Duolingo – Learn English with Duo the Owl

This week I want to introduce you a very useful website for learning and practicing English: Duolingo – a free science-based language learning platform. The teaching method heavily depends on translation. While translating from and to your native language, you learn and practice how to pronounce and spell the words and to form sentences.

Taking your native language –or another language you are competent- as basis, Duolingo gives you the option of learning various languages, besides English. For Turkish speakers, it only offers English courses, but German will be added soon. For English speakers, Duolingo has more languages to offer. For example, I use this site to learn Spanish and refresh my Italian. Interestingly, in the near future it will even be offering fictional languages like Dothraki and Klington.

Duolingo was created by crowdsourcing pioneer Luis von Ahn, PhD and Severin Hacker, PhD and was launched in January 2013. Today, it has a community of 20 million users. More than 20,000 of these users applied to be volunteers for contributing the process of creating language courses. Due to its strict selection process only 3 to 5 bilingual contributors can work in the creation process.

After you choose the language you would like to study, Duolingo gives you the opportunity to start from the beginning, or to take a test to determine your proficiency level; you continue accordingly. You set yourself a goal to reach each day and your coach reminds you to come back if you do not show up for a few days. It keeps track of your progress, as well as motivating you to reach your goal.

For demonstration purposes I chose to learn English as a Turkish speaker and I began with Basics 1 as you can see in the screenshot below. In addition to providing hints and notes to help you understand the topic, Duolingo offers test where you translate words or sentences from Turkish to English and vice versa, listen the phrases and write them down, fill in the blanks and pronounce the words. It may seem like a piece of cake at the beginning, but trust me; it gets quite tough as you progress.

I really like using Duolingo and find it very useful for learning a language. There are a couple of reasons why I chose Duolingo, among the other language teaching sites. First of all, I can use it on my smart phone when I am stuck in traffic on a bus or on my computer. I set daily goals and I try to keep up with them, or get an e-mail from Duo, reminding me to study. Both the application and the website are user friendly. What I really appreciate is that, there are no hidden fees, Duolingo is totally free.  Frankly speaking, I did not have any problems using the website therefore I do not have any weaknesses in mind to declare. I would definitely suggest teachers to recommend this website to their students to practice their English because of the above mentioned reasons. Teachers may turn the usage of this site into a challenging competition and the students may try harder to make a decent progress.

If you wish to learn more about Duolingo, you can watch the video below.