Emily, presumably on Duolingo
It is a curious paradox that as the world closed down last year, our desire to learn its languages rose. More striking, though, is the strange, gamified form it assumed.
Increasingly, learning Italian has become like one of those Buzzfeed posts that used to tell you that you’d been slicing a mango wrong your whole life. Studying a language has become treated as a practical problem — and when we have practical problems in 2021, be it in tile grouting or bike maintenance, the first thing we turn to is YouTube. And the first thing that YouTube teaches you are “hacks”.
Take Nathaniel Drew, an owlish early-20s American with 1.3 million YouTube subscribers, who has racked up nigh on 3 million views for his video, “I learned Italian in 7 days”; 805,000 views for its less successful sequel, “I learned Portuguese in 7 days”; and a category-leading 9.6 million for the cute, impressive motherlode of: “Speaking 5+ languages with my polyglot grandma”.
Drew’s secret, which he will also sell you in a series of courses, is essentially: memorise the thousand most common words in any language, record yourself saying them, combine the words to create more advanced sentences, learn common verb conjugations, then just go ham on cultural artefacts like songs and podcasts.
And then there’s Cameron — the clean-cut 20-something behind the channel Language Lords. He offers a Stakhanovite routine of daily Excel phrase spreadsheets and out-loud summarising in “How I Got Fluent In French In 30 Days (Full 8 Hour Routine)”. Or there’s Ikenna, with his 755,000 subscribers, a streetwear lothario in a yellow hoodie and black beanie who says he has taught himself six languages in nine years. He too is a thousand-worder, but also with an elaborate flashcard game, which later eases into prescriptions to read a lot of graphic novels in your target language.
If this next-level systematising sounds depressingly mechanical, remember: the motivations for learning any language are almost always noble. Yet here, they’re also bound up with a personal development aesthetic. Goals and the meeting of them is a central part of the millennial mindset. To hit your targets is to follow your dreams; to follow your dreams is to have achieved transcendence. By this measure, the YouTube polyglots are basically gurus.
For lesser mortals, still stuck in the 9-5, without the time to invent their own systems, there’s Duolingo. In 2020, the market-leading app reported a 67% jump in users, compared to the previous year. In the UK, they shot up by 132%, almost double the worldwide average. The app’s key to success? It has perfected a new kind of language gamification.
To “win” in Chinese or Serbian, users must hold on to their continuous “streaks” by practising every day, and in the process acquire a series of digital baubles — diamonds, hearts and the like. The lessons are packaged to fit into the ten-minute work gap, the Tube ride or a smoke break. They even tap into the way we see our phones as rectangles of productivity — be it actual emails, or just the pseudo-work of social media, or even stuffing your ears with podcasts. To be mentally idle is to be missing out.
The dominant player from the previous era of traditional educational software, Rosetta Stone, now has 500,000 subscribers in its online incarnation, charging each of those $120 a year. Duolingo, by comparison, has 28 million. Yes, only 1% of those upgrade from their free system to the premium version, but in absolute terms those numbers are so big they still trump Rosetta Stone’s revenues.
As an aspirational product, Duolingo has achieved this by allowing users to dive into multiple languages simultaneously, like kids in a candy shop. It offers more range than anyone else: over a million people are presently studying High Valyrian — the made-up dialect from Game Of Thrones.
At its worst, though, this leads to a kind of Emily In Paris mode of consumption: doing a thing as an act of fandom, a badge of belonging. It’s a mode set up for failure, practically designed to keep internet consumers grazing on the thousand and one potential futures that they might hypothetically inhabit. As with the Netflix series about a hot American girl who ends up photo-blogging in a Paris sans bainlieus, this is “One day I’ll move to France” as a form of escapism from the drudgery of the commute.
Yet one of the first things the YouTubers will tell you is that Duolingo doesn’t work all that well. Intrigued by the company’s claim that 34 hours on the app was equivalent to a college semester’s worth of instruction, a former linguist spent that long studying Swedish, then convinced the professor of UCLA’s Elementary Swedish course to let him take the final exam. He got an F.
It’s certainly better than nothing, but, like many internet products, the app is ultimately more interested in driving up your usage time — in creating addiction — rather than in finding the short route to growing your skills. Those who embrace the gamification can end up with kind of obsession of the intellect — the constant need to achieve mastery, a life rationed out into a series of To Do lists: “Abs, breadmaking, Tae Kwan Do, Swahili”.
