I Spent Five Hours Straight On Duolingo

Je ne suis pas une pomme de terre. That is French. I know how to say that sentence in French. But, for the sake of the thought experiment, if I were to go to France or Canada or any other nation where French is widely spoken and say to the locals, “Je ne suis pas une pomme de terre,” they would likely think me another crazy American. Which I am. I can’t argue with that. Anyway, I spent five hours straight learning French on Duolingo. Here’s what I found out about myself.

I took two nonconsecutive semesters of French during my undergrad and effectively speak very little of it. It’s a language that I acknowledge I should know: I hope to work in Europe very soon, and at the time of my writing this, it is looking increasingly likely that I will be ending up in Canada for the next few years. Regardless, I would love to be able to speak a language that is not English, and Duolingo seems to be the most effective method of being able to do that. Or so you’d think.

The way Duolingo works is, you invest time and energy into various lesson modules which touch base on new grammar and vocabulary within the language. Some languages, such as French or Spanish, have additional stories that you can read through and answer questions on to practice critical thinking and reading comprehension. More on that later. Anyway, I spent five straight hours on Duolingo working my way through these modules and taking occasional breaks to practice those comprehension skills with the stories that were available. It was a long five hours, and honestly, I was a little fried after doing it. So, how do I feel about it? What did I gain, and what didn’t I gain?

Duolingo is, I’ve realized, pretty excellent at cultivating a textual comprehension of the language one chooses to learn. After all, it is a text-based application, and while the program does read the foreign text aloud to you, all activities require some sort of textual input (with the exception of pronunciation activities, but on the desktop version of the program, those do not seem to exist). Listening-based activities require you to type out the phrase being spoken to you, and translation-based activities have you translate your native language to the language you’re learning (or vice-versa). You are getting to know the language as text, which is helpful in a lot of ways.

The downside to this is that I personally have not found Duolingo particularly helpful in acquiring a listening or speaking fluency in a language. This is acceptable, of course. The program is mostly free, and every language-learning program is bound to have its flaws. However, the lack of creative thinking in the language within the base program means that you are learning a very flat version of the language and that, as a learner, you are not experimenting with the language; rather, you’re following a rubric. Don’t expect to go from Duolingo to complete fluency.

But those are my comments on the program. How did I feel going five hours straight? It was a lot, and frankly, I don’t remember a lot of what I learned. That’s just how the human brain works, though. We can only practice something for so long before it starts going over our head, and while I was completing the exercises and reading the stories as they were coming to me, there came a point where I was just completing them for the sake of completing them. Learning is all about engagement. Duolingo consistently sends me reminders to practice every day. “Fifteen minutes a day can teach you a new language,” the app notifies me constantly. “What can fifteen minutes of social media do for you?” It’s absolutely true. Sustained practice over time helps sharpen skills more than binging practice ever will.

Fifteen minutes a day won’t kill you. If you want to try Duolingo, then by all means, try Duolingo. You’ll get pestered by notifications every waking moment of the day, but ultimately, if you can put in the time, that’s a new skill right there. Hell, if you do it fifteen minutes a day for, like, two days in a row, even, you may end up learning more than I did. Because the next day, I did not do Duolingo. I did not strengthen the skills I spent five hours honing. Those five hours were nothing without fifteen minutes the next day and the day after that, forever. Because right now, if you asked me to speak French to you, all I could tell you with 100% confidence is that I am not a potato.