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Saturday 24 January 2015

Duolingo

Duolingo is a free language learning tool. It also helps with the translation.

You can log in and start learning languages you would like to learn. Language choice depends on your mother tongue. If you are a native speaker of English, you have nine choices. However, if you are a native speaker of Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or Italian, etc., only English learning is provided. You can still choose English as your site language and learn languages in the list below.




Duolingo invites you to start learning. You can learn in your pace.





You can learn anywhere anytime as it is available on smartphones.

It can record the result of your learning and you can carry on your learning.




Duolingo is interactive. You can add your friends to compete with.




One of the problems is that it sometimes provides wired sentences or questions seem difficult because of the lack of context.

For example, when learning French, I encountered a question;

"Select the mission word.

________ sont des garçons."

I should choose a word from "Ce, Ils, Vous".

I got it wrong by selecting "Ils". The correct answer was "Ce".

However, when asked "select all correct answers",

the correct answer was "Ils sont des garçons."


This is a interesting learning tool. You will be provided with various types of questions. However, getting wrong answers because of the lack of context or relevant explanations could be sometimes frustrating.


Having said so, overall, I think this can help learners to study autonomously unless they don't get frustrated by some types of questions.


Here is the link to Duolingo.

https://en.duolingo.com/

2 comments:

  1. A very good point about the inflexibility of Duolingo. To be told that "ils sont des garçons" is incorrect is not only demotivating, it is also confusing. I encountered similar problems when trying out the Spanish course. The site insisted I translate El pan as the bread, and would not allow me to generalise the word in English. It's much more natural for us to say "I went out to buy bread" than "I went out to buy the bread", but the Duolingo site does not acknowledge this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A very good point about the inflexibility of Duolingo. To be told that "ils sont des garçons" is incorrect is not only demotivating, it is also confusing. I encountered similar problems when trying out the Spanish course. The site insisted I translate El pan as the bread, and would not allow me to generalise the word in English. It's much more natural for us to say "I went out to buy bread" than "I went out to buy the bread", but the Duolingo site does not acknowledge this.

    ReplyDelete