After all, when it comes down to it, “completion” will always be tantalisingly just beyond the horizon. And just as no one ever truly “completes” a language, so too no one is ever truly satisfied with their overall crop. Steve Kaufmann — a genial, older YouTuber who claims proficiency in some 20 tongues — is perhaps the Michael Phelps of his domain, hero-worshipped by the younger set. This is a world where everyone knows by heart the US State Department’s bedrock estimations of how long an English speaker will take to learn a target language: the likes of Spanish — with plenty of loan words and common grammar — come in around 550 hours. Russian? Indonesian? You’re looking at 1100 hours. Then, there are the Fiddly Four: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, all a gut-busting 2200 hours for fluency. Like benching 100kg or summiting K2, these are the targets that put you in a whole new quantum level.
But as impressive as it may be, there’s also something a bit melancholy about double-digit language skills. Witness the experience of hyper-polyglot Dr Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia, who, in a piece in the New Yorker, turns up in Malta, spends a week swallowing a dictionary, taking endless notes, practising with every cabbie, hoovering up a casual fluency — then departs, probably never to return. Dr Luis has just had a linguistic one-night stand.
After all, a language is only as useful as the people behind it: a gateway into literature, a periscope into culture and a doorway towards friendship. For all the gearing that these hackers offer, To Do lists inevitably make for misery, because competence is just the starting line of the good stuff. To learn a language like this is like leaving dinner after the hors d’oeuvres. That’s French for sausage roll, by the way.
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SubscribeWhy learn anything? Right? I took the time and trouble to learn English, I realize I butcher its grammar but I CAN TALK TO PEOPLE! That’s something an app can’t do. I know many of the nuances of your language. Does it have an use? Is it useful? Probably not. Does it give me great pleasure to read George Orwell in the original language? YES! Name any subject and you will find articles like this one, defending its uselessness. Why learn math, Latin, cursive, Ancient history, Astronomy, etc?
Do we really want to live in a black-box world? Why learn how to read? Let’s just be idiots.
Spot on, Jorge.
Certainly, there is learning the language to be comfortable traveling/living somewhere else. Then, there is learning it to understand original language texts. Both are good things to know. I think we are neglecting the positive that people still are yearning to learn important (or what they deem important) things.
We should be more excited that there is an urge to learn for many instead of slagging on some misguided app.
I lived in France for 15 years and speak the language fluently. The only way to really learn a language is to live there because you need to understand the cultural references and you need to understand local accent and slang.
I love languages and I have quite strong feelings about learning them. I am a bookish person. I studied French and German at school and didn’t use them much. Then work allowed me to travel and I didn’t try speaking the languages. I now know that this was a lack of confidence.
Then I travelled to Germany with a colleague and he knew almost no German but everywhere we went he kept saying odd bits of German to people, stupid sentences which didn’t really make any sense. I noticed how positively people reacted to him.
I now know that the languages taught at school are for reading, writing and speaking but you only really need just a few words to speak – reading and writing comes much later.
In my late 40s I went for six months to Italy and concentrated on speaking Italian. I was really fluent when I left and even had a car accident and sorted out the insurance claim on the ‘phone.
I have looked at Duolingo and it is intended to give you confidence to start to speak, nothing more. The rest develops with your own interest.
Spot on, Chris. I’ve been a linguist all my life and this is exactly how I feel about the process of learning and knowing a language. Germans and Austrians just love it when an English person makes the effort to speak their language, as German is a tough nut (“Deutsche Sprache, schwierige Sprache!”) and it would be so much easierfor us to play the “global language” card and speak English. There are massive brownie points on offer if you bother to learn and use bits of dialect.
I’m English and lived in France. When I was there I made a real effort to learn the speak the language and the locals loved it, especially when I got really good because most English people there really didn’t seem to make much effort and I think that’s incredibly disrespectful.
Me too. But I was never that good. The problem was that whereas the French understood me, I was always behind on understanding THEM. Speed of speech, dialect words, ungrammatical constructions – the normal way of speaking – was an obstacle to someone formally educated. By contrast, visiting Parisians seemed to be much easier to converse with.
My son has a real flair for languages too, it’s just his ‘thing’.
