Duolingo Dashboard 2018
Review

Duolingo Review

Meina
30/06/2015
LAST UPDATED: 29 JUNE, 2018

They let you try one of their basic courses in any language you choose before you even decide to register. Unfortunately, they only offer certain languages such as English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Irish, Danish, Swedish, Esperanto, Turkish, Norwegian, and Ukrainian. More languages will be added in the future.

Duolingo Tree Tips And Notes

You’ll learn your course in many ways: a picture with a name, listening, writing, and speaking. Duolingo courses are split down into categories. At a certain level, they give a few tips and notes which include some grammar before you proceed to take the course. So, kudos for that! 

However, I wish they would explain a bit more about the accent mark because up until now I’m still confused when to use and when not to use it.

Duolingo Recognition Achievement
Duolingo Recognition

Once you've finished the tree you'll unlock the golden bird a.k.a recognition from the Duolingo team. 

Duolingo has its own virtual currency called Lingot. You’ll receive it when you level up, finish skills, and so on. You can use that to buy items from their virtual store which will definitely help you with your course.

There is a daily goal that you can set from 1 XP per day up to 50 XP per day and you can change it anytime you want. At the top right, there is a fire icon called a streak. It counts how many days you’ve succeeded in achieving your daily goal. 

So, if you don’t want your streak to go back to zero, make sure you hit your daily goal or you can buy a streak freeze at the virtual store if you don’t have time to practice for the day and keep the streak intact. A streak freeze only works once. 

If you happen to lose your streak you can pay to have it restored back using cash. As far as I know, there is no fixed price as it depends on the streak length. The purpose of the daily goal and the streak is to help you stay motivated while doing your task. 

Some may think the streak is useless if you lose it because the real deal is the knowledge you gain and some may think the opposite.

Their ‘add friends’ option is different from the others. You can follow (add) users you come across in the discussion. There are 3 options; 

  1. Search for the name of the person you want to add.
  2. Send an invite through email.
  3. Find friends through Facebook. Let’s face it, not all of us have Facebook. Not all of us have friends that share the same interest so the only best option here is to follow any user you like in the discussion that is learning the same language as you.

Pro

You’ll have instant feedback from both writing and speaking so, you don’t have to wait for days to get a review on your exercises which is awesome.

Skip Basic
Skip Categories
Skip Lessons

You can skip the basic lessons by selecting the Placement Test. You’ll be presented with this option when choosing your course. If you want to skip certain categories and test all your skills at once, you can do so by clicking the ‘test out of (# no) skills’ yellow button. 

Don’t want to learn lesson by lesson? You can also skip this by clicking the ‘test out’ yellow button on any skill page at the top right corner.

Spanish Characters

I took a Spanish course here and I am glad they provide the Spanish alphabet characters and it makes my life easier when it comes to writing sentences.

When you have finished learning each category, you can test it immediately. You can strengthen your memory in 3 ways; redo, practice all the categories you’ve done and polish your skill by taking the strengthened skills.

When doing exercises they provide an instant correction. Let’s say I wrote it the wrong way. They will explain why I got it wrong. It can also differentiate between an error and a typo.

Listening and writing exercises provide a slow version of reading when they read the sentences. It’s good because sometimes they read it quite fast and I couldn’t catch up.

Hover over your cursor to any words to know more about the tenses, and verb conjugation, or perhaps you need some clarification.

Spanish Rules

They have a forum called discussion. You can ask anything related to your course or Duolingo. It has lots of good information and various topics.

There's also Immersion. Based on my understanding, it's where you can test your language skills by translating a document (articles from Wikipedia, etc.) 

Other than that, you can also view and edit the translation and give upvotes or downvotes. The documents have various categories ranging from technology, art and literature, entertainment, and many more.

Duolingo Spanish Stories

Apart from the immersion, you can now test your reading and comprehension skills using Duolingo stories. At the moment, it’s only available in Spanish. It has 8 sets so far and each has 10 stories. This together with its podcast is the best feature I enjoy the most. I believe you’ll do too.

