Category: Databases, Smartphones & Computers

I thought I’d offer an update on my continuing phone-based diversion with the language-learning app called Duolingo.

I still actually rather dislike the app – but after trying some other options, I feel it’s the best of a bad bunch. It’s the only one that I’ve tried that can run fully and reliably without an always-on internet connection, for example, which is an actual necessity for me given where I live (rural Alaska).

I sometimes sigh in disgust at the obvious linguistic shortcomings – it’s often clear that non-native-English speakers are being given free rein in providing material for the English facing language learner, and likewise that non-native-Spanish speakers are doing the same for the “Swedish for Spanish Speakers” program I’m working through. And that makes me wonder about the grammatical and idiomatic quality of the language I’m trying to learn, too. So if you try Duolingo, just always remember to assume it’s not a great or perfect snapshot of the language you’re trying to learn. Think of it as taking lessons from someone not much farther along than yourself, maybe?

But I have managed to spend at least 5 minutes (about 1 “lesson”) on Korean every day since I started the program, while riding on the bus to the airport on my last day of my short visit back to Korea, last Spring. And I think I’ve genuinely learned and even gotten comfortable with some Korean vocabulary that I was unfamiliar with before (which perhaps speaks only to how lousy my Korean ever was – it was always horribly domain-constrained, during my years living there).

Meanwhile, aside from my steadfast commitment to working on my Korean, I dedicate another 5-20 minutes a day with some other language. All of these other six languages were deliberately chosen for their level of expected difficulty for me (which is to say: fairly high).

I find it genuinely rewarding to try to puzzle through some obscure aspect of introductory-level Vietnamese or Swedish grammar, trying to guess at the pattern before finally breaking down and spending 2 hours of follow-up research on wikipedia or somesuch. Syntax is something I just plain enjoy learning about. Vocabulary is harder, for me. Each time I switch languages, I spend a few lessons making crazy-stupid mistakes until the 100 word passive vocabulary that’s been built up is reactivated.

I make a point of trying to keep all my seven languages on Duolingo “in sync” – though because Korean is the only one I commit to doing some of every single day, it always ends up ahead. But I make sure I distribute my  time to the others evenly, so that the “number two” language in the queue is always shifting. Here is a snapshot of my current “points” (“XP”) in my languages in Duolingo.

I think my favorite language, by far, is Vietnamese. It’s also the hardest, for me – so I think, as with Korean, I’m specifically drawn to languages I find quite difficult.

I dislike that Duolingo shields users from learning to type “non Roman” scripts – so even the Korean (where I’m much more advanced than the other languages, which is entirely belied by my point totals above, because I “tested in” to the Korean quite deeply into the course, if that makes sense) doesn’t ask me to type answers in Korean. And that’s frustrating, because “typing Korean” is one skill I mastered quite early in my language-learning journey, and I could even win speed-typing contests against my students typing Korean on my phone when I lived there – just don’t ask what whatever it is I just typed means. I think typing would make the new vocabulary “stick” much more effectively, for me.

Nor do the Arabic, Greek, nor Ukrainian programs give me the option or opportunity to learn to type my answers in those languages – they just give you written-out choices. But meanwhile, those languages with Roman-based scripts have quite intensive requirements to type in answers, which leads to a higher level of word-shape memorization, by far. Vietnamese is the “weird” outlier in this dimension, because it is, nominally, a Roman-based script – so Duolingo insists on making me type it. But the number of diacritics for Vietnamese is painfully huge – people do weird “text art” using Vietnamese diacritics, because it offers so many possibilities. “Typing” Vietnamese on a phone keyboard is apparently an art too arcane to ever bother even trying to explain. You either know or you don’t. So I get lots of errors on my Vietnamese because I simply can’t figure out what combination of keys will give me the combination of diacritics I know that I need. But I think that over time having the requirement to type in answers increases longer-term retention of vocabulary, at least for me – I’ve always been a very visual and text-based learner. So I can sincerely say that even though the scores are all basically equal, so far my learning of Vietnamese, Welsh and Swedish are far in advance of the other three non-Korean languages (Ukrainian, Arabic and Greek), because of that typing requirement.

I still would give Duolingo only 3 stars. But I’m sticking with it. It provides one of the few genuinely enjoyable breaks in my day, these days, in my otherwise quite depressing life.