This should take you then much less time to finish Duolingo, although even then it will still take you about a month or two to finish it, depending on the amount of content it has. If you decide on the other hand to maybe do one lesson per day plus maybe two or three reviews, it will take you longer to turn everything into gold.
I think Spanish is the best course on Duolingo. I've done (but not mastered) all the Spanish lessons in six months. Sometimes I would do sprints of many exercises a day though. I didn't practice every day.
However, under the paid Duolingo Plus subscription, you are allowed to test out of individual modules (or entire groups of modules if you want) by passing a short quiz. This allows you to jump ahead as you see fit.
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??? Can you become fluent in Spanish with Duolingo?
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.
Overall, Duolingo learners demonstrated on-level speaking skills at Unit 5. About half of Duolingo learners met or exceeded expectations for speaking skills: 66% of Spanish learners and 53% of French achieved A2 speaking proficiency or higher.
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.