Is Duolingo a Good Way to Become Fluent In English?
Duolingo is huge, counting over 170 Million users around the world. You can study over 20 different languages on Duolingo, but over 50% of users are studying English.
Many students ask, is Duolingo a good way to become fluent in English. The answer is not so simple. There are positive and negative aspects to the popular language-learning app.
Duolingo is a popular language learning app. Duolingo is huge, counting over 170 Million users around the world. You can study over 20 different languages on Duolingo, but over 50% of users are studying English.
Many students ask, Is Duolingo a good way to become fluent in English? The answer is not so simple. There are positive and negative aspects to the popular language-learning app.
Check out this article if you are looking for information on the Duolingo English Test
The Good
Let's start with the pros:
Price - Although they recently introduced a membership plan, you can still use the app completely for free. This is obviously a big benefit, because there are not many options for learning English for free.
Convenience - For convenience, Duolingo is hard to beat. It’s in your pocket on your phone and ready to go whenever you are. On the train or before bed, it’s right there.
Gamification - Duolingo uses what is called gamification (game + ification = making something into a game). It’s like playing a video game. You’re getting points and earning badges. It’s fun and some people believe this helps to motivate you to keep studying English.
Personalization - I think this is one of the biggest strengths of Duolingo. It knows you, and it knows your English level. As blogger Malingual says, “[Duolingo] knows exactly what I can and can't do because it constantly asks me.” This is called adaptive language learning. Another type of personalization is self-paced learning. With Duolingo, you don’t need to worry that the class will go too fast or too slow. You control how fast you go and how much you study.
Science - There is also some strong brain science behind Duolingo. They seem to take research seriously. One example is the app's use of spaced repetition. If you want to remember new English vocabulary, trying to remember them again and again, with more time in between each recall is a scientifically proven method for remembering. Duolingo uses this kind of science to make your studying more effective.
So these are some good things about Duolingo, but the app isn’t perfect, and some of the following points make me think that the app is not the best way to learn English for most students.
The Not So Good:
The Method - Duolingo is based on the grammar-translation method of learning language. Most experts today agree that grammar-translation is not the best way to learn a language. It certainly isn’t bad, but there are better ways.
Lack of Interaction - Most current theories of how we learn English put some emphasis on communication and interaction. With Duolingo, it’s just you and your phone. You have no classmates, no conversations, no group activities. Most experts agree that these are important elements to learning English. This is especially important if you want to become fluent. English fluency comes from speaking, not from translating sentences. If you want to become fluent, you have to speak!
No Teacher - Everyone is different, but most students like the ability to ask a question to the teacher when they don’t understand. Duolingo has some help options along the way, but it’s not the same as having a person to talk to.
Persistence - Persistence with apps like Duolingo tends to be quite low. This is bad, because learning a new language happens over a long period of time. That means you need a lot of persistence, or else you are wasting your time.
Duolingo founder Luis Von Ahn says the users who persist are the ones that make Duolingo part of their daily routine. Users who “binge — spending hours on the site, cramming in French or German or Chinese language lessons — tend to disappear fast.”
Inauthenticity - As one blogger says, “Duolingo is horribly inauthentic. You'll quickly find yourself getting sick of 'red apples'.” You are almost always looking at sentences made up only to teach you language. This is definitely useful sometimes. I make similar sentences when teaching my students basic English grammar rules. But in a class, we make sure to mix in some authentic English.
The vocabulary you find in Duolingo is also very different from the most common words in English, because it depends on theme-based units about food and animals. That means the language you are learning is often incredibly useful.
Conclusions
Duolingo is fun. And with it you can definitely learn some useful things about English, like vocabulary and common grammar structures.
But Duolingo will probably not help you to become fluent in a language. It isn’t good for people who aren't highly self-motivated.. It’s good for an app. It might be a good way to get extra practice at home or learn basic grammar, but by itself it’s certainly not the best way to learn a new language.
Review of Participles
Remember:
Participles (or participial adjectives) are verbs with -ED and -ING endings that can work like adjectives, describing people and things.
