Knowledge of at least one foreign language has long been desirable. A specialist who additionally speaks one or more languages ​​is always given preference when applying for a job, not to mention the fact that such people feel easily and confidently abroad, they can read books in the original language ... The list is endless. Progress does not stand still, and tutorials can be replaced by a great application called Duolingo. User reviews are unequivocal - this is one of the best educational applications.

What is Duolingo?

Learn languages ​​for free! You need to install the program on the computer from the official website, and you can start classes. Scientists have long found out that a person perceives information very well if it is presented in a free game form - it seems that this has been with us since childhood. And if there is an alternative to just memorizing or hiring a teacher, then why not use it? In addition, no financial investment is required.

The Duolingo app is suitable even for those who are completely new to English. By the way, in addition to it, there are also courses in German, Spanish and French.

How is the training

Simplicity combined with powerful functionality is what the user gets in Duolingo. Registration takes just a few minutes. After confirming the email, the virtual student gets access to tasks that can be performed both on the site and in the application installed on the computer.

The difficulty of tasks increases as a person develops his skills. Each big topic is divided into many small tasks, so a person does not need to absorb tons of information, he can choose what to learn today. Each topic ends with a special mini-lesson to consolidate knowledge.

Motivation

Someone will say that it is not necessary to go for such tricks, because you can learn English from a textbook. However, most people learn the language not because they "should", but because they "should", therefore there is not enough will and perseverance: poring over a book quickly gets boring. Duolingo, on the other hand, works like a teacher, issuing portions of assignments and grading them.

Vocabulary is also of great importance when working with a foreign language. Even if a person knows the rules perfectly, he will not be able to build a sentence if he does not know any of the necessary words. Yes, you can often use synonyms, but, you see, it is quite difficult to use them for such a word as, for example, fork. It's much easier to use word sets, which Duolingo allows you to do.

Levels already passed by the user are not postponed to the far corner - this is also a huge plus. Periodically, the program offers to repeat the material covered. So, by repeated repetition, a large number of words are easily remembered, which, in turn, are used in other tasks (for example, when it is necessary to compose a phrase).

Practice and more practice

"Daily low" is what else helps users in Duolingo. Feedback on the project often mentions how hard it can be to force yourself to open a textbook after a hard day at work. The application offers a small number of tasks every day, and the volume can be increased or decreased depending on your own employment, in addition, they can be completed one at a time during the day, when there are a few free minutes, or on the way to work.

Practice shows that daily classes of 20-30 minutes are more effective than one many-hour lecture once a week. This rule applies to Duolingo as well: do a few tasks daily.

In the application, you can set the so-called "goal" - this is the minimum tasks that must be completed during the day in Duolingo. The levels are: Easy, Medium, Serious and Insane. It takes only a few minutes a day to complete "easy target" tasks, but if you have time, you can work overtime. The system automatically calculates how many days you have been exercising in a row, and here it is important not to skip days. This is great motivation.

In addition to learning words and rules, the application has tasks for constructing phrases. Here, the developers did their best: in addition to simple colloquial sentences, sometimes there are quotes from books, idioms, aphorisms, and just funny speech turns. This diversifies the learning process.

The site has technical support, whose specialists are ready to help the user in case of difficulties, they can report bugs. An important part is the forum where you can communicate with colleagues, look for interlocutors and even organize competitions.

Duolingo can easily oust such time wasters as social networks and learning from a person's life is easy and interesting, it does not tire, but it allows you to get distracted or unload your head after hard mental work. All this is supported by positive emotions from the fact that time is not wasted, something useful is being done.

By level

If the user is no longer new to the language, the system will quickly determine his level, and you will not have to monotonously perform many too simple tasks. If, for example, a person reads and writes well, but is not good enough at listening, then this problem is also easily solved. Lessons that the user already knows can be taken ahead of schedule.

The main thing in learning a language is to learn how to speak it as quickly as possible, to overcome the "audio barrier". To do this, the app features listening tasks, but to make your workouts as intense as possible, you can use voice input. Thus, if the answer to the question needs to be written (printed), the user simply pronounces it. The system may recognize words incorrectly, but this will be an incentive to practice pronunciation.

Polyglots

To fundamentally study the base of the language, use two courses, for example, Russian-English and English-Russian at the same time. The peculiarity is that there are many more materials for English speakers, and by choosing the reverse course, the user gets access to them.

For Russian-speaking users, only four languages ​​​​are available for learning, but for the English-speaking audience, the list is much larger. Therefore, as soon as English is brought to an intermediate level, you can take, for example, an Anglo-Spanish course, and improve two languages ​​at the same time. In addition, this will open access to new interesting materials.

For kids

An indispensable tool in teaching children a foreign language is Duolingo. German, French or English - it doesn't matter, because not only an adult, but also a child will be interested in learning and monitoring their "leveling" in the profile, receiving lingot bonuses, which are the so-called game currency, and buying various additions to the functionality for them , for example, the ability to complete a task on time.

However, do not forget that this is an educational game, and the child should be unobtrusively reminded of it.

