Duolingo: Double or Don’t

One part of my professional story that tends to surprise people is that I give due credit to those villains of late-century brain rot: videogames. Usually, I talk about the number of SAT words I picked up in RPG and adventure titles: unparallelled, tumultuous, iridescent, opalescent, saffron, malefactor, implements, peruse… (comment if you can ID my favorite series from this). More generally, there is just something so proofready about running through the same scenario over and over until it reaches maximum precision and efficiency.

With that, I’m going to say what I think of Duolingo.

Like many of you, I sometimes wish the green owl had become an omelette instead of the mascot for a language learning app. I’m currently on a 100-plus-day streak, but this is my second major crack at it. My first was a year or two ago. I figured I could stand to refresh my Spanish vocabulary. Duolingo bored me, gave me headaches, and offered no option to focus on what I considered my weakest areas, so I quit. I picked it up again last fall so I could buddy up with some friends. This time, I’m splitting between two languages.

I start my daily Duo with one lesson in my beginner language, Korean. I usually break open a few hearts (like lives in Mario) before I get to the end. The app asks me to match Korean words to English, repeat what I hear out loud, or reconstruct sentences using a word bank. It’s easy to cheat: For speaking challenges, I usually memorize the sounds rather than the meaning. Tapping on an English word in sentence reconstruction brings up Korean options.

As part of the ending sequence, the app shows me my daily quest status: three challenges with individual and collective rewards, which may be XP or gems, which can be exchanged for streak protection, heart recharges, or special levels. They might require me to earn a specific number of points, spend so many minutes on the app, or complete so many lessons with a certain score or higher.

At this point, I tap the Korean flag on my screen to switch to Spanish. Here, I’m in the advanced range. I do what I need to do to break open all three daily chests. The core lessons are sometimes interspersed with reading comprehension or performed dialogues. I’m already strong on Spanish verb conjugation and on the kind of vocabulary available in Duolingo, so I make few mistakes. I usually understand the sounds coming out of my earpiece, so repeating them doesn’t require memorization.

My error rate is low but nonzero. Duolingo awards one heart every five hours, with life storage maxing out at five. Or you can spend gems to recharge. Or you can switch to the paid version. Or you can practice.

I click “practice to earn hearts.” Because making mistakes during practice doesn’t cost me any lives, I switch back to Korean. These exercises can be like the ones from regular lessons, but they also work in learning Korean letters. When I have enough, I either go back to Spanish or click “learn the letters” until I hit my daily quota.

All in all, it takes a little less than half an hour.

Some background:

Spanish: I took six years of classes, got a 5 out of 5 on the AP exam, and worked for a Mexican-American company, albiet primarily in English. There were times late in high school when I would think in Spanish.

Korean: I’m from northern New Jersey, so I’ve spent most of my life around Koreans and Korean-Americans. I was friends with Korean classmates. I did taekwondo for years. I think spicy kimchi can get a little intense but overall I like the food. In college, I learned about Korean history and culture. (If you want your Korean friends to win over your old Irish relatives, just have them compare Japan to England.) But I never got around to learning the language beyond “hello,” “thank you,” and “front snap kick.”

On Duolingo, the most obvious difference between the two is that Spanish uses the same Latin alphabet as English, which came to us through the Romans, Etruscans, Greeks, and their predecessors in deep b.c.e. Letters were added, dropped, or repurposed as it moved from language to language. Korean uses the hangul alphabet. The invention of hangul is attributed to King Sejong in the mid 1400s. He deliberately set out to create a practical and intuitive written language that people who were not scholars could learn easily. Many of the symbols are stylized depictions of how a person’s mouth might look while producing the corresponding sound. (I don’t see it, but the letter G doesn’t look like a camel to me either.) Both alphabets are phonetic, which means each symbol represents a sound rather than an idea.

(Korean’s claim to be phonetic may be like Casablanca’s waters. Still, it hardly shocks an English-speaking system if the angle symbol only makes the G sound most of the time. “Kansas” and “Arkansas” don’t sound the same. Just go with it.)

Duolingo, by itself, is frustratingly inefficient.

I’ve been at this for months, and it took until last week to figure out that Korean prepositions and conjugations become suffixes to the subject or object noun. Why? Because I was on my own, and I’m just guessing. There was no way to get the app to skip to grammar or skip to verb conjugation. The only variation on regular lessons on offer is to learn the hangul alphabet. There is also no way to focus on an individual word and break it down into its different functional groups.

Transliteration would help hugely, and there isn’t any. Duolingo’s actors speak clearly, but they do not always pronounce things the same way. A G can sound like a K and an M can sound like a P, depending. This is probably by design, but it would be much more effective to memorize the Hangul letters with the standard English transliteration next to them instead of guessing over and over.

This is a problem at both levels, but it shows up more in Spanish: Vocabulary is not grouped by subject or situation. If I’m preparing to visit a specific workshop or want to know how to say “Good job!” to a student, I’m out of luck. Duolingo’s word-matching exercises aren’t bad, but sometimes I’d like to blast through them exclusively rather than interrupt them with inane dialogue that I already know.

Because I am not a native speaker of either Spanish or Korean, I can’t speak to Duolingo’s authenticity

In learning as in chemistry, sometimes you get a reaction if you lower the activation energy. Duolingo’s advantage is that it is an app. It’s handy. It’s perky. It’s full of the same dopamine-diving bells and whistles that kept Candy Crush in the black for years. I can use it in the gym, so it’s easy to find time for it. There are no CDs to carry around and no traffic noise to rock-tumbler out the edges of the words. Duolingo makes it easy to practice a language and rewards the user for doing it.

What Duolingo doesn’t do is stand on its own.