I rarely feel like I’m keeping track of the words as I’m going along, but then I do find that sentences make sense to me that wouldn’t have in the past. And what I know for sure is I’ve learned a lot more Danish in the last month than I managed to learn of Spanish 20 years ago…
Back then, I enrolled in a night course and checked out music from the library and watched Spanish language tracks on DVDs that had them… but it was just really hard to get anywhere when I didn’t have an actual pressing reason to learn…
Duolingo gamifies the experience, and that really, really works for me, exactly because it doesn’t feel most of the time like I’m getting anywhere which would make it really easy to just give up.
So simply by keeping me engaged and letting me feel like I’m “winning,” Duolingo had made it much easier for me to actually get somewhere. It may have problems, but it’s a whole hell of a lot better than not having it.
And then there’s my kids — in the moments when they’re going to be playing phone games anyway, it might as well be something educational. My 17-year-old seems to be genuinely learning a decent amount of French.