How quickly can you learn Spanish on Duolingo? Spending roughly 2 hours a day on Duolingo, it took me 60 days to complete the tree. If you complete one new skill a day, you should reach your target in roughly this amount of time. Shortcuts???
But if you take a trip to a country where it’s spoken and you have to use it daily, you will find within the first day that you have a huge advantage over other visitors who made no attempt to learn the language. Just a Duolingo course and no other efforts or tools for learning the same language? That would be far less than ideal.
At that pace, you'll finish most Duolingo trees in about 400 days. If you follow my suggestions, that'll come to 400 hours of study, which should make you a strong B1 speaker/reader, and at that point you're ready for an immersion experience. If you can't travel, you can at least immerse yourself in books.
In other words, Duolingo uses your typical “freemium” software subscription model, and makes their money mainly through paid, premium subscriptions. And if you do opt for their paid subscription, Duolingo Plus, it will cost you right around $84 per year (or $7 per month ).
You can learn as many words or sentences as you want, but until you're able to have a conversation with another person, you'll never be fluent. Or, according to the CEFR model, you won't even be halfway there.
We have a team of PhDs dedicated to this. According to an independent study conducted by the City University of New York and the University of South Carolina, an average of 34 hours of Duolingo are equivalent to a full university semester of language education. You can see a full report of the study here.
It's a waste of time. In fact, it's just as bad as the education system Von Ahn criticizes. Duolingo outsources its translation services, allowing for awkward sentences to slip in undetected. And translation (the core of its platform) is already widely known to be an ineffective way to learn a language.
You get 10 XP per lesson, but you can choose how many lessons you want per day. Casual is one lesson per day, Regular is two, Serious is three, and Insane is five lessons in a day.
Spending roughly 2 hours a day on Duolingo, it took me 60 days to complete the tree. If you complete one new skill a day, you should reach your target in roughly this amount of time. Shortcuts???
Right now Duolingo can get you pretty far: a 2020 study found that learners in Duolingo’s Spanish and French courses performed as well on reading and listening tests as students who took four semesters of university classes — and in about half the time.
Users have stated that while both language apps offer basic grammar and vocabulary lessons for all their languages, Babbel has a stronger focus on conversation phrases. Compared to Duolingo, Babbel also appears to be buggier with less of an intuitive user experience.
The effectiveness measure showed that on average participants gained 8.1 points per one hour of study with Duolingo. The 95% Confidence Interval for the effectiveness is from 5.6 points to 10.7 points gained per one hour of study.
It’s a waste of time. In fact, it’s just as bad as the education system Von Ahn criticizes. Duolingo outsources its translation services, allowing for awkward sentences to slip in undetected. And translation (the core of its platform) is already widely known to be an ineffective way to learn a language.
Summary: According to FSI, if you spend 3 hours per day learning Spanish, you’ll achieve fluency in around six months. Reduce your Spanish time to one hour a day and, according to FSI, it will take about 1.5 years to learn. As you can see, Spanish is one of the most accessible languages for English speakers.
Here are some of his best tips for learning a language in three months:
When signing up for Duolingo, you set a daily goal. You can choose between 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes a day. Most of the Duolingo marketing touts “Spending 15 minutes a day learning a new language.”
To finish a language tree on Duolingo in 6 months, you will need to spend a minimum of 130 minutes per day on Duolingo, for a full 180 days. That’s 2 hours and ten minutes. Alrighty them. Read about the evolution of the Duolingo mascot, “Duo,” here.
Duolingo premium is about $13 USD per month, and you get some fun features. But most important is that you don’t spend time on ads. If you’re committed to practicing daily – and finishing a language in under 4 years – you’ll want to get rid of the ads. Spend your practice time practicing, not waiting for an ad to load.
On Duolingo when you run out of hearts (lives) you have to go practice to earn hearts. Your practice helps you learn the language, but you don’t advance in levels. You’re learning, but the time spent practicing doesn’t count towards your progress.
Duolingo is one of the most popular apps in the world for learning Spanish, and for good reason. With a totally free base version and a cool course design that gamifies learning Spanish, people rave about this product.
To make navigating this lengthy review a little easier, we’ve inserted jump-to links above so you can quickly get to where you want to go.
Let’s kick this review off by covering the cost of Duolingo’s Spanish program, as this is one of the main reasons why so many people are drawn to this app. As many of you may know, Duolingo actually offers a free version of their course. That is correct: you don’t need to pay a dime.
With all that said above, I’m not here to talk about other companies. I’m here to talk about Duolingo. So let’s jump into how their Spanish course is structured.
So now that you know how the Duolingo program is structured, let’s dive into what the lessons themselves are actually like. And the major takeaway is this: they’re very short.
Now that I’ve covered the different subscription options and you know what the lessons are all about, let’s get into the nitty gritty of this review. That is, what I like and what I don’t like about Duolingo after thoroughly testing the program. And let’s start with the good news.
Now that I’ve run down all the reasons why I like Duolingo, let’s switch sides to the things I don’t care for.
Duolingo will tell you which parts you need to review and re-complete basically . Duolingo has an interesting concept of gamification of the language. You basically play around, create sentences, etc. One distinctive feature that it has is that it tells you when you need to review previous lessons.
But, duolingo is smart to know the retention power of human brain. As you proceed further in the course, you can notice that the "strength" of topics drops down. It is true that our brain actually forgets the words we learnt in the earlier part of the course.