Adventures in Duolingo
22:19 |
| https://twitter.com/duolingo |
Something I've had to get used to since I became a 9–5:30-working, tax-paying adult is the travel restrictions imposed upon me by annual leave, a concept that sounds highly appealing until you realise how little of it you get. As such, the fortnight-long holidays that I have grown accustomed to during my Hertfordshire life have been replaced by the phenomenon known as the Weekend Break. This month, I will be using one of my precious days of paid leave to visit a new city in a new country: Amsterdam. Due to the fact that I have never been to the Netherlands before, my knowledge of Dutch begins and ends at vaguely recognising words that resemble German, a language of which my knowledge is, to put it generously, restricted. It was my desire to not be rude to the Dutch people (and also not to accidentally order something terrible in a restaurant) that led me to what seems to have become the latest linguistic craze: Duolingo, the free language-learning app that gives you points based on how much of your chosen language you learn.
Despite being exceptionally late to the Duolingo game, I actually heard about it long before it became a craze when my American neighbour in Aix-en-Provence mentioned that he was using it to learn some basic German phrases. I thought it was a cool idea but didn't think much of it, seeing as living in France, trying not to forget how to speak Italian and taking a basic German class was keeping the language-learning part of my brain occupied for the time being. It was only this calendar year that it started appearing on more and more of my friends' phones. Now they all have it, from my fellow MFL graduates to people whose grasp of their native language is occasionally a bit on the tenuous side.
I downloaded Duolingo after my trip to Amsterdam was confirmed and was full of enthusiasm. I'd seen friends abandon real life conversations to slowly repeat French phrases at the app for a few minutes at a time so I figured it must be pretty engaging. Resisting the temptation to choose French and Italian as my languages as a way of getting my point score off the ground, I went straight in with the Dutch course for people who've never spoken Dutch.
Despite being exceptionally late to the Duolingo game, I actually heard about it long before it became a craze when my American neighbour in Aix-en-Provence mentioned that he was using it to learn some basic German phrases. I thought it was a cool idea but didn't think much of it, seeing as living in France, trying not to forget how to speak Italian and taking a basic German class was keeping the language-learning part of my brain occupied for the time being. It was only this calendar year that it started appearing on more and more of my friends' phones. Now they all have it, from my fellow MFL graduates to people whose grasp of their native language is occasionally a bit on the tenuous side.
I wanted to like Duolingo, mostly because it is free and I didn't particularly want to invest my hard-earned money on a set of CDs or a phrase book that I would use for 72 hours and then abandon forever. Its mascot is also an endearing green owl and I am a fan of both the colour green and creatures with large eyes. Said owl posts encouraging messages at the bottom of my screen, for example after one brief session it proclaims, "You are on a one-day streak!" which I found heartening and pleasant. I wanted to make the owl proud, and also avoid the telling off that it gives you if you don't play for a while. Sadly – and I am genuinely sad about this – I just can't get excited about it.
The basis of Duolingo seems to be repetition. Not the kind of repetition where the language learner dedicates time every day or two to practising their newfound craft; the kind where you find yourself typing out the word for "hello" four times in as many seconds. My first session involved me becoming increasingly frustrated as I typed out the phrases for "I am a man" and "the boy drinks milk", an activity which apparently deems me worthy of a "lingot", which is basically a picture of a gem that I can whip out when I'm waxing lyrical about my fantastic Dutch skills and want to enhance my credibility. Occasionally it would mix things up by asking me to translate or write a word I'd never encountered before, which is particularly difficult in Dutch as their spelling resembles what would happen if you removed most of the consonants from a bowl of Alphabetti and flung it over a flat surface. On my first venture into the "Basic Phrases" section I was unexpectedly presented with the word "doei" (pronunciation: insultingly similar to that "doy" noise American sitcom characters make when they think you've said something stupid) and told to translate it. After I got that wrong, it asked me to do the same with "dag", although it did give me three options to choose from that time. Apparently both words mean "bye". Apparently I am not good at Dutch.
Having dedicated a great deal of time over the years to learning verb conjugations, adjectival agreements and how to place object pronouns in sentences depending on whether they're direct or indirect, I need a grammatical base to actually feel like I'm learning a language rather than just spouting stock phrases and hoping no one tries to actually hold a conversation with me. This makes it difficult for me to get on with Duolingo's beginner courses, which will present you with one verb form and not tell you any others until you've repeated the phrase "I am a girl" ("Ik ben een meisje", pronunciation still unknown) sixteen times.
From what I can tell, Duolingo's real success lies not in its efficacy, its accessibility or its lack of price but in its gameplay. It has ingeniously introduced the element of competition to the learning process, meaning that people who lack a deep love for Spain, its people and their culture now have a motivation to learn Spanish: beating their friends. This is where I fall down. There are very few things that inspire competitive urges in me; for the most part I'm quite happy to leave everyone alone and selfishly focus on my own life. There are, of course, exceptions to this – Boggle, for example, at which I remain unbeaten by everyone except my mother (whose skills are, if I may make an appalling pun, mind-boggling). I will joyfully participate in a game that I love, I will even try my best to win it if I think I have a chance of doing so, but I'm simply not willing to do something that bores or annoys me just so I can feel like I've won at something.
While I remain unmoved by the competitive element of Duolingo, it seems to have given a great deal of motivation to my friends. I was – and still am – in favour of this. Whatever their drive for doing so, it's nice to see people dedicating themselves enthusiastically to learning languages, especially people who will speak passionately and at length about how much they hated GCSE French. It strikes me as sadly ironic that I, someone who was so keen to assert her linguistic aplomb that she named her blog "linguaphile", is so indifferent towards Duolingo.
In my more introspective moments, I've concluded that I expected too much of what is, ultimately, a free app not designed to be used by people who've been studying foreign languages for twelve years. What I wanted were the talking phrase book CDs that teach you the holiday vitals quickly and effectively without having to pay for them; it isn't the free app's fault that it doesn't provide that service. The slow-moving pace of the course is frustrating to an experienced language-learner but that's because that's not the demographic that it's aimed at. The real lesson to be taken from my brief time with Duolingo – aside from the fact that the Dutch have at least three different words for "bye" – is that not everything is for me. And possibly that expecting a free service to meet the same standard as a £45 set of audiobooks is a little bit stupid. Doei.
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