A few summers ago I became addicted to the language-learning app Duolingo. I was a complete beginner in Chinese having spent the previous year attending a few scattered elementary classes and, like many people in my situation, was searching for a magic app that could transport me to fluency.
A friend who I met on a trip to China and whose Chinese was more advanced than mine told me he had been using a free app that helped him build vocabulary and learn sentence structures.
Around the same time, I did some research online to find out: how long does it take to learn Chinese? I came across some research claiming that DuoLingo Mandarin users progress as quickly as students on university courses.
I downloaded it and was soon hooked.
For the uninitiated, DuoLingo is an app that turns language learning into a simple and addictive game. The app lets you take courses that are split by topics, starting with basic introductions and progressing to more complex themes like business and travel.
Each course exposes you to words and random short sentences related to the topic covered. You are also set various challenges which you must pass to unlock the next course. These include placing words in the right order to form sentences and translating Chinese sentences into English. The end goal is to unlock an entire ‘tree’ of hundreds of courses.
That summer I spent so much time using the app that I actually completed the DuoLingo Chinese tree. Each day the app sent me a message reminding me that my friend had completed more courses and accumulated more points than me. On days when I neglected my studies the owl (DuoLingo’s mascot) would email me to express his disapproval and sadness, adding that his mood wouldn’t improve until I took another lesson.
This emotional blackmail usually had the desired effect, spurring me into action whenever I had a spare moment. Yet by the end of the summer I not only wasn’t fluent, my spoken Chinese was no higher than a lower elementary level or A1 – the lowest rung on the European framework.
I recently reflected on this experience after a friend who is a beginner learner in Spanish and an enthusiastic DuoLingo user sent me an article by the app’s producers defending it from critics. Duolingo has been mercilessly mocked on language forums with many users posting bizarre, nonsensical sentences they have encountered while using the app.
The article, titled ‘How silly sentences can help you learn’, argues that although many sentences on the app are weird this is a good thing because it helps lodge them in your memory. Sentences like “The Tuesday is similar to the Monday” might never come up in real life but they serve as a ‘grammatical anchor’ enabling you to remember key grammar concepts and communicate accurately in your target language. After all, communication, the blog’s authors remind us, is about “learning rules and flexibility.”
I disagree that communicating in Chinese has much to do with learning rules and I disagree even more that encountering isolated, unnatural sentences that native speakers would never actually say is an effective way of acquiring grammar.
The degree to which a given sentence is “memorable” strikes me as irrelevant if that sentence is unnatural or not how a native speaker would express themselves. Instead, the priority should be to repeatedly encounter and comprehend thousands of sentences – preferably relevant to our own lives – in a natural context, until eventually the structures no longer feel alien.
Years later, after closely studying the methods used by the world’s best Chinese speakers, I discovered the best way to internalise grammar patterns is through consuming lots of comprehensible content, using sentence mining to collect phrases and structures that are relevant to your everyday life, and putting yourself in situations where you can use them as often as possible.
Alternative tools, such as graded readers are much more effective than DuoLingo at immersing learners in grammar patterns because they are designed to enable those with a small vocabulary to read extensively rather than translating one random, isolated sentence at a time. However wacky DuoLingo sentences might be, they will never be as compelling as good stories and meaningful articles on interesting topics.
Shortly after completing Duolingo, I discovered Mandarin Companion graded readers starting from as few as 150 words. The website LingQ also has a series of mini-stories aimed at beginners in Chinese. If I had known about these resources earlier I would have quit DuoLingo sooner. In the end, it was these tools combined with taking every opportunity to practice speaking the language, not DuoLingo, that transported me to fluency.
In one limited sense, DuoLingo has a valid claim to being useful; as an aid to vocabulary building in the initial stages of learning Chinese. It’s a useful introduction to the most masic phrases, such as how to say hello in Mandarin. Learners who know fewer than 150 words will struggle to read the simplest beginner books or articles and DuoLingo can help bridge the gap to meaningful content like graded readers and Mandarin novels.
But even for this DuoLingo alone is inadequate. Reading Chinese requires learning to read Chinese characters and characters can be learned much more effectively using Spaced Repetition (SRS) flashcards to aid recall and memory retention. Some of DuoLingo’s tasks do include characters but on its own, this was nowhere near enough to make them stick in my memory. Anybody using the app as a vocabulary builder should therefore combine it with character flashcards or a gamified SRS tool like Ninchanese.
Moreover, while DuoLingo includes activities that introduce you to the tones of the Chinese language, I found that these were far from sufficient to give me a solid grasp of them. By the time I completed the tree my ability to produce tones accurately remained limited. I later had to go back and spend a lot of time and effort fixing my tones.
Looking back on that summer it would be excessive to say I regret using Duolingo. But I do regret becoming as obsessed with it as I did while naively swallowing the notion – promoted by the company – that it would help me achieve anything resembling fluency. If I could go back I would adopt a more realistic mindset, using it for a shorter period alongside flashcards and other vocab-building tools until I was ready to tackle meaningful texts.
Then I would run a mile.
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