When he was about 10 his French teacher told us that in his experience children were reluctant to try speaking French on holiday in front of their parents, so we used to send him to get baguettes and croissants on his own and it really worked. Sometimes we would be outside peering in though the windows and could see the women in the boulangerie smiling and making a big fuss of him for speaking French.
He was lucky enough to go to an independent school that took languages very seriously, where he studied French, Russian and Portuguese, all of these included a compulsory extra curricular hour per week of conversation with a native speaker. I am afraid language teaching in the state sector is not good.
I started studying French ten years ago purely for my own interest. I can read and speak it fairly fluently now, and have found it very rewarding. It really is appreciated by the French and adds a lot to our holidays in France.
You are right though, apps and other online resources are a useful aid but you cannot really learn a language properly just by using them.
It‘s great to have the opportunity to speak with a native speaker but not all of us have that privilege. In any case, what you are practising in these conversations is your own speaking, which you should be able to do with anyone who can speak the target language well. With a native speaker you simply hear that one person‘s accent and vernacular, which, in the case of Spanish and French, could come from many different parts of the world.
A truly authentic command of an accent comes from spending hundreds of hours working on each individual sound. Like any skill, be it music to maths, the people who are really and truly command a foreign language only get there through hours, weeks and years of daily training.
That said, you can practise your listening and accent skills through electronic media, where you will get a wide range of different voices – much better than a short time with a native speaker.
Although I am a native English teacher here in Germany, I recognise that the value of a native speaker is over-valued. A lot of my students‘ conversation practice is gained from speaking to each other – I can‘t split myself into multiple parts. This is standard English language teaching practice and non-native English teachers are rightly very disturbed at two tier classification of language teaching between native and non native.
Finally, your classification of state school language teaching as, ‘not good‘, seems rather dismissive and without justification.
Perhaps I should have said fluent speaker rather than native speaker. The need to understand, and be understood, and to converse in a language is important. There are a number of schemes which enable access to teaching from people online in order to practice language skills, as you have suggested.
Accent is not so important (in my opinion) so long as you can be understood. Which of us does not find accented English pleasant to listen to, and French friends assure me they also find my English accented French pleasant too!
My comments regarding language teaching in state schools was not intended to be a criticism of the teachers, but of the curriculum and of the level of skill required to pass exams. I have several friends who teach modern languages and I share their despair that it is possible for an able student to gain an A* at GCSE level and yet be unable to carry out even the most basic transactional conversation in that language unless they have learnt it almost by rote beforehand.
What a strange cynical article. I don’t really understand what your problem is with people who are trying to ‘master’ a language efficiently. That they’re not doing it in the way you want them to do it? You seem to be implying that they’re just mastering a language for the sake of it, without any desire to interact with the respective culture, but I don’t think that’s actually possible. You can learn as much vocabulary as you like, but you’re never going to become proficient until you spend hours and hours speaking the language with native people (I know this from hours and hours of frustrating experience).
Also, anyone who thinks they can become fluent in a language purely through the use of Duolingo is incredibly naive. OBVIOUSLY their claim of it being in any way similar to a university degree is bollocks. It’s really just a fun way to be introduced to a language, then you take what you’ve learned and apply it in real life to advance to a higher level. Surely it’s better for people to be spending hours learning Swedish or Korean rather than just scrolling mindlessly through Instagram or bickering with people on Twitter.
I agree. I don’t suppose that Duolingo and other such products are an effective way of learning a language, but I see no harm in them. And, as you say, it’s better than playing Candy Crush or whatever the latest nonsense is.
In defence of Duolingo (full disclosure: 474 day streak/82% completion of Italian) Here’s the thing: as a result of playing the Duolingo ‘game’, I can now at least make a passable attempt at communicating with locals in the tiny Italian village that I get to whenever I can. And I understand a lot more about English grammar … previously, despite being an English graduate, I might have considered ‘gerund’ best placed on a spice rack! Clearly, Duolingo is no substitute for linguistic study – but let’s not make the best the enemy of ‘the good’
Most accept Duolingo is a ‘taster’ of a language, and not strong enough to teach you listening / speaking / writing / reading. If you want to learn a language, you’ll converse to native speakers, read books, immersion tactics. I don’t use Duolingo (daily streaks aren’t helpful) but Babbel has been great.
