Language learning with Duolingo: the interaction and instruction
Learning languages from over 100 different courses in 40 languages anywhere, anytime? Sounds intriguing, but Duolingo (alone) won’t ensure fluency as advertised.
Note: This post was written as part of the “Design of Educational Games” course at Carnegie Mellon University.
Being a language enthusiast, I appreciate every tool that helps me pick up or practice languages. Among all the resources, Duolingo is undeniably one of the most popular educational apps in the world.
Duolingo was launched in 2011 by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn and his post-graduate student Severin Hacker. It recently reached a major milestone — it became a publicly-traded company in July 2021. This language-learning platform is available both as an iOS or Android app, but its desktop version provides a nuanced learning experience.
Learning Objectives: Language, fluency, and habit
Learning a new language anytime, anywhere
Language is a complex system that actually involves listening, speaking, reading, writing, sometimes even a new alphabet and writing format. Duolingo promises that doing their daily exercises is an effective way to learn a language. To be more specific, they affirm that their courses would “effectively and efficiently teach reading, listening, and speaking skills” even if the learners have little or no prior knowledge of the target language.
However, Duolingo based this statement on the studies conducted with only French and Spanish. Also, they did not clarify the source languages of the participants, which might matter for evaluating the efficacy. For an English speaker, it might be easier to learn Spanish and French, but it might not be the case for Mandarin or Japanese speakers.
Build vocabulary and fluency
Once users are signed up for a language course, they are prompted to choose a path between beginners and advanced learners.
Beginners can build their vocabulary step by step with the “skills” tree defined by Duolingo. For example, the Japanese course for English speakers begins from Hiragana and Katakana, the Japanese writing system, then learners can continue to learn from the basics like greetings, counting, food, color, family to advanced topics like ecology, society, science, history, etc.
On the other hand, if the learners consider themselves to be at an advanced level already, they can take a placement test and unlock some skills depending on their test results. Afterward, advanced learners can start to learn the new instructional content or practice the content that Duolingo supposes they might have been familiar with.
The question is — Are learners really learning the language? Or are they just memorizing random words by rote? It is controversial whether the instructional materials are meaningful and conversational for learners to really transfer the skills into their daily life.
Build the habit of daily practices
In reality, Duolingo seems to be encouraging habit cultivation rather than language proficiency or fluency. It utilizes multiple channels to urge learners to keep their streak, which would be further discussed in the Player Experience section later.
Honestly speaking, Duolingo might not be teaching basic conversational phrases that are useful when you’re traveling, not to mention having a complex conversation about whatever your expertise is. But if your goal is just to pick up some vocabulary, especially if you don't have access to a culture or education system that will give you the exposure, Duolingo might be a choice.
Game Elements
The core gameplay loop of Duolingo is to complete each skill in the language tree to then move on to the next. And the goal is to complete the entire tree.
Mechanics and Gameplay
Each skill consists of several lessons, and each lesson contains different types of exercises as follows:
- Translation exercises (which are the primary exercises)
- Listening exercises (which can be turned off )
- Speaking exercises (which can be turned off)
- Matching images with words
- Matching word pairs
To complete each exercise, learners can do several actions :
- Read tips before starting the exercise (on the web version)
- Tap on the speaker button to listen to the pronunciation
- Tap on words that have dotted underlines for a hint.
- Tap on the word to make a sentence
- Type the sentence
- Check if the answer is correct
- Lose a heart if learners make a mistake
- Browse or join discussions for the particular exercise
- Share the sentence
- Report a problem is there’s one
Other mechanics include:
- Earn XPs by learning lessons, stories, writing systems, etc.
- Earn gems by completing daily exercises, watching ads, and fulfilling achievements
- Keep the streak by completing a certain number of exercises every day
- Spend gems on heart refill
- Read interactive stories (e.g. Spanish and French)
- Learn writing systems (e.g. Korean, Japanese)
- Skip skills by taking a test (which requires spending gems)
- Join the leaderboard every week and gain XPs to enter leagues or gem rank (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Ruby, Emerald, Amethyst, Pearl, Obsidian, and Diamond)
- See personal achievements and claim rewards (gems)
- Invite or add friends and compete with them for XP
The following functions require a subscription to Duolingo Plus:
- Practice past mistakes that Duolingo thinks you can practice again.
