APPraisals: Duolingo
Abigail Welch, Staff Writer
If you were to look at a college student’s phone, you are going to see a wide variety of apps ranging from social media, study aids, games and organization helpers. In today’s society, we use our phones to handle everyday tasks. While some of these “tasks” such as social media can sometimes act as a distraction; others, such as banking apps and to-do lists make it easier to have a handle on otherwise overwhelming situations.
For students, there is a plentiful market of study apps that you can download for free to help push you over the finish line. Most college majors require you to take at least a beginner’s level of a foreign language. If you’re like me, and not gifted in languages, the Duolingo app is for you.
Duolingo is a free language-learning platform that has over 68 different language courses across 23 languages. Founded by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker in 2011, this app has gained over 200 million users across the three interfaces they offer.
Once you’ve downloaded the app, it will ask you what languages you are interested in studying (you can choose more than one, you just have to have the language keyboard downloaded to your phone), then it lets you pick a goal of how much you’d like to work on it daily. They offer casual, which is five minutes a day, regular, which is 10 minutes, serious, which consists of 15 minutes and finally the Insane, which requires 20 minutes daily on the app. Good news is you can always change this goal later.
After choosing your goal, it will let you choose from beginner, where the app will start you off at the very basics of the language, or if you’re not a beginner, it will have you take a placement test to see what lesson to start you on.
Duolingo provides gamification in every lesson. Each lesson includes speaking, listening, translation and multiple-choice challenges. With the in-lesson grading, you will instantly see which answers you get correct and when you miss one, they quickly show you have to improve.
Each lesson you are given “hearts” and you lose one every time you answer incorrectly; when you’ve run out of hearts you start the lesson over and try again. The app motivates you to stay on track by recording how many days in a row you spend learning the language and shows you your streak count.
Duolingo is available for download on IOS, Android and on Windows Phone. They also offer a desktop version.