-ED participles (past participles) usually describe how we feel, as in, "I feel exhausted."
-ING participles (present participles) usually describe things that make us feel that way, as in, "That hike was exhausting."
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Anatomy of an Email - Greeting
The punctuation you use at the end of an email greeting is important!
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Portmanteau Words
A portmanteau word is a words that is made by combining two other words.
Portmanteau is a French word (pronounced /pɔːtˈmantəʊ/ in English) for a big suitcase that can hold many things. Because these words "hold" more than one other word inside them they were called portmanteaus by Lewis Carroll, the writer of Through the Looking Glass, who enjoyed using them in his writing).
English Portmanteau Words
Have you ever felt so hungry that it made you angry? We call that feeling hangry in English! Ever wondered if someone was your friend or enemy? Frenemies! What's an icon that expresses an emotion? An emoticon!
What is a Portmanteau?
First, let's define portmanteau. A portmanteau word is a words that is made by combining two other words.
Portmanteau is a French word (pronounced /pɔːtˈmantəʊ/ in English) for a big suitcase that can hold many things. Because these words "hold" more than one other word inside them they were called portmanteaus by Lewis Carroll, the writer of Through the Looking Glass, who enjoyed using them in his writing).
Although the French plural of the word is portmanteaux, in English we can just say portmanteaus
How we form portmanteaus
Usually, it's the first half of one word added to the second half off another word. For example, a TV show that has both drama and comedy is sometimes called a dramedy. If you want to chill and relax with your friends, you can say, We're just chillaxing. When they first made hotels that where you could park your motorcar, they called them motels.
One of our favorites is brunch, which is breakfast + lunch. What could be better?
Not all portmanteaus are formed in the same way, though. For example, you have probably heard the word sitcom used to describe shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother, right? Well, sitcom comes from the phrase situational comedy.
Surprising Portmanteaus
Oxford Dictionaries points out that there are some common words that you may not realize are portmanteaus:
moped = motor + pedal
modem = modulator + demodulator
motel = motor + hotel
dumbfound = dumb + confound
bash = bang + smash
hassle = haggle + tussle
web + seminar = webinar
brother + romance = bromance
friend + enemy = frenemy
hungry + angry = hangry
Examples of Common Portmanteaus in English
Here's a longer list of portmanteau examples. After each word in the list are the two words that form it and its definition.
| # | Word | Part A | Part B | Definition |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | hangry | hungry | angry | so hungry you are angry |
| 2 | motel | motor | hotel | a hotel for people driving |
| 3 | podcast | iPod | broadcast | a radio show for iPods or smartphones |
| 4 | spork | spoon | fork | a spoon with tines on the end |
| 5 | brainiac | brain | maniac | someone very smart |
| 6 | emoticon | emotion | icon | an icon that expresses an emotion |
| 7 | snark | snide | remark | sarcasm, especially online |
| 8 | dramedy | drama | comedy | a show with both serious and funny parts |
| 9 | sitcom | situational | comedy | a tv show based on funny situations |
| 10 | frankenfood | Frankenstein | food | genetically modified food |
| 11 | Bollywood | Bombay | Hollywood | the Indian movie industry |
| 12 | bromance | brother | romance | a close friendship between men |
| 13 | crunk | crazy | drunk | really drunk and crazy |
| 14 | edutainment | education | entertainment | educational entertainment |
| 15 | mansplaining | man | explaining | when men explains to women rudely | 16 | sexture | sexy | texture | a sexy, messy hairstyle |
Can you add any to this list?
Using Portmanteaus
It's important to know that some portmanteaus, like chillax, are just for fun and extremely casual. We'd rarely use them in places like school or work. Others are not necessarily casual, but not used very commonly, such as dramedy. And then some have become everyday words, like motel and brunch.
In the media, it's common to combine the names of celebrities who are dating to refer to them as a couple. The first was Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie), and others have followed: Kimye (Kim Kardashian + Kanye West), Billary (Bill + Hillary Clinton).
