Learn Spanish

DuoLingo – Learn International Languages at Your Own Pace

Discipline: Language Arts 
Platform: iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Web 
Price: Free 

For What:

DuoLingo is a language learning app offering 16 languages for English speakers. Say, as an English speaker you can learn Spanish, French or German along with million other learners. It uses crowd source to help you understand your learning or discuss doubts and queries. Speakers of non-English languages can also learn using this app. These include Spanish, Greek, Czech, German, French, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese speakers. 

DuoLingo smoothly drives you through learning language. On mastering the basic module (lesson), next module will get activated. You can also take the test to skip one or group of modules, if you’re already familiar with it.

Duolingo

 

Each lesson has range of activities such as matching words, translation, listening and speaking exercises. It identifies your weakest words to strengthen it. Under the module, a bar will show the mastery level. It will get weak progressively if you don’t practice the same lesson regularly as our brain will start forgetting. DuoLingo keeps track of it, sets the revision schedule and reminds you. It is so much intelligent that, as our brain masters the lesson, interval between our revision schedule increases – as obviously we don’t forget and eventually become geeks.

Pros:

  • Intuitive, Easy and Self-paced learning app
  • Need no educator to teach
  • Beautiful User Interface

 

 Cons:

  • Lack of Human interaction
  • You must be a speaker of one of the language supported to learn new languages. Say, you know my mom passionately trying to learn English and that’s why I started researching apps. She knows only Tamil but this app doesn’t support it so she can’t learn English. DuoLingo won’t help my mother but I ended up learning Spanish. Hope Tamil will be supported soon. This is the best free app to learn new languages. Period.

 

How to Integrate in Classroom:

Decide how you will use it in your classroom. You must have a smart device, chrome book, PC or Mac and a projector so that you can screen-cast and project the app to entire class but I will recommend each student have access to a smart device preferably Android tablet as it is cost effective. So, they can self-learn and educators can mentor them. 

Let’s say Students have a smart device and learn independently. They must create a profile, login, choose target language they wish to learn and setup weekly goal. Students must use the app during Core Skill time to learn, practice and revise new language like Spanish.

As I mentioned, DuoLingo lacks in human interaction. During Socratic discussion time (open ended discussions), educators must facilitate group of students to apply their learning from the app to speak, listen closely to the comments of others, think critically for themselves, understand, articulate their own thoughts, connect learnings with real world scenarios and respond to thoughts of others. Also, integrate the learning in trans-disciplinary projects. Say, write a blog about the project activity in the language students learning and socialize sharing it with family, friends and our community. 

You need not worry about testing students as the app covers it and tracks the progress my means of mastery level indicators under each module (lesson) and weekly goals.

Set your own goal. Learn at your own pace. Welcome to personalized learning!

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