How much can Duolingo teach us?
Everyone slags off Duolingo on here but I highly doubt many have put in the time necessary for a fair evaluation. A quick google search will show you that the US Foreign Service Institute (e.g overseas diplomats who probably know a thing or two about this) say it takes 480 hours to learn a group 1 language which are the easiest languages for English speakers to learn. To put that in context, doing three lessons of Duolingo a day for a week will put you somewhere in the 60 - 80 minute region. Let’s say it’s the former because you had a few days where you only did one or two lessons. That means it will take you 9.2 years to become proficient in your chosen language.<p>Duolingo is good, but it is not a fucking miracle worker. If you’re going in expecting to put in two or three lessons a day and then are disappointed that after a year you don’t speak Spanish, you’re completely fucking deluded and it is not Duolingo’s fault. It takes a lot of fucking effort to learn a language and you get what you put into it. I have been using Duolingo for two years to learn Spanish now, and the results have been wonderful. I can read a lot of Spanish texts, I can pick up on a lot of dialogue in tv and movies and I can express quite a few thoughts in Spanish. Am I completely proficient? Probably not - but if I lived in a Spanish speaking country for a few months I think I’d get pretty competent pretty quickly. And the learning I got has cost me a grand total of about £140. I can guarantee that as far as value for money goes, I have gotten way more learning for the money through Duolingo than if I’d have spent the equivalent on human one to one lessons (how many would I have been able to get realistically for the same amount of money - between five to ten 1 hour lessons?) and definitely better value for money than what I would get through my local college.