Top Ten Best Things About Duolingo
I love language learning. You might have guessed due to the fact I've made a few language lists here and there. The app I always use when learning languages is Duolingo, a free and efficient language-learning website. You can create an account by clicking this link (https://www.duolingo.com) because I really recommend you to try it out. I myself can speak fluently swedish and english, but with Duolingo, I am now also moderate in Esperanto. So I am going to make a list of the best things about Duolingo to show you my love for it. With that being said here is the list.
Seriously Duolingo wouldn't be the legendary language learning platform it is if it wasn't for the incredibly amazing gamification that this game is built upon. Because you see, most people nowadays love video games for how it rewards you with stuff such as xp and levels and stuff and hate to study and learn new stuff because it lacks all of those. Well but Duolingo is a perfect mix between study and gaming. You earn xp when complete a lesson, skill, etc. The gamification made this platform legendary.
A lot of language learning apps nowadays from what I've seen are incredibly inefficient and uneducative, or just plain bad. We've got Mondly which not only is super expensive, but it only teaches you the same unimportant sentences and no grammar. Then there's dropbox or whatever it's called which only teaches you basic words. And Ling is an inferior version of Duolingo. Duolingo on the other hand teaches you grammar, how to form sentences, a good chunk of words for your vocabulary in each sentences, you get it. It's awesome.
The gamification and the fact it's for free really is what made Duolingo so succesful and loveable in my opinion because if it have had all of the stuff it has now but not being free, less people would've tested it out for sure. Now of course this isn't a super valid reason to love something..., but it still is in a way. Long live free Duolingo!
I swear if this didn't exist I would've had much less respect for this platform because the only languages made by the staff on Duolingo are the usual popular ones like german, french, spanish, portuguese and italian. What the duolingo incubator, which was added quite quickly after Duolingo was released, is that it allows fans and users to create their own language courses. Of course the staff needs to approve first that the course can be built but you get the point. With this, there have been lots of new learnable languages on Duolingo such as Russian, Turkish, Swedish and even Navajo! So much respect for this.
I talked about in the duolingo incubator item about how it has allowed so many courses to be added to Duolingo. English speakers have the best advantage as we've got a mind-blowing 37 languages including four currently being built in the incubator. Everything from mandarin, norwegian, indonesian, japanese, swahili, hawaiian and even fictional languages like klingon and high valyrian (although I highly oppose the addition of fictional languages over real ones like lithuanian or farsi). Most speakers of other countries aren't lucky though unfortunately but the spanish have the luck of learning catalan and guaraní as well. So lucky!
One of my biggest complaints with a lot of platforms and video games is the fact that sometimes it's all just too complex. Like I'm not going to bother learn a bunch of game rules that I won't need to know later in life anyway. Duolingo really knows how to be simple yet educative. You just click on a lesson, start it or read the tips, translate some sentences and voila. And the icons and stuff are easily located. You've got a shop, language list to the top and the leaderboard for leagues and xp to the right. Excellent!
Motivation is important when learning a language because it's no easy task to learn a new language and be fluent in it. The motivation is due to mainly the gamification which is addictive and motivating, but also the fact that there are lots of languages to choose from. Without any of this it would've been a lot more boring and uninteresting, at least in my opinion.
A lot of times when maybe your translation of a sentence in a lesson is wrong, you might not understand why at all even if you've read the tips before starting the lesson. Well thank gods that there's a forum. With every question in the game comes a page on the forum about it and there you can see if other people had the same problem as you and they might have responses from others that might help you a lot. But the forum is not just for that. There's so much you can do with the forum. So yeah.
This is a minor reason on this list and mainly only because I needed ten items but it's worth noting, how much satisfaction you get from translating a sentence correctly. This is mainly all because of one huge flaw though as well, because the feeling when your answer in INcorrect, is one of the worst ever. It's because it doesn't give you a second chance to correct the sentence, and instead moves on. You quickly forget it and when the question is back and you don't remember the answer, good luck on not smashing that computer screen. Not to mention the irritating sound. But this also makes the feeling when answering correctly one of the best in the world. So I guess this is pretty much a "negative pro".
As someone who loves to study and learn stuff, and even..., *gulp*, school, there is one flaw about it all though if it's school because you can never learn stuff at your own pace but instead have to do a 50-pages homework before even having a chance to breath which makes it all irritating. Duolingo doesn't force this on players. Sure it will send messages when you have not done any progress and make you beg for your life in spanish, but it's all your choice, school doesn't get involved in this (if lucky) which is great.