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| The lovely look of a website, once screenshot and stretched. Comes from https://www.duolingo.com/courses. |
Recently, I decided to revisit Duolingo, a website which I reviewed very early in the TCSA blog's existence. (Technically before it became the TCSA blog.) And it has undergone a few improvements since the last time I was there. Lets talk about that.
If you've been with this blog for a long time, (Golly gee, heading for the 1 year mark already.), you may remember the afore-linked article I wrote, mostly about Duolingo, in which I discussed the website and it's free language courses. Of which there were about 3 when I wrote that. Perhaps you even decided to check out the website as a result of that post. Either way, I recently went back to Duolingo to continue my French learning, (At fair random as is my wont.), and have found the website to have undergone a few, subtle improvements.
First and foremost that I would like to point out, you can no longer fail lessons. In the past they had a system in which after three strikes you would be forced to repeat a lesson until you managed it. If you, like myself, have ever been to school, you might understand the frustration of failing a test you've done before. The new system uses a progress bar of sorts which fills and empties based on correct and incorrect answers respectively, with the lesson continuing until you either quit or succeed. In terms of progression, this is far easier and far less frustrating than the old system, but I feel that psychologically, there are many benefits to not repeatedly telling the learner that they failed.
Besides that, Duolingo previously only offered a small selection of languages. If I remember correct, it only offered French, Spanish and Portuguese back then, but now offers an impressive 9 languages, with a further 7 under development, both of which I have listed below for ease of reference.
Available:
Spanish
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Dutch
Irish
Danish
Swedish
"Hatching":
Hungarian
Turkish
Esperanto
Russian
Ukrainian
Romanion
Polish
I don't know about you guys, but I'm personally and very particularly excited about these new languages because of my love for languages and linguistics, and because I've always wanted to learn Russian, French and Irish. Odds are though, I might add one or two other languages to the list simply because they're available and because Duolingo is, in as far as I have seen so far, a particularly effective way of learning these languages.
However, for those of you keen to learn Russian as soon as possible, I might suggest going to http://learnrussian.rt.com/ as it is also an immensely well written way of learning the Russian alphabet and language.
In any case, that's all for this one. Found a website you think is also great for learning languages, or simply have something you wish to say about Duolingo? If so, do be sure to let us know down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter. We here at TCSA love to hear your feedback. And of course, if you enjoy finding out about awesome stuff on the web and world then do please be sure to like the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left to get all the latest posts as they're published. Also, do be sure to share posts you enjoyed with your friends as it helps us out a great deal. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.
Au revoir.
