I usually don’t read the stuff Google dishes up to me. It’s mostly sensationalist clickbait, and celebrity gossip has never been my thing. However, on Tuesday, I found this post, and although it angered me at first, I ended up feeling extremely sorry for the author, Mark Serrels from Sidney, Australia.
And because I feel so sorry for him, I have decided to be rather more kind than usual in my response to his post, right here.
First off, he probably started learning Spanish through Duolingo because he had just come back from a vacation in Chile, where he most likely felt left out because he was the only one not well-versed in Spanish and couldn’t engage in conversation with his hosts. He admits that he never bothered to learn some Spanish while he was there. I mean, really? Not even the most basic phrases? Ouch.
Secondly, he decided to start learning through Duolingo. I love Duolingo. I am using it to learn Ukrainian and I dare say I am not faring too badly. In fact, I can even understand some of the video clips and songs my friends from Ukraine send me. But I digress.
There are two things that one must know about Duolingo. Firstly, the Spanish they offer is the one spoken in Europe. There would be marked differences in the pronunciation and some expressions would be as foreign to a person in Chile as “Waltzing Matilda” would be to an Englishman from Bristol. Right, Mate? The other thing is that while Duolingo is indeed designed to be a game, it is also designed to be used by teachers and elementary school-age students, the latter having a notoriously short attention span.
The daily “points” target of Duolingo is no more than 50, with some other targets in between. Those targets can be achieved in the space of 4 to 5 lessons a day, so there’s no reason to cram whole sections of learning into one’s head at once.
The other value of Duolingo lies in its use of “spaced repetition”, a technique that has been around for decades and is designed to help keep concepts fresh in one’s mind for longer. So repeating certain words and phrases after a time period has elapsed helps to keep them fresh. Once you cram them, that space doesn’t exist anymore and the repetition becomes meaningless.
Yes, there are levels to achieve and competition between learners, but no one forces you to reach the top levels within a week. If you do, that means you have totally missed the point of spaced repetition, anyway.
Ukrainian is not an easy language, especially if you live 10 000 Km away from Kyiv. It has a totally foreign alphabet and SEVEN verb cases, which makes conjugation a nightmare! However, once the strangeness of the “An elephant is an animal” type of sentence passes and you actually look deeper, you would notice how those case structures are being practiced and the patterns set in your brain over and over again. Then it’s no longer about the given vocabulary, but you’ll find yourself building simple sentences as you go around doing things during the day, with vocabulary that you may have found through Google Translate or have heard on video clips. When the pattern is built, words can be made to fit.
The biggest mistake (in my not-so-humble opinion) that Mr. Serrels made in his mission to learn Spanish was not to avail himself of the Spanish speakers that he had access to for help in his learning process but to rely solely on a computer/cellphone application. Computers are cool, but they can never replace people. And AI can never replace the knowledge of someone who has spoken any given language regularly for years. And rushing through learning is stupid, to say the least, no matter what the subject may be. Crash courses only teach one to crash.
And if his wife does start speaking Spanish to him and he succumbs to the pull of Duolingo, I hope that he would take it slower, and maybe actually speak to HER this time around, instead of relying solely on the app. She might even be nice and teach him some typically Chilean phrases to impress his friends with on his next visit!
Good luck, Mark!