Duolingo Overall Review
Duolingo is an online (and app) based software that helps its users acquire various languages such as French and Vietnamese. Today, I will compare the pros, cons, and various statistics about Duolingo and make a quick summary on whether you should use it or not. Here goes…
User Satisfaction
In this study made by an external group other than Duolingo, it was shown that 95.5 percent of the participants feel like Duolingo was user-friendly and only 78.8 percent of the participants were satisfied with Duolingo overall. In the conclusion, the study promptly states, “Also 93.8% of the participants in the exit survey declared that they will continue to use Duolingo after the study ends.” Keep in mind that statistic was based out the surveys from 66 participants.
Other people have remarked that Duolingo is a good way to learn new languages, if not great. Take Agnieszka Karch from 5-Minute Language and her four star review for example. Or actually, take a rave review from the Economist instead. The author sums up his view on Duolingo with two sentences, “ I was surprised at how good the app was, since most language apps have tended to be spartan, buggy or both… It’s a joy to use Duolingo, in part because its phone app is not only convenient to use but full of new content.” Even better for Duolingo’s ratings is that it is ranked as number one for best free language learning program by PCMag and is Editor’s Choice.
Now we can’t forget about the bad ratings can we? Actually there are very few and almost impossible to find, excluding those as very buggy, crashing, or a 1-star with no reason. Simply Google “why Duolingo sucks” and try to scavenge an article like this one from Hacking Portuguese. It states some disadvantages to Duolingo such as using random sentences like “We watched tons of coffee” and having a bad user experience with the human voice recognition system which seems heavily flawed and not so open-minded.
Efficiency
Duolingo made a study (actually the one from above) which explained not only user satisfaction but Duolingo’s efficiency. Let’s take Duolingo’s co-founder Luis Von Ahn’s answer in Quora to find out some facts about its efficiency. He asserts that “it takes 34 hours of Duolingo to learn the equivalent of one college semester.” One college semester is very, very long, somewhere from 12 to 15 weeks (84 to 105 days). Let’s say you study at least two hours in college: that’s about 168 to 210 hours total!
Another Quora answer claims that Duolingo is simply too slow and lacks proper and enough exposure to the vast amount of sentences. The user’s exact words: “I tried to use Duolingo to improve my abilities in sentence composition in German. In the end, it was just too slow. I can already read quite a bit of German and carry on basic conversations. So, Duolingo was simply boring. I thought it was useful, but boring. I can spend my time far more efficiently by practicing the scriptorium method on 15 German sentences from a news article in the time that I would cover 5 meaningless ones on Duolingo.”
SSRN’s study on Duolingo provides a more positive report on Duolingo’s efficiency however. The study showed that Duolingo was efficient since most of the participants were able to learn Spanish over a course of two months without the need of external resources, which is surprising given that a multitude of people claim Duolingo is just a booster.
As seen in the chart above, Duolingo seems to help improve one’s fluency in a language. Before the study was conducted, a participant took a two-part test consisting of English and Spanish. The participant got 11/20 for Spanish and 13/20 for English. After the two months of using Duolingo was over, that participant was told to take the test again. This time, the Spanish score was raised to 17/20 and the English score remain steady at 13/20.
Motivation
A key aspect to any type of learning is motivation. Why keep learning if you’re not interested in learning? Duolingo uses gamification, a form of teaching that is similar to games: level up, earn currency (lingots), etc. Gamification itself can be very motivating: learning with a game is super fun compared to the dry text you often get.
According to this paper by MCSER (Mediterranean Center of Social and Educational Research), Duolingo is not exactly fully gamified and was only a partial success in raising motivational levels in the participants. The paper claims that Duolingo lacks an emotional connection to the lessons which is where it fails: “Doing quite repetitive tasks for points is only interested for a limited time when it is not supported by emotional connection to what happens on the screen and it is here where Duolingo fails.”
The paper though did find that Duolingo did help increase motivational levels just a bit in terms of participation and homework attempted, all in percents.
As shown in the table, the groups that was able to use Duolingo had an 8 percent increase in attendance and an 18 percent increase in homework attempted when compared with the control groups.
Effectiveness
Arguably, the most important factor of any language learning program or software is its effectiveness. Duolingo’s effectiveness has been quite murky with the reviews and articles able to be placed anywhere on the spectrum of effectiveness. Some say not at all, some say otherwise. So how effective is Duolingo really?
It seems to be according to an article by TechCrunch that cites a study sanctioned by Duolingo. It asserts that a college student can gain 91 points in the WebCAPE test for Spanish in eight weeks while a Duolingo user can earn 8 points per hour. Basically, a Duolingo user can gain more points in 12 hours of studying than a college student studying over the course of eight weeks.
With the the results all over the place, I can safely say that Duolingo has to be quite effective to have over 100 million users.
Summary
Duolingo is probably an effective language learning program that is free to use. It uses gamification as a way to motivate its users and make the learning process more fun and less dry. User satisfaction is quite high except for the few highly critical reviews made against Duolingo.
So, in other words, Duolingo is quite effective, efficient, cheap (actually it’s mostly free to use, some features cost money), and user friendly/satisfying.
Go ahead and try it then post a review down below so everyone else can see what you think about Duolingo. All opinions are respected!
