences and repeating sentences through the microphone among others. To progress, users must complete these activities. Streaks can be achieved by getting multiple activities right. After finishing a level, users are awarded with experience points (XP) as well as lingots (in game currency). Daily streaks also exist and are reached when you reach a certain amount of XP for the day and reach your ‘daily goal’. The amount needed to reach this goal is determined by the ‘level’ of learning the user wishes. Casual learners require less XP to earn their daily goal than ‘intense’ learners. Streaks are simply for bragging rights as others who see your profile can see it by viewing your profile. Lingots may also be used to purchase ‘power-ups’ such as streak freezes, to help you keep your streak, as well as unlocking special levels such as flirting and idioms.

Currently, I am going through the French language tree at a casual level. As a gamer myself, the way the app is set up makes it quite addictive. Reaching new levels with new ‘challenges’ keeps it fresh and engaging. But Duolingo is not perfect, at least not yet. Although I do feel like I am learning the language, I feel like it is very skewed towards the reading comprehension side of the language. I can see a word or read a sentence and understand it very easily, but when it comes to speaking, listening and coming up with words and sentences in my mind, that is where I feel like the learning is not as effective.

My suggestion to improve the Duolingo platform is by having the option to customize what type of activities you wish to have more of as you move through the tree. For example, matching pairs is really simple, whereas translating sentences or listening to sentences and typing them out are the most difficult for me. Having an option that would allow putting less emphasis on one activity over the others and vice-versa, in my mind, would be able to possibly balance out this problem.

As it is right now, Duolingo is a very fun and engaging way of learning a new language, and with a user base of over 10 million, Duolingo will continue to grow and be improved on. Now, I need to go continue my daily streak!