, 10+ years experience in studying languages. Conversational in ten. 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.
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.
To become a course designer on Duolingo, you don't have to master either of the two languages. I usually report at least one mistake (or what looks like one) when studying a lesson. The "beta" languages are worse; I've been in situations where I couldn't progress past a lesson because there were so many problems.
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.
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.
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.
An average Duolingo tree introduces you to about 2,000 words. It should be more than enough to get a good sense of how the language works and hold most everyday conversations. Not bad for a free online course. However, vocabulary is just one competency you need to navigate the language with ease.
Readlang gives you instant translations of words and phrases you don’t know so that you don’t have to distract yourself from the reading to search in a dictionary . It’s a bit like adding Duolingo’s hover hints to your reading material. And it’s free!
Clozemaster lets you gamify your learning experience and learn new vocabulary by filling in the blanks ( clozes) in sentences. You can use it for free on the Web, Android and iOS. Here are some things that set it apart from other similar solutions:
The Great Translation Game lets you practice writing sentences in your target language and provides instant feedback to make sure they always come out perfectly well-formed. Here’s how it works:
While most Duolingo courses cover an impressive number of relevant grammar topics, they don’t really teach you grammar in any explicit way outside of the brief Tips & Notes sections.
However, vocabulary is just one competency you need to navigate the language with ease. If you only rely on Duolingo, you won’t have the chance to read long-form content, participate in actual conversations in the target language, or even write utterances of more than one sentence.
When it comes to extensive learning, not all types of content are created equal. However, before I point you to several genres that you might want to use in your learning, let me address a belief that leads many people to rely on ineffective learning methods.
Duolingo levels are done by language, so the overall amount of XP that you have earned on the app isn’t the number that is important. It’s the number for each specific language.
On Duolingo, the highest level you can reach in each language is level 25, which is equal to 30,000 XP.
First of all, it’s important to understand that Duolingo levels have nothing to do with crowns. In the app, you can earn 5 crowns and turn your subject bubble golden. However, the only part of that that matters for your Duolingo level is how many XP you are gaining. Duolingo Levels are broken down into 25 different levels ...
The Duome. The Duome website is basically every serious Duolingo user’s DREAM site. It puts together all the information that you can’t find on Duolingo and makes it easy to figure out what you need to do next. But most importantly, it spells out exactly what level you are on and how to get to the next one.