The biggest problem with duo...?!

As with anything that is different to what came before, Duolingo has split the camp between lovers and haters. Some people swear by it, convinced that it is the only way to learn a language in the 21st century. Others see its bright colours and game-like approach as unserious, injecting too much fun at the expense of actual advancement in the language. Of the many arguments levelled against Duolingo though, one that keeps coming up time and time again is the fact that the sentences aren't useful for conversation, that phrases you need straight away come up later in the course or not at all and that the sentences that are there are often artificial or just plain weird.

Strange as some of them are, I actually don't see these as a drawback, in fact, I'd go as far to say that learning to translate such phrases as "the elephant drinks milk" etc goes a long way to making sure that the structures of the language themselves stick in your mind, rather than just learning rote phrases. Duolingo works by teaching you vocabulary then getting you to use it. This is different to how a phrasebook works, where you "learn" a phrase as a whole utterance, ready to be brought out when you need it in a specific context. At most, a space will be left blank to insert the noun you need, but besides this, it's a highly specific way of learning language that isn't encouraging you to actually make use of the language. The strange sentences often used by Duolingo work by encouraging you to instead take vocabulary out of isolation- they aren't specific to a certain situation. For example, instead of learning the phrase "jeg vil reise til Norge", you instead learn the words on their own, ready to be brought into various other sitautions. It might start off with "jeg vil reise til Norge" but before long it will be "katten vil reise med fly". It really doesn't matter that no cat on this Earth has ever thought to itself "I can't wait for the next time I go on a plane", the point is, it's asking you to create completely new sentences, using the vocabulary you have learnt and then manipulating it with the structures that you have picked up.

Duolingo does teach you enough to be able to order in a restaurant, book a hotel room and navigate the rail network, just not directly. It teaches you the vocabulary and the structures behind this, then it's up to you to put it together when you go on holiday. Here's the thing: studies have compared completing the Duolingo skill trees to the equivalent of a first year college level course. Now, how many people enroll on a college language course before their holidays? And how many college courses spend the first term role-playing restaurant scenarios? There are quicker ways to learn these things before your holiday, the fact is that Duolingo isn't for that purpose, it is to get you actually understanding the language and using it, not to prepare you for a weekend break in various European cities. Courses exist just for this purpose, and they're a lot better at it than Duolingo, but they won't bring you to B1 level.