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.

Duolingo Part 2: The Review

So here's the big one, my attempt at reviewing Duolingo Norwegian. In part 1 I told you about my own experience on Duolingo and how far it took me. Here, I am gong to look at how Duolingo works, reviewing its features and discussing how you can get the most out of it.

The Tree
Once you've signed up with Duolingo (a simple process, you can log in with facebook) and chosen your language, you are presented with this:

All the lessons are grouped into "skills"- the circles- and arranged in a "tree". From the start you are guided through your studies- you can't skip ahead unless you've already studied the language and pass a test- and the tree tells you exactly what you are going to learn and when. I personally think this is a great way of setting out a course. Everything is broken down into small topics and so, for example, you know that within the first ten lessons you'll have learnt names of some animals, how to talk about food, how to form the plural and some verbs. The fact you can see everything but not just rush ahead, as you could in a book, actually really encouraged me. I looked forward to learning about the arts and philosophy, which come quite late on, and so stuck the course out. If you're not into the arts, then there's skills on science, nature and fantasy, which was a really cool skill all about trolls and witches.

The skill icons change depending on your strength and how firmly it's planted in your brain. They turn coloured once you've unlocked them. Once their gold you've completed them and they're in your mind, though as you can see in the "Definites" skill, the strength bars start going down once you've left it for a while. This means you should go back and strengthen them. This is a really good aspect of the course, it actually lets you know what your weaknesses are and what you should revisit- just because you've finished a skill doesn't mean you can just forget it. For a lot of people, this is a bit of an obstacle in Duolingo, it's nice to have a gold tree and it takes a lot of work keeping it that way, but I think you can really use it to your advantage. Instead of just ploughing ahead, every time you start a session, before moving on, take time to revisit a past skill. This is especially important later on, when you're learning a lot of new words for some skills. It's fairly easy to keep the first twenty or so gold as they use a lot of vocabulary that overlaps with English, but later on you really need to keep it fresh in your mind to make the most of the later skills. Each skill consists of 2-10 lessons, each of which you need to pass to move on.

Lessons
Lessons consist of around 10-40 exercises but if you make mistakes, instead of sending you back to the start (as it used to- lose three hearts and you're out!) it simply extends the lesson, making you repeat certain words until you get them right.

That's an example of one of the early lessons and as you can see, it starts off quite simple. You simple have to select the picture of a woman, with the Norwegian written underneath. However, dn't be fooled, it gets more complicated:

Here, you're being asked to translate a full sentence of Norwegian using the words you've learned with the matching exercises, as well as introducing new vocabulary in the actual sentence. If you hover over the words, it gives you a translation. If you click on "Tips & notes" in the top left of the exercise, it brings up the grammar explanations for the unit. As you can see, there is a lot of support provided, but you quickly stop relying on the translations and start doing it yourself. This is a nice, rewarding way to learn- from the beginning you're dealing with actual sentences that you quickly learn to read and understand.

Other exercises involve listening and speaking. These can be a bit tricky as, for example, in the listening exercises the voice doesn't always pronounce things clearly and in the speaking exercises it might find your particular accent hard to understand, or, as I saw when my friend was studying French, you can just make an assortment of noises and it will congratulate you. As the voices are computer generated, you really do need to explore other options to get used to the sound of Norwegian, by watching videos or listening to the radio. This is possibly where Duolingo's biggest weakness lies, though from early on you're introduced to speech, this is limited. It's best to see this as a starting point, to here sounds in context, rather than a means in itself to become fluent at speaking and listening Norwegian.

What to do after Duolingo?
When you finish Duolingo, you might be asking yourself what do you do next? For the other, more popular, languages, you have the option of helping out with translating real texts, but this hasn't been rolled out to the new courses yet. Fortunately, there's a few options outside of the Duolingo world for you to look at and try. As I've said quite a lot, after finishing I had a lot of general ideas of the grammar floating around my head, but no organisation, and so for me I have been following various book courses. The ones I've found the most helpful are Colloquial Norwegian and Teach Yourself in its various editions. I've also been trying to watch videos and listen to the radio, but I am less disciplined when it comes to these two activities. Nonetheless, it definitely helps to hear Norwegian as it is actually spoken, outside of the context of the course.

