By Jill Duffy If you're looking to learn or practice a language on an iPad app, Duolingo (free) is indisputably the way to go. The app and program are both 100 percent free, and they still outshine practically every other language-learning app I've seen—even the very expensive ones. Your major limitation will be whether Duolingo supports your language of choices, as the list remains tight. Fortunately, Duolingo does include many of the languages most studied by English speakers: Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese (Brazilian). It also has an English (American) learning program for speakers for those languages, except German. While it's not available in the iPad app, the website for Duolingo also includes Mandarin.
From a user's perspective, Duolingo works like most other language-learning programs. You work through exercises or activities to complete lessons which are part of larger units. The structure is clear, shown on a tree diagram, and the app keeps track of your progress synchronously across all the places where you can use Duolingo, from the Duolingo iPhone app and Duolingo Android app to and the Web version. It always remembers where you left off, and it even saves offline the current lesson you're studying and a few near it so that you can continue learning no matter where you are without eating up all the free space on your device.Is It Fun? Does It Work?I've been using Duolingo regularly since it was first released in late 2011. While using the program to learn German and practice my very-rusty Spanish, I've definitely increased my German vocabulary and have had some success refreshing my memory of verbs, phrases, and grammar in Spanish.The mobile version of Duolingo is, in several ways, easier to use than the Web app. Typing special characters, like letters with diacritical marks, takes almost no effort on a smartphone or iPad. Just press and hold the letter you want until other options pop up above it. The Web app handles diacritical marks well (a few options always appear on screen that you can click, so you don't have to learn any difficult keyboard shortcuts), but the iPad app just does it better, and with more ease.Another neat feature: When you see a sentence in the foreign language that you have to translate to English, you can type using voice commands and Siri, thus minimizing the amount of typing you need to do on the tiny screen.The Duolingo Web app emphasizes writing quite a bit. The iPad app swaps out about half the writing with an exercise that lets you build a sentence from a group of available words, which you have to put in the right order while also ignoring some words that don't belong at all. Thankfully, the iPad app works in both portrait and landscape mode, so you can maximize the keyboard size when you do need to type.Duolingo paces the activities in the app superbly. Short sessions work best on mobile devices, and while the content is almost identical to the Web version, enough of it is slightly truncated or tightened up in the iPad app to let you breeze through the activities just a bit quicker.A Few Flaws
My partner got hooked as well and completed the French program in its entirety. At higher levels, he reported an increasing number of inaccuracies, which any user can flag so that Duolingo's developers can eventually correct them. The higher the level, the fewer the users to spot and flag such problems (and I would bet the lower the priority for the team to fix the errors). For the most part, it's easy to overlook an error here or there, but it becomes irritating when you fail a section because you've answered too many questions "wrong" when you weren't in fact wrong but have to restart that section anyhow. These instances are not too common, however, and are quite rare in the lower levels.
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