Hello, it's Alex!
It's been quite some time since I've recorded a video,
and one of the reasons is that my old camera broke.
So this is a new camera,
so hopefully it'll have better video quality.
Today I want to talk more about DuoLingo.
DuoLingo is a website and app for learning languages.
I made a video before
in which I said that, for me,
DuoLingo was more effective for learning languages
than traditional classroom learning,
and I gave some explanations why.
And I'd encourage you to watch that if you haven't.
In this video, though,
I want to go into a little bit more depth,
and I want to talk about
how you can use DuoLingo effectively.
I've watched a lot of different people use DuoLingo,
like I've sat next to them
while they are using the app on their phone
or the app on their desktop computer,
through the web app.
And I've noticed that people
don't necessarily use DuoLingo the same way,
and I think that there are some
more and less effective ways of using it.
The first thing I want to emphasize,
I think the web app is WAAAAY better
than the phone app.
I strongly recommend not using the phone app at all.
I really like the web interface.
There are tons of features
that are only available in the DuoLingo web interface.
When you use the web app, for example,
and it has you translate sentences,
you're piecing together sentences,
using like a choice of words that it gives you,
whereas on the web app,
you're actually typing in the words yourself.
It's much more open-ended,
and you will find that you learn things like,
you learn how to spell, for one, in the language,
which is immensely valuable,
and I find that learning the spelling,
typing things out,
also improves my pronunciation,
and more importantly,
you're having to recall things
in a more open-ended fashion.
Like, you have to actually recall the words
more often, instead of just
picking them from a set of choices
that it displays to you.
And I think that that skill
is much more useful
if you want to actually speak the language,
because when you're in a conversation,
you don't have like a multiple choice list
that pops up in your head,
like you have to come up with the word yourself.
This is just one of many examples.
Another reason though that I think that
it's better to do DuoLingo on a computer
in a web browser
rather than on a smartphone using the app,
is that you can have all these other browser tabs open
or windows open on your computer,
where you have supplemental resources,
so like one example of a resource
that I use all the time
when I'm learning new words in DuoLingo
is Google Image Search.
Like when you learn words in a foreign language,
it can be tempting to just
take the recommended translation
or the dictionary definition as the end of the story.
But like, languages don't correspond
in a one-to-one manner,
and even if there's a word that literally translates
the same way in another language,
it might have different connotations
from what you're used to.
So like, you might translate it one way,
but maybe the word is a little bit more formal
or a little bit more casual
than the word that it's typically translated as in English.
You can have differences in connotations of like
the context in which you might use the word.
When you're learning another language,
it's easy to miss those sorts of connotations.
If you go into Google Image Search
and you type the word in
in the language that you're learning,
you see pictures, and there's that like
"Pictures are worth a thousand words."
saying,
I think there's some truth in that, like
when you start seeing pictures,
you get a mental picture of what the word means,
and you realize that
these words have different connotations,
and you start to get like a feeling,
a sense of that connotation,
and I think that's really powerful.
You can't really do that if you're using
the DuoLingo phone app.
It's really cumbersome to be switching back and forth
between different windows on a phone,
whereas on a computer, it's really easy,
because you have the full keyboard,
you have a mouse,
you can switch tabs with keyboard shortcuts.
You can also use sites to get
supplemental information on pronunciation.
And this feeds into one of the things
that I think is super critical,
and it's something that I notice a lot of people
don't seem to focus on as much
when they're doing DuoLingo,
and that's pronunciation.
When I started doing DuoLingo,
one of the things I really liked about it,
it has this computerized voice, which,
it's not super perfect sounding,
like it's not totally natural,
but it's pretty good in most languages,
and there's something about it being very standardized
that I think is useful, like
it allows you to pay attention to the pronunciation
in a way where you can keep monitoring
how you're speaking out loud,
and how your own speech is not quite matching
what the voice is pronouncing the words as.
And I found that that was really helpful,
like when I was in a classroom,
I was surrounded by people
who were just speaking with a heavy American accent,
and that was pretty bad for pushing me to the next level.
Obviously, the best thing to do is
immersion with native speakers,
but I do think that DuoLingo
offers a unique ability to pay attention
to pronunciation more closely.
So I'd say, when you're doing DuoLingo,
focus a lot on listening to the nuances of pronunciation,
and speak things out loud,
not just in the speaking exercises.
Like, it'll give you speaking exercises to do,
but you can pronounce anything out loud,
and, especially when I'm starting to learn a new language,
and my pronunciation isn't great,
I try to read everything out loud, that I see.
Especially the stuff that it speaks to me,
I like to speak it back,
but then I like to try to read words loud on my own,
and see if I get it correctly.
I find that when I put a lot more energy
into learning the pronunciation,
it pays off a lot in the long-run,
like it's a lot of work up-front,
but then things start getting easier later on.
So that's another way that I would recommend
for you to approach DuoLingo,
like focus more on pronunciation,
and consider using external resources.
There's this site Forvo,
where you can type in a specific word,
in a specific language, and it'll tell you,
like it'll have different people pronouncing the word,
and it'll tell you where each of those people is from,
so you can be like, "Okay, I want someone in Spain"
"pronouncing this word in Spanish."
"I want someone in Mexico pronouncing it."
And you can hear how they pronounce the word differently.
And in some cases that can be really useful,
like if you're wanting to travel to a region
where there's a specific dialect,
and you want to be familiar with that dialect,
that's really important.
Umm, other things about using DuoLingo effectively?
I think that it's really important to
let the AI, the artificial intelligence of DuoLingo,
do its job.
DuoLingo has an AI,
and it measures, like what, it keeps track of
what things you get right and wrong,
it even keeps track of like,
if you put your mouse over the word,
to use the hover-over hints.
It then realizes, oh you might not know this word as well
as a word that you don't ever hover over,
if you get the hint.
And, appropriately, it gives you those words more often,
especially if you get a word wrong,
it gives you those more often in exercises.
And, I find that like,
the best way to get the most out of that AI
is to use the "strengthen skills" feature.
So, it's like a practice feature
that automatically tells you
what you need to work on
and then it gives you that exercise to do.
I find that this is not just useful for like using that AI,
it also kind of helps me manage my time,
cause like when I'm studying a foreign language,
it takes a great deal of initiative
and self-discipline,
and a lot of that initiative is taken up
by me deciding what I want to work on next.
And I think one of the great values of DuoLingo
is that it does a lot of that work for you.
It tells you what to work on next,
based on its assessment
of what you've been getting wrong
and what skills are solid,
and it gives you the stuff
that you haven't practiced in a while,
or that it knows you've been getting wrong.
And I find it does a pretty good job of that.
I also find like, when, when I do that,
when I use that strengthen skills feature,
it really, it helps me to relax,
it makes it seem like it takes less mental energy,
and freeing up that mental energy
of like time management,
and choosing what to work on
gives me more energy to focus on
learning the language:
learning the words, learning the grammar,
and doing those supplemental things
that I told you before, about like
typing things into Google search,
and learning the connotations of words.
So like, when I see some people practicing DuoLingo,
they like rush ahead, and they learn all these new lessons,
and they don't keep the "tree" as it's called,
they don't keep the tree fully practiced.
I recommend keeping everything fully practiced,
get that whole tree completely gold
before moving on and learning new lessons.
I have found that that's a really effective way
for me to do it.
So, I'm sure I could come up with more things to say
but this video is already long enough.
I hope you've found this helpful.
I'd love to hear from you:
do you agree with this?
Do you disagree maybe?
Are there any other tips that you can think of
of ways that you think you can get the most
out of DuoLingo?
I'd love to hear from you!
Yeah!
Thank you!
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