Regardless, this year, with my twenty-fifth birthday looming over me like some kind of gravemarker [dramatic, I know, but I've been dreading the big two-five since I can remember. Picture seven-year old me, panicking about one day being twenty five.] I wanted to focus on self-improvement and enriching my life. Luckily for me, my wonderful friend Paul turned to me mid-way through January and said "Do you want to learn to speak German?"
Well! Sure, I said. Why not? I was floored when he turned his phone towards me and showed me the app he had been using to learn Portuguese for the past few weeks. "It's free," he said. Say no more, my friend. Say no more.
Duolingo is an incredibly innovative free program available on your iPhone or on their website. I've read articles that have said their method is better at teaching adults new languages from scratch than the Rosetta Stone program! ...but for free. Did I mention it's free? It just does not get better, folks. An independently conducted eight-week study found that 34 hours spent with Duolingo is the instructional equivalent of one full, eleven-week semester taught at university level. Check out their website here for all sorts of press, fun facts, and more.
To start, you pick your language. French, Spanish, Italian, German or Portuguese. If you already have a knowledge base in a language, you can immediately test out of as many lessons as you need.
Here's why they can offer this amazing learning tool for free: They use their users' brainpower and collective knowledge to provide translation services to the online world! At the end of each lesson, if you are able, there are real-world translations. DuoLingo asks a large number of users to translate real-world text from your learned language to your native language, and actually has you cross-check the work of other users in order to arrive at the most accurate translation possible. Sheer genius, says I.
I'm several lessons into German and I am finding it incredibly intuitive. Aside from the directed lessons, there's a practice area that notes how far along you are in your lessons and incorporated everything you've learned up to that point in a review. It feels like a game - you start each lesson with a certain number of hearts and for each incorrect answer you lose a heart. Bonus point are awarded for any hearts remaining at the end of the lesson.
Each of the lessons are divided into areas of language - there's basic & phrases, grammar, vocabulary, and more than I haven't even come close to unlocking. You complete the first half of each lesson in order to move on with the instruction, and when you've mastered enough to tackle some real-world translations you head back and complete the second half of the lessons!
You can have more than one language on the go, too, for those of you who have brains that can multitask like that. You probably read five books at the same time, too, don't you? I will never understand.
What I find most helpful about this particular teaching model is not only the repetition of vocabulary and verb conjugation, but the variety of methods you are required to understand it in. From my schooling in French, I can read and speak fairly well but my verbal understanding and writing is practically nonexistent. This platform requires you to read, write, speak, and listen, often all at once! Though I am still a beginner when it comes to German, my comprehension across all four mediums is level and that contributes a great deal to how quickly you can pick it up, I believe.
Sometimes the sentences and phrases they have you translate can be a bit goofy...
Check it out - if nothing else, it's something to keep your brain active and happy in your downtime! No more rubbish $1.99 games and time wasters. Find it available for download on their website, or on iTunes here.
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