Hi, I recently downloaded the app Duolingo to my smart phone. I am trying to learn some Spanish before my next trip to Costa Rica. Has anyone else tried this app? I believe they have many languages, including English. So far it seems pretty good, as I can practice whenever I have 5 or 10 minutes to kill.
Hi Luschen I think Kati Svaby is the one to ask. If I remember it was started by an Irish Polyglot. The theory I think is you have to try to start speaking straight away.
No, it was started by a Guatemalan who wanted to give people from developing countries a way to learn English. It is free, but fascinating how it makes money:
"If it doesn’t charge users and, so far, doesn’t serve them any ads, how does Duolingo make money? It tricks you into working as an unpaid translation service. At the end of some lessons, Duolingo will ask you if you want to practice by translating a real-world document. Which will turn out to be, say, a BuzzFeed article. By melding together enough stabs at this task from high-level Duolingo users, the app can render a surprisingly accurate translation. Which is worth good money. So far, Duolingo has contracts with BuzzFeed and CNN to translate stories from English into languages such as Spanish, French, and Portuguese. This service is already earning Duolingo hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but von Ahn predicts he will be adding a raft of new clients soon. “The language translations market is huge,” he says. “It’s a $30 billion per year market.”
slate.com/articles/technolog … d_fun.html
Hmmm? my mistake Luschen I’m wondering is this the one Kati was talking about? Ok Google here I come. I’m going to start with “Irish Polyglot”
Here’s this guy I was talking about and he seems to be promoting duolingo on his site?
So this must have confused me. - I think?
fluentin3months.com/duolingo/
Hello Lushen,
I have done the DUOLINGO for 2 months. I had been speaking in French rather well, but I forgot everything. Not everything because I could read everyday something from Le Monde. But I couldn’t utter a word in French because they came into my mind in English. Even the personal pronouns! I was sorry for my forgotten French, and my grandson found for me the DUOLINGO.
The DUOLINGO is good for the people who learned the language earlier, and they are able to catch sight of the mistakes what they commit in the grammar and the pronunciation also.
For me it was good that my memory woke up I caught sight of the mistakes. There are some teachers who tried to call their attention to the mistakes, but several times they didn’t correct them.
For me it was good that this inhibition which was due to focusing very much to English - I am over it. And I can say that I could bring back my forgotten French.
I never believed that I could speak again in French.
For learning a language from the beginning at the DUOLINGO isn’t good because you can learn a lot of things badly. Afterward to correct the mistakes became ingrained; it is not a good method to learn a language.
Regards.
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