Duolingo: Friend or Foe

Nathaniel Worthman 
Professor. Dadak
Writing 101
4.4.19
Duolingo: Friend or Foe

            Today I want to talk about the increase in popularity of Duolingo. Is this a god thing or a bad thing? Now I want to preface this with the fact that this is solely based on my opinion and thus this is NOT fact and shouldn’t be treated as such. Anyway, I feel that from my personal experience Duolingo has become such a great platform for people to not only learn languages but to learn about language. What do I mean by this...? Well, I know so many people who have never heard of languages like Romanian, Catalan or even Irish. Additionally, I know some people who have never seen languages like Vietnamese or Esperanto. For that reason, I believe that Duolingo serves the great purpose of educating people on languages and the cultures behind them. 
            With that being said, I don’t believe that it’s possible to learn a language through Duolingo alone while many people who I’ve spoken with (who have little to know experience learning a second language to the point of proficiency) do seem to be under the impression that they can. From my experience this has been a little bit of a sticky situation because some people will then say “well, I can always learn the language later because it’s on Duolingo right?” While, it’s great that this app has made language learning so accessible, it has also put unrealistic expectations of the language learning process into people’s minds. 
            Another issue I have with Duolingo is pronunciation. While regardless of where you learn a language there will be a bias based on where the teacher learned the language be it in or out of the nations or regions its spoken but also Duolingo doesn’t account for the plethora of dialects and accents that exist in pretty much every language. Additionally, the use of tones in certain languages are not taught as much as they should be. For example, I had a peer who was going on a mission trip to Vietnam and wanted to learn some Vietnamese for her trip. Vietnamese is a tonal language where the pronunciation of certain words can change the meaning the word completely. Through Duolingo she learned some basic vocabulary but was not familiar with the tones, so she said the words she learned weren’t extremely useful because she didn’t even know that there were different meanings with the different tones!
            In conclusion, while I love Duolingo for learning languages for fun or just as some supplementary work or just to start out on a new language and would recommend it to friends who want to familiarize themselves with anew language, I do feel there are some flaws with the set-up of the site. 

Comments

  1. AM. DadakApril 5, 2019 at 6:59 AM

    Whether Duolingo is a god or not (see your opening lines), you definitely have some good points about how it encourages language awareness but sets up some problematic expectations and understandings of language learning.

    (BTW, this 5 para form is fine for the blog post, and it would be exactly perfect for Project 3 part 4)

    ReplyDelete
  2. AM. DadakApril 5, 2019 at 7:05 AM

    Check out Meaghan's blog post on the same topic. The two posts by the both of you make a nice pair.

    ReplyDelete

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