Cons

Like Memrise, Duolingo also has its own app of the same name. Unfortunately, you can’t use it in offline mode. It requires an internet connection. They also don’t provide tips and notes like the ones on their website. 

English courses won’t be available if you choose English as your speaking language. At first, I thought they didn’t offer an English course there. It was only available when I changed my speaking language from English to Indonesian (similar to Malay). This process is called a reverse tree.

It’d be great if they offered the course to people who choose English as their speaking language too and let them decide if they want to take the course or not. Don’t simply assume people who choose English are already good.

Verb Conjugation

At the very beginning, I mention Duolingo giving tips, notes, and grammar when you finish on certain steps. Unfortunately, that only works on the web-based and not the mobile version. I’d love to see it there as well because not all people use the web version.

The fluency indicator is unreliable. In my opinion, the only way you can measure how fluent you are is by communicating with a real person.

What confuses me a lot is that there are different words that have the same meaning. For example numbers - tres (three), trece (thirteen), and tercero (third). The word de also has lots of meanings. I wish they could create a column and compile together all those similar words that have different meanings as well as different words with the same meaning. That’d be great.

Regarding written exercises rather than mixing both English-Spanish writing and Spanish-English writing together it would be better if they have separate exercises for that. Sometimes they are more Spanish-English writing than English-Spanish writing.

There are times when the audio recording doesn't pick up the speech correctly. It identifies the wrong one as the correct one as incorrect. Although I’m grateful that it isn’t as strict as Easy Learning 6 it would be much better if they can fix that.

Latest: Watch Something Like Home official trailer

Duolingo is making its very own documentary called Something Like Home. You can watch the full film on their website or watch it on YouTube

Duolingo by far is the best website among the other two as of now. Is it possible to speak fluently just by using it? No. You’re going to need to add other resources and methods to do so and don’t just rely on one. If your goal is to be able to speak or to have a basic conversation then yes, it’s possible. All I can say is it’s worth giving a try. 

Do any of you use Duolingo? How is it going? You’re more than welcome to share with us below.

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  1. georgia says:

    My partner and I stumbled over here coming from a different web page and thought I may as well check things out. I like what I see so now I am following you. Look forward to looking at your web page for a second time.

    • Meina says:

      Hey Georgia,

      Thank you so much for the follow. I suggest you try Dualingo, just for fun. Who knows, it might pique your interest to learn new languages 🙂

  2. Vic says:

    I have used the app Duolingo and found it both helpful and entertaining. I just wish I had more time to learn!

    • Meina says:

      Hi Vic.

      Make use of any free time you have, even if it’s only for 30 minutes. Don’t have enough time to learn new lesson? That’s ok, though. Just make sure you review back what you’ve learned so that you don’t forget.

  3. Yishan says:

    Hi Meina,
    Thanks for sharing this great website to us! Another good way to learn a new language. Definitely will try it out!

    • Meina says:

      Hi Yishan.

      Thank You and You’re welcome!

  4. Anthony says:

    Great post about learning a new language with Duolingo! I have been interested in learning french, but some of the other popular options were rather pricey. I will look into this option and I may just try it out to accomplish my goal and learning french.

    • Meina says:

      Hi Anthony.

      Thank you. You’ll definitely love it. Luis Von Ahn, the founder of Duolingo believes that learning a new language (education) should be free and created the website based on that. Their hard work has been recognized and they were awarded with Apple’s iPhone App of the Year of 2013 and Google Play’s Best of the Best of 2013 and 2014.

  5. Sheena Stafford says:

    I really like this post 😀 It is in depth enough to really get an understanding about what duolingo is about, but not so long that I got bored or distracted. The pictures are descriptive and capture the essence of what you are getting across! Good Job and keep it up… (Making me want to go re-open the Spanish text book from a decade ago :P)

    • Meina says:

      Thank you 🙂 Did you learn Spanish at school? What level you are? I just wish back then in high school they offered Spanish Language and not just French.

  6. Emily says:

    What a neat sounding program. I’ve always wanted to learn another language, and it sounds like this one has some good pro’s. I like the idea of the immersion part. Thanks!

    • Meina says:

      You bet! Give it a try and I’m sure you’ll love it.

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