Why I failed: Learning French with duolingo
When I set out on my journey to learn French, I was full of optimism at the promise of duolingo. Just 10 minutes a day, how hard can it be? Well, Very. Here’s why:
1. It’s hard to focus after a long day
After a long day of work or school it is really tough to focus on duolingo. Doing more than 1 or 2 courses is pretty taxing and you quickly start to make mistakes. That’s if you even start. It’s all to easy to get home and just avoid duolingo, put it off for another day and eventually give up.
It’s all to easy to get home and just avoid duolingo, put it off for another day
2. After 3 days, the fun stopped.
Lingots, Streaks, XP, I absolutely love the gamification on duolingo, they do it better than absolutely anyone else and this makes the first two or three goes amazing fun. But the fun soon drys up. As you whirr through the lessons you stop noticing the little things that used to make it so exciting. You no longer get that satisfaction from the congratulations for a correct answer, you start to think, what does XP even mean?! And all of a sudden it is just about as fun as a French textbook from 1995.
As you whirr through the lessons you stop noticing the little things that used to make it so fun
3. Repeat. Repeat. And Repeat again.
Learning a language takes repetition, I know that. But duolingo sticks to an almost identical formula for every course. Yes the words are different, but with over 70 French courses to work through, this formula soon becomes tedious.
Recipe to learn a word on duolingo
- Match word with pictures
- Ask you to type the word
- Show you the word in a sentence
- Ask you to write the word in a sentence.
- Listen to the word. Write it again.
- Spell the word
- …
4. The topics are rarely interesting
I love sports. Football, tennis, formula 1, cycling, boxing, rugby and many more. I love to keep up to date on sport news and it would be amazing to be able to do that in French.
Yet with duolingo, I have to complete 75 courses before I can start learning French associated with sports. That is a long road before I even get to start learning with content I actually enjoy.
I have to complete 75 courses before I can start learning French associated with sports
5. Is 10 minutes really enough?
No matter what language you speak, we are all surrounded by language, immersed. So will spending 10 minutes a day on duolingo really work? Is it enough to absorb a new language? For me it wasn’t. I didn’t have the energy or time to invest more than 10 minutes a day into duolingo and that meant I was always likely to fail.
I agree, so what now?
duolingo is a fantastic app and it might work for you, but I know that for many people like me, life gets in the way.
In an attempt to solve these problems, I have created Sublingual. An app that allows you to learn French as you browse the web, integrating learning into your daily life. It should mean you are able to practice more, with content you enjoy and it won’t feel like a chore.
