Duolingo: a very friendly learning tool for all the beginners!

The first time I heard of Duolingo was in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic led to the cancellation of all the IELTS and TOEFL tests nationwide, which was undoubtedly a huge strike for students who were about to apply to study abroad, so many students had to seek for another way to get the qualified language score for the application for studying overseas. At that time, Duolingo seized the opportunity to expand the market and enhance its own reputation, for students can take the Duolingo English Test at home using their own computers and use this score to apply for universities overseas. This was my first impression of Duolingo as an English test software. However, I recently found out that it is actually a very useful language learning tool, especially for the beginners, so I can't wait to show you all this magic learning tool.

If you want to access the Duolingo English Test page, please click here.

If you want to use Duolingo to learn another language, please click here.

📑What is Duolingo?

Duolingo has both a website page and a mobile app. It is a useful language learning tool containing 106 courses in 41 languages with over 500 million users now, so it can meet almost all the language learners' study needs. I am going to show you how Duolingo guides the new users to get familiar with it, and hope this can also help you to know how Duolingo works and furthermore to recognize some classic features of Duolingo.

• Decide which language you are going to learn about.

We can see from the picture at the right side that there is a button asking what is your site language. I think this can be considered as a way asking which language you want to use as a basis to learn other languages. The colorful national flags below represent different languages which you can choose to study. An interesting thing is that when you choose different site languages, the number of languages you can learn will be different. I guess it is because the system have not been able to match so many different languages for learners from different countries. Tell you a little tip: choosing English as your site language will give you more choices!

• Choose whether you are a totally new beginner or already have learned some.

This helps the users to set up the difficulty level of the upcoming learning lessons. If you have already learned a lot about the language, it will give you a small test. Then the website of the app will automatically skip the basic lessons and direct you to a harder stage based on the test results.

• Start the adventure step by step.

Learners will start to learn the chosen language step by step. Duolingo has already given the learners established courses, and the learners will just need to follow the steps and finish the courses from the upper icon and make their ways to the next stage. It looks like a game doesn't it? The player light the icon by finishing the study task!

💖What makes Duolingo a good tool to learn languages?

• It is friendly for language learning beginners.

I tried some basic courses for English learners. First of all, the words and sentence structures are really easy for beginners to accept. Secondly, it has a useful function that learners can click on the words they can't understand in the questions, and then the corresponding translation of the words will appear. It helps the learners to deal with the new words in an appropriate context immediately, which promotes their understanding of the new words.

• It uses repetition in different forms to strengthen memorization. 

We all know that it is hard to remember the knowledge that we have only learned once. Repetition is a good way to strengthen memorization. Duolingo even does much more than simply repeats the same questions for many times. It vmay require students to translate English to Chinese first and then do the opposite, and it will also play an audio for dictation. All the different question forms are based on the same knowledge point, which helps the students to actually learn it and remember it. 

• It motivates students by accumulating experience points.

After students answer the questions correctly, it will show that the learner has earned some experience points. Duolingo also uses some cute pictures to encourage the learners and praise them. It even has a graph to record how many points the learners have earned everyday. All this small designs can have great impact on motivating the learners to stick to learning and gain the sense of achievement. 

• Duolingo stories create a fun atmosphere for language learning.

 In Duolingo stories, learners can listen to a daily conversation between two speakers. During this process, some questions will appear on the screen to test whether the learner have actually understand the conversation. It creates different contexts for the learners to learn how the language is used for real life purposes.

💟Actual use of Duolingo for language learners in my context

My target students are university students in China who have already gotten a solid English learning foundation after more than nine years learning in the primary school and middle school. Therefore, it is not suitable for students to use it to learn English. However, there is a trend among university students to learn another foreign language other than English. In this way, Duolingo is a good start for them to start their journey of learning a new language. It is easy to follow with all the established courses and steps. It is easy enough in terms of the new words and sentence structures. It is also friendly for beginners to keep up laerning, for it has many mechanisms that can motivate the students and build their confidence.

Duolingo can also be used by young learners to study English before they take actual lessons in school. Additionally, it is suitable to be a daily practice tool for English learning beginners, for the difficulty level of its learning materials seem to be very primary. 

💢 Limitations

• It is so easy that it cannot satisfy the learners who seek for high-level language ability.

After I finished the English ability test after I first signed in the website, it skipped many courses for me and directed me to a stage which seemed to be a difficult phase. However, after I clicked into the lesson, it asked me the meaning of the word "sock". Then I realized this website might not  be able to give appropriate lessons for my level. 

• It teaches languages without giving grammar lessons. 

In the first stage of learning English, full sentences are given out to help the students learn the new word in the sentence. Nevertheless, in my humble opinion, just presenting the sentences cannot force the students to figure out the grammar rules themselves, especially for the beginners. I think new function need to be developed to deal with the grammar problems.