Minuses

Despite many positive qualities, Duolingo also has disadvantages. User reviews allow you to compile some statistics: the application does not cause any complaints only among beginners. For those who are fluent in the language and, for example, want to deepen their knowledge or prepare for an exam (IELTS, TOEFL), the application will not help much. However, here we can mention a wonderful alternative - the LinguaLeo project. Its significant drawback is its narrow specialization: only English, but there are significantly more materials than in Duolingo.

English with the help of this service can also be learned from scratch. True, some functions will be available only when purchasing a premium, however, you can easily do without it, knowing a few tricks. For example, the use of a mobile application along with the functionality of the site itself will expand the number of available workouts (for some reason, there is a significant difference in tasks on these platforms). In addition, many interesting and motivating videos with English subtitles are available without any premium. For beginners, such materials may seem complicated, but for those who are more advanced in the language, the videos will be very useful.

Tasks where you need to speak the answer can become a real problem if the Internet connection is unstable or not at all. The same goes for listening.

There is one more small minus in Duolingo. Reviews about the program are periodically updated with reports of bugs in some courses, but they are not critical and are quickly eliminated by the site's programmers.

Instead of a conclusion

No, Duolingo is not a program that will install a foreign language into a human "operating system". Without effort, there will be no effect. But for those who really want to learn a language, this app will really help. However, you need to learn in a complex way, Duolingo alone is not enough. "Learn languages ​​for free" is the slogan of many speaking clubs.

Some of them are really free, and some of them do not take money only from those who already have a good command of the language. In any case, this will be not only a great addition to the main tasks, but also an opportunity to make interesting acquaintances. Often, native speakers also come to the evenings of conversational clubs, and this is also an opportunity to get to know the culture of another country better.

Without leaving home, you can use various chat services, where people from all over the world are looking for interlocutors to talk in the language they are learning. There are many self-learning tools, and best of all, many of them are free (or almost free), you just need to know how to use them correctly.

Click "Home" to get to your skill tree. In the skill tree, you will be doing most of your training. It is divided into separate sections, and each block contains several lessons. The more you advance in learning the language, the more units will be available to you.

Pass ahead of time what you already know (optional). If you already have the basic knowledge, you can take part of the skill tree ahead of time. Click on the golden keyhole at the end of each section to take the quiz. You will have three attempts.

Click on the first skill block. It will probably be called "Basics 1"

Duolingo (duolingo) - is a fairly new online project (launched in June 2012) for independent language learning. The idea of ​​its development was born from a young American professor Louis von Ahn. His previous successful projects Capture and Recupture are known to most internet users.

Developers of the DUOLINGO project

If someone is not familiar with the operation of these programs, then briefly this can be explained as follows: if you make some kind of request to a site that provides services (for example, you buy tickets), then the system must make sure that you are a person. To do this, a set of numbers or letters is sent to you so that you reproduce them and thereby prove your human nature.

Second project recapture was designed to digitize books. It was just a brilliant idea - to use a huge number of Internet users to digitize books. Probably not everyone is aware of this, but regardless of whether you know it or not, you are also participating in the creation of a digital library if you are given two lines of characters to play.

With one of them, you again confirm that you are a person, and the second is characters unrecognized by the computer. Of course, they are not only given to you, there is a comparison of the same fragment from different people, then all this is processed by the program. Now this project has already been bought from Louis von Ahn, and he and his team are working on a new grandiose project - Duolingo.

The essence of the project

Its essence is to give people the opportunity to learn foreign languages ​​for free, and in return, these people will translate texts from the Internet. The Internet is now 70% in English. Translation work is endless. Probably, everyone has already encountered when they cannot find something they need in their native language, and not everyone understands English, and it can be difficult for those who understand, since a lot of special terminology is often used.
And if this is some kind of matchmaker, then there is no hope at all!

Available languages

Initially, Duolingo was available in English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, French, but trial versions of other languages ​​are already running. Nowadays, Russian has already appeared - so you can learn English based on your native language. It's very interesting, exciting and enjoyable, I advise everyone to try it, by the way, in Duolingo you can start from scratch.

Duolingo - site snippet

Currently, over 5 million people use Duolingo every week and the audience is constantly growing. The site periodically changes its design, work on improvement is ongoing. All your successes are counted, there is voice acting, which is very valuable, as it is being worked out pronunciation which is indispensable in learning a new language.

DUOLINGO Efficiency

Louis von Ahn claims that using this free Duolingo course is very effective. It takes several hundred hours of work for a student with zero knowledge of a foreign language to reach the intermediate level and be able to participate in the translation of texts. Translations from different students are compared, evaluated, processed - with the help of special programs, it turns out quickly and not as expensive as the services of professional translators.

It turns out that the Duolingo project is mutually beneficial for students and founders. Students are given the opportunity to receive free knowledge, and developers receive and use the results of this knowledge.
Here is a video from the TED conference, translated into Russian, in which Professor Louis von Ahn himself explains how Duolingo works

Duolingo's official website is located at