- Take a progress quiz
Player Experience
Each lesson has a variety of exercises, along with a progress bar. Throughout the lesson, players are rewarded several animations from the Duolingo when they check the answer, finish 5 exercises, complete the lesson, etc. According to Duolingo, these animations or characters help learners enjoy spending time learning a language.
Duolingo does not time the lesson, so learners do not have the time limit or urgency. (But they can join the Lightning Round from to Leaderboard to have that experience.)
A variety of messaging is used to persuade learners not to quit Duolingo. Learners receive pretty persistent reminders like push notifications on the phone or emails to urge them to learn every day. However, it could be a double-edged sword. Learners can simply repeat one of the earlier lessons to keep the streak. Meanwhile, Duolingo also provides the Streak Freeze feature, which is a well-intentioned feature that lets you keep your streak even if you miss a day.
Duolingo also employs several nudges to encourage learners to keep learning. For example, they send weekly progress report emails to learners. Also, joining a weekly leaderboard or competing with friends motivates learners to go the extra mile.
Learning Mechanisms
Fluency Building
Duolingo uses spaced repetition model to help learners revisit and review words that they have learned instead of forcing learners to do mass practice all at once (Spacing). Obviously, every course is broken into several skills and lessons (Segmenting), and each exercise is built upon previous exercises for learners to gradually achieve the main goal — being fluent in the language (Scaffolding).
In other words, learners can unlock the next skill only if they have reached Level 1 on the previous skills. Hence, they are focused on the task at hand and thus spared the Cognitive Overload of the rest of the curriculum. Once learners acquire a certain number of skills, there’s a checkpoint to review their proficiency (Quizzing).
Refinement and Induction of Knowledge
Learners can sharpen different areas of language skills in alternation with Duolingo (Interleaving). In addition to the translation, listening, speaking, and pairing, they can read stories and familiarize themselves with the writing system. Also, the same word might be taught in different sentence structures or contexts to prepare learners to apply their knowledge in varied situations (Variability). Most significantly, Duoling offers Immediate Feedback for each question. If you get the answer to an exercise wrong, you will be provided with the correct answer.
Sense-Making
The strongest feature of Duolingo is that it uses multiple stimuli — visuals, audio, writing — to enhance the learning experience (Multimedia). You can listen to the pronunciation with diverse accents and voices, and the pleasant sounds and animations for the correct answers create positive reinforcement.
What they could have done better is that the sentences could be less quirky and more related to the learner’s Interest or connected to the real world (Anchored Learning).
Limitations
To be frank, users can definitely learn some things from an app, but if you want to become fluent in a language — or even conversational — Duolingo won’t be enough.
Other than the language itself, learning the language oftentimes involves an understanding of culture, context, distinct levels of formality and politeness, or even body language.
Also, not every language learner has the same learning style. Some prefer learning by speaking and interacting with native speakers, while others may find reading or writing more efficient. It is good that Duolingo has varied tasks, but they don’t offer choices for different learning styles.
Unlike in a class setting where more instructions happen, Duolingo often just drops a new particle on you without much explanation of what it does or even that it’s a particle at all. Moreover, many times learners are not learning chunks of words or collocations, but just random combinations of words.
I memorized tons of words, [but] I didn’t know how to use them properly. — Duolingo user.
Maybe instead of focusing on the streak, Duolingo should put more emphasis on the personal goal — whether it is travel, business, or study abroad. The goal of learning a language ought to be to survive first, then to learn vocabulary. Nonetheless, the flow of the learning tree is basically one-directional. Users aren’t encouraged to learn whatever topic they want, which gives the impression that you must complete lesson 5 in order to move onto lesson 6. Neither is it clear how the sequence of the instructional content is decided. Why can’t you learn how to order food in that language because you don’t know how to say stop sign yet?
Learners also cannot customize their word bank or flashcards. There’s no coming back after you hit the continue button. They can’t save words or sentences, so if they forget a word in the middle of a new lesson, they have to go through the previous lesson again to find it.
Duolingo also has this nice feature of learner community, but unfortunately, they are going to remove this feature and redirect users to unofficial channels like r/duolingo on Reddit, various Facebook communities, or the fandom wiki. I believe that language is eventually social, so providing learning communities is meaningful and helpful.
Conclusion
Language learning is a long long way to go, and Duolingo should not be used as a standalone resource. Learning a language ought to be about learning a new way of communication rather than maintaining a streak for using the app every day.