When it comes to vocabulary, memrise is a really helpful website. It works on the flashcard concept, which is a feature notably lacking from the Duolingo Norwegian course but present in some of the others. Someone has even gone to the trouble of making a Duolingo course on memrise which brings together all the vocabulary from the course in a handy set of flashcards, all 2314 of them, organised according to the Duolingo Norwegian tree.

Of course, the best way to learn Norwegian is to... GO TO NORWAY! Unfortunately, this hasn't been an option for me yet but hopefully one day. I have heard that it can be quite difficult to get Norwegians to speak to you in their own language as they are taught English to a high level from an early age, but if you force yourself to stick with it, make a point of ordering in Norwegian and making yourself understood, then it should really help to get some proper exposure. This is nevertheless all hypothetical as I have yet to go to Norway, but it is definitely next up on my destination list!

Final remarks
The biggest positive about Duolingo, and this really cannot be stressed enough, is that it is free. I don't know of any other provider that has such a complete course for nothing, taking you from complete beginner to a good intermediate level in a short period of time. I think for a lot of people starting out in Norwegian, or any language Duolingo teaches, this really is the best way to begin. There are drawbacks, of course, and for the skills of listening and speaking especially, you will want to supplement your learning as you go. Try youtube videos where a native speaker gives you essential vocabulary or try fairytales where a lot of the simple vocabulary from the early Duolingo lessons will, again, be spoken by a real native speaker. Again, for grammar, after finishing the course I found it useful to consolidate what I had learnt with a "proper" course. This isn't to detract from the positives though. With so much vocabulary, you should be able to read at least simple newspaper articles, wikipedia pages on Norway, and simple stories in Norwegian. Don't let your journey stop once you've completed the tree, explore the language and make it your own.

Duolingo Part 1: My story

Duolingo is one of the most popular ways of learning languages these days with millions of learners using it everyday. A few months using it is supposed to give you the equivalent knowledge of the first year of a college level course, giving you all the grammar and around 2000 words depending on the course. Norwegian is one of the smaller languages on the site with 182,000 learners, but this doesn't change the quality of the course. It takes you right from saying hello, to discussing politics, dealing with the passive and finishing with a unit called Celebration, a nice way to finish!  I will go into detail about how Duolingo works in a later post and give it a proper review, but for now I will just talk about how I used it and got on with it. I completed it a few months ago now and I found it a great way to get used to the language.

I had done a bit of Norwegian before starting, but I was finding it difficult to consolidate everything I was reading. I found myself redoing the first unit of Colloquial Norwegian over and over again, not absorbing the vocabulary as well as I wanted and just not progressing. So when I got an email saying that the Norwegian course had been released, complementing the Danish and Swedish courses already on there, I was eager to begin!

I breezed through the units, greatly aided by how similar a lot of Norwegian word are to English and the friendly grammar. The website has a lot more features than the mobile app, and I found the grammar explanations simple. They aren't enough to develop a complete understanding of the intricacies of the language, but adequate to give you at least some idea of how the language you are studying works.

For me, vocabulary is where I normally stumble in language learning. I find learning grammar rules a fairly straight forward experience, especially when it comes to endings and things like that, but for some reason vocabulary is something I have to really study to get. Duolingo helped a lot with this, the spaced repetition is a great help and the activities really allow you to see the words in use. This is a real bonus because a simple glossary doesn't reveal shades of meaning, you need to actually see the words in context.

The Norwegian course on Duolingo has a lot of personality and you can really see the dedication of the team who made it. It is full of pop culture references and a sentence that seems really odd at first suddenly clicks and you realise its a movie title or quote. This adds a lot of fun to what could easily just become repetitive translation exercises and it's fun to see what you can spot.

I finished the course in about a month and went on to more traditional, book based courses. This would be my recommendation to people who have completed Duolingo, I think when you finish you have a lot of information swirling around and a book course lets you consolidate what you've been doing and the variety means you get a wider vocabulary than if you just use one course. However, I go back to it quite often. If say, there's a topic on the arts I'll go to Duolingo and redo that unit. It's great for grammar as well; after learning the rules and doing the exercises in the book, I'll do it again on Duolingo, where I find the activities there get you to recall it a lot faster and gets it lodged in your brain.

I'll post a full review soon, but in the meantime give it a go! It makes starting out at least in a language easy. Feel free to find me on Duolingo, my username is alexwilliamson92