#Dual lingo movie#

I expected some defensiveness from him about my need to use books to get the conversational skills I had hoped to get from Duolingo. I recently got in touch with Luis von Ahn, a co-founder and the CEO of Duolingo, to ask whether my experience was typical.

Was that how the app was supposed to work? In the end, I did pretty well in Rome, engaging in simple, fractured semi-conversation in most of my encounters. Learning the verb conjugations was a breeze, too. The app had exposed me to a considerable vocabulary I needed only minimal drilling with books to remember the words. It seemed I had been getting something useful from my hours with Duolingo. A funny thing happened: I started easily picking up what I hadn’t been able to get from Duolingo-grammar, vocabulary, and, most important, an ability to engage in simple conversations in typical situations. I got my hands on a self-study book, a travel phrase book, and a pocket dictionary, and started cramming. And this in spite of 70-plus hours of study.īut I still had a week. But without a prompt, I was as speechless in even the most basic situations as any boorish American tourist. Given a bunch of words to choose from, I could correctly assemble impressive communiqués. The app had made me a master of multiple-choice Italian. Panicking, I fired up Duolingo and almost instantly saw the problem. But I was utterly unable to recall them and pull them together. Laurie switched to a restaurant scenario: “Do you have a table for four?” “I’d like two glasses of red wine.” I knew I had seen all the pieces in Duolingo’s sentences. Words and phrases swam through my mind, but they didn’t add up to anything useful. You’re at the airport outside Rome, she said, and you want to get downtown how would you ask? I gaped like a fish. But surely, I figured, that would work to my advantage when I was faced with more mundane language demands as a tourist.Ī week before we were to leave for Rome, my wife, Laurie, put me to the test.

Okay, so Duolingo’s sentences covered some strange ground. And I was learning Italian! I walked through my home confidently talking about hiding a knife in my boot, when my master’s thesis was due, and how important it was to pay attention to the will of the people. Learning languages was always a chore-until Duolingo. I’m not a serious polyglot, but I’ve tackled a handful of languages in just about every way a language can be learned: classroom, tutor, textbook, audio recordings, flash cards, software, and more. Sucker! I became rich in worthless points, and cherished them. The app kept me apprised of my progress via various point schemes, and used email and phone notifications to nudge me to keep my routine going, even betting me points that I wouldn’t keep my streak up for another week. Finishing a lesson was a full-out digital celebration featuring treasure chests with flapping lids.

But without a prompt, I was speechless.ĭuolingo praised me constantly: for responding correctly several times in a row, for completing a chunk of the day’s lesson, for learning from my sloppy mistakes.

No tedious grammar or vocabulary drills-that stuff, apparently, would seep into my consciousness via exposure to increasingly varied, complex, and interesting sentences. But more often it asked me to translate Italian phrases and sentences into English, or vice versa, providing multiple-choice responses. Sometimes it demanded that I speak an Italian phrase or sentence (which I always did correctly, to hear Duolingo tell it). It pulled me right in, helping me set daily goals and then launching into simple phrases. I was planning a trip to Rome in the late spring, and I’ve always been of the mind that to properly visit a country, you’ve got to give the language a shot.īut I had another reason for sticking with it: Duolingo is addictive.

#Dual lingo movie#

I used it on trains, while walking across town, during previews at the movie theater. No way was a camping trip going to make me miss my Italian lesson.įor most of the preceding year, I had religiously attended to my 15-minute-or-so daily encounters with the language-learning app Duolingo. Late one chilly evening last September, I excused myself from a small group huddled around a campfire to peck at and mumble into my phone.