I am a Duolingo user. I have been using Duolingo to learn German for
about a year. There is almost nothing on the web about Duolingo, so I
am writing something here for you. I will start with some Q&A.
Do you really learn a language with Duolingo? After a fashion
you do. I listened to a German movie, "Das Boot," with English
subtitles. I could pick out a word here and there, but there was one
short conversation that I completely understood. I understood it well
enough that I could see the translators did not translate the German
precisely, but into an equivalent English idiom.
What is best about Duolingo? That this app is free is obviously a
major advantage. A lesson takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. The
earlier, simpler lessons are 5 minutes. Towards the end of a course the
lessons are harder and might take 10 minutes. Short lessons are great.
But here is what is best: When they give you a sentence in German and
ask you to translate it, they say the sentence out loud. You can then
listen to this one sentence repeatedly until your pronunciation matches
the Duolingo pronunciation. This part is great: you can stab an
individual word with your finger and that word is translated for you and
it is spoken so you can practice that one word. You can practice on an
individual word. I have also used the Pimsleur Conversational German
course and you can rewind the CD, but you cannot work on an individual
word. The advantage of Pimsleur is that you get to hear entire
conversations.
Is Duolingo addictive? It does seem as though Duolingo
Leaderboards can be addictive. If you make your profile public, then you
get invited to participate in Leaderboards, a competition. I have
calculated that there are people in many of the leaderboards who spend
20 hours or more per week with Duolingo. These people get hooked on the
desire to finish in the top 3 places in their current leaderboard.
There are times you get your competitive juices going and you want to
get promoted to the next league and you do 2 or 3 times more lessons
than you objectively want to do. The leaderboards and leagues have
become like games and you want to play to win.
Here is a calulation. First place player has 2000 XP points (experience
points). You average 12 XP points per 8 minutes. Do the math and you
see that 2000 XP points means 22 hours of play. That is a bit
ridiculous.
You must remember that internet game companies know how to make their
games addictive. Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri wrote an Op-Ed for
the Thursday, August 29, 2019, Wall Street Journal entitled, "Big Tech's `Innovations` That Aren't". The Senator writes, "... the
dominant platforms employ behavioral scientists to develop interface
designs that keep users online as much as possible. Bit Tech calls it
`engagement.` Another word would be addiction." Beyond a doubt you
can get addicted to Duolingo competitions. You look to see where you
are in the ranking for your leaderboard. You watch people above you and
people below you. You find yourself wanting to climb past people. You
want to maintain your place on the ladder. It does get competitive.
Tell me about the Duolingo Leaderboards. First they place you in
a Bronze league leaderboard. A leaderboard is a group of 50 people. In
a Bronze league leaderboard you must be in the top 15, the Promotion
Zone, to get promoted to the Silver League. Once you get promoted you
find that the bottom 5 in the list of 50 are in the Demotion Zone. (Oh
no! Don't demote me!) You are in the top 15 at the end of the week and
you get promoted to the Gold League. Surprise! The promotion zone now
changes to the top 10, so it is harder to get promoted from the Gold
League. What do you get promoted to? They do not tell you. You have to
get promoted to discover you are now in the Sapphire League. The zones
stay the same in the Sapphire league: top 10 get promoted, bottom 5
get demoted. What comes next is a mystery. Duolingo is not
informative. On the Duolingo website there are discussion boards, but
they are pretty useless. Eventually you will find you are like a
hamster running in a wheel going nowhere. Enjoy the leaderboards for a
while, but then move on to better uses of your time, like studying a
book on German (or your chosen language).
What do you do when you get to the end of your course? You have
learned a lot, but you don't really know the language, so what do you
do? On your phone you can scroll up to the top of the list of lessons
you have completed and you can start over. The lesson titles are
the same, but the content changes and the presentation changes. The
second time through the course they will play a sentence out loud and
you have to pick words from a list to show you understood what you
heard. There is a turtle button to repeat the sentence more slowly.
When you complete the lesson a second time then the crown on your lesson
icon changes from showing a 1 to showing a 2. I like this very much.
Getting to the bottom of a list of lessons is, I think, called
"completing a tree." I do not know at what point you are completely
finished with a language course. I just listened to a fellow Duolingo
user discuss on YouTube his experiences and he did not mention repeating
the course.
What else do I need to know about Duolingo? I suggest you also
pick up a free translation phone app. I use iHandy Translator, the free
version. There are times you will find it helpful with your Duolingo
lessons. There are Hearts and Streaks in Duolingo, but you can learn
about them on your own. There are many tricks you can use to help you
past tricky parts in the lessons. When you get an item within a lesson
wrong, they repeat it at the end so you are expected to get it right the
second time around. They showed you what you should have done, so it
is up to you to remember that when you see the item again at the end of
the lesson. The tool is pretty intuitive. I like it, but it requires a
bit of shrewdness as a user to make the best of the Duolingo app.
The tool does not explain anything. It is learning by doing. If you
want understanding, you do need a book. What do they not explain?
Declensions, verb tenses, there is a lot that is not explained. Even if
you can master the formation of sentences in every instance, you won't
be able to explain why you do what you do. Because of this I would say
you might learn a language with Duolingo, but you will not master it.
Tips. Remember I said Duolingo does not explain declensions and
verb tenses? It turns out that there is sometimes a light bulb icon on the button
to start a lesson. Press that light bulb icon and you get a brief
grammar lesson. I have been using Duolingo for about a year and I just
discovered the meaning of the light bulb icon. The Duolingo is not hard, but it is not intuitive. Let's say Duolingo is partially intuitive.
Conclusion: Duolingo is definitely worth your time, but it has
limitations. There are Facebook groups for Duolingo that might be
useful. You will find out more about Duolingo by searching YouTube than
by searching Google. If Google has limitations, why shouldn't
Duolingo?
Robert
From this website we have a list of the Duolingo leagues: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/33013171/how-many-leagues-are-there
"...there are 10 as of May 2019. Bronze, Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Ruby, Emerald, Amethyst, Pearl, Obsidian and Diamond." To put these into list form, the ten leaderboard levels, from low to high, are:
Bronze (lowest)
Silver
Gold
Sapphire
Ruby
Emerald
Amethyst
Pearl
Obsidian
Diamond (highest)
