I’ve been practicing for one week now with Duolingo – German. Pretty funny, especially thanks to the companion iPhone apps! You alternate between free translation, ordering words for translation, writing down what you hear, selecting a multiple choice answer,… You win « skill points », learn words, and go from one level to another along a skill tree.
You can get a daily reminder (iPhone notification and email) to keep up the motivation level.
The other specific feature is the « real world practice » where you translate sentences from « real » web articles. I tried a few ones, but I’m wondering about the final quality of this crowdsourcing approach.
Now, let’s see how much I remember of these first lessons on the mid-/long-run…
5 Responses
I think I’ll give it a go. I assume there is one for French?
Yes, there is Spanish, German, French, Portuguese and Italian from English; and even English from Portuguese and Spanish… Have fun!
I just received an email from Duolingo linking to an article commenting the results from a survey about Duolingo’s effectiveness: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/17/study-learning-spanish-with-duolingo-can-be-more-effective-than-college-classes-or-rosetta-stone/
Interesting enough!
I’m loving it. I could only learn from from immersion – exchange, then working in France. All of these now over 20 years ago. I want to speak it again, write it far better than I could … and one day dream in French. So far so good and I’ve gone back to basics. A little miffed when I keep making basic mistakes, but this is what I want fixing.
Reblogged this on My Mind Bursts and commented:
I’ve tried to learn languages at school; Latin, German and French. And Russian from a book. 9 years of Latin and I was none the wiser, 1 year of German and I was temporarily motivated by the holiday romance with a German Girl (we’re 15) … then French. Another disaster until I took it on myself do go on a French exchange – this and immersion in my gap year then working in France all helped. But I never thought to have lessons. 20 years back in the UK I am having great fund with Duolingo – fixing some of my rubbish written French, remembering what I know and hopefully moving in the right direction for both spoken and written fluency which is what I have always wanted. Ten years ago I had tangential experience of a language learning e-commerce start-up, today, with in Masters in Open & Distance Education I am somewhat wiser about what may, or may not work. This will work.