Oui, j'aime Duolingo!

Salut! Desole, I have not posted for quite some time. I am in the middle of reading 1984, and it's going very slowly since the book is so depressing that I have to stop every once in a while and play some happy games to restore my faith in the world. While I'm scouring the App Store for some easy games, I discovered Duolingo, a free educational app for language learning with a 'gamingification' method. As a poor would-be polyglot from a Third World country, I couldn't refuse an opportunity to learn a foreign language for free, so I downloaded it and signed up for a course in French. Now, I am completely addicted.

Duolingo is very easy to use, with a simple, user-friendly interface. It doesn't have any instructions in the beginning, but you'll get a hang of it quickly enough since it's so intuitive. You learn language like you play a game. In the upper-right corner, there's several "hearts" and the objective is to go through your course without losing them all. If you complete a course, you get XP points that contributes to you leveling up, and if you manage to complete the course without losing any hearts, you get a Lingot, which is the virtual currency for Duolingo that you can use to buy perks in the shop. Lingots are awarded for other activities too, such as leveling up, adding friends, etc.

The courses made up several skills or lessons. In the beginning, you only have one "skill": the Basic. As you complete the Basic, you can unlock several other skills, and so on. The skills are inter-connected to each other and you have a "Strength" bar that reminds you to revise the skills every now and then. I love that the course's challenges are very varied: there's a listening challenge, writing challenge, and speaking challenge. French being the accent-heavy language that it is, the game is very forgiving at first if you don't write the accents when you first try it, but as you level up and move on to more complex skills, it starts to get stricter.

I love, love, love this app. It doesn't really teach you the ins-and-outs of grammar or structure, but it teaches you enough for you to be quite proficient with it. You explore the grammar structure by yourself, but it provides explanation should you be confused. The learning style is easy and breezy and you don't really feel cooped up or tied down. Of course, since the app is designed to get users to B1 level, I don't think you can learn to read Proust with it, but it's enough to get by for everyday uses. And because it's free, you can use it anytime you want!