My favourite Polygot YT, Lindie Botes, makes it clear how difficult languages are, and to have the right expectations. She’s refreshing in a sea of gimmicky advice and ‘easy’ solutions.
Learning a language takes a while. I’ve been learning Russian and German since 2017. My progress is minimal, and although I’m considering Latin and French, I know it’s a long road ahead. So, why bother? It’s not to make crass, indulgent assumptions about other cultures. I like languages because I’ve always been a wordsmith, and as someone who wants a career in history, you need a foundation in languages.
Madeline, I think that you “know it’s a long road ahead” is the biggest step.
I would say (not too immodestly I hope) that I am at a high level in two foreign languages, and have been pursuing them for decades! But I still find new words and turns of phrase I did not know and they are not always obscure ones.
I hope this statement does not depress people. I do not mean I have been sitting at a desk studying for decades. I have conversations, get a lot of my news, watch TV and read books in both my foreign languages. That is when it becomes fun – for me at least.
Just like a sport, and in fact just like most human activities – you have to maintain a decent level of practice. One could not reach a good level in tennis by playing until one was 30 then stopping, and expecting to maintain the level without practice.
I think providing the opportunity for a brief but regular practice is where Duolingo comes in handy. In my experience, it isn’t much use for actually learning a language to speak it, but it will stop you from forgetting a language you learnt somewhere else.
Also, does Duolingo actually do Serbian?
If the author of this article had bothered to learn French, perhaps he would know how to spell “banlieue”!
Perhaps he’s been busy trying to look up the English word for restaurant?
Was it George Bush who reportedly said “The trouble with the French is that they have no word for ‘entrepreneur’ “
I’d bet money that this reference to Bush is a calumny.
Fair comment. Perhaps it was Reagan – or Trump.
Worrying that it is a plausible quote by more than one US president!
Bainlieu sounds like a bathhouse.
I studied various languages from infant to adult, 4 of them, and never got any good at any of them, never past the how much does this cost, sort of level, (which way to the swimming pool?). Then as an adult overseas I would string together monstrous sentences containing bits of them all – but what seemed normal to me then, as I was so often in foreign places, is that a bright foreigner could go through the sentence, and pick out the bits in his language, AND the bits in other langues he was also familiar with (foreigners speak a lot more languages than we do), and almost always we could come to some sort of understanding, I would get to the swimming pool, or whatever.
Actually, I think when you spend a huge amount of time in foreign places you just get really good at guessing and pantomiming and picking up clues, and can get by pretty well not even speaking the local language, and a soup of foreign words can end up making a real difference too.
I regret to say, every last foreign word has long since left my brain, though I know the ability to absorb language is massively different between individuals. I am horrible at learning languages, wile my brother could just passively assimilate them, but he was a musician and I, not one bit.
I also tried Duolingo as a supplementary tool for learning French and hated it. It was like being back at school – learning completely disjointed phrases that might help you parrot stuff back and pass exams but have nothing to do with the authentic use of the language.
I can speak one foreign language with almost native-level fluency (German) and another (French) at a reasonable conversational level. And from all the years of learning and living foreign languages, I have gathered the following:
Courses are just there to help you learn the basic language structure: A2 standard is fine. Once you’ve got a rough idea of how a language is working, it’s time to get out there and say stuff to REAL, LIVE people and communicate. Saying stupid stuff, getting mightily frustrated and having to start a sentence 5 times because you keep getting your grammar all tangled up is all part of the game.
Learning and speaking languages gives you a great chance to experiment with different personalities (I’m quite a different person speaking in German than I am in English)…staring at a screen racking up Duolingo medals is never ever going to replicate that. Duolingo might help you pass the time in lockdown to a halfway decent end and provide an instant-gratification, self-optimisation high to post on Facebook and get some likes but you have not learned a language. Put modern technology to better use: join a Facebook group to find a language tandem partner and chat over Zoom/Skype/WhatsApp instead.
Oddly, most of the consumers of Duolingo seem to demand the gamification.
“I’m quite a different person speaking in German than I am in English”
I believe it was Charlemagne who said “to possess another language is to possess another soul”
How true!
All I know is that having started Duolingo during the first lockdown, my boys of nine and six are now conversing with me routinely in basic Spanish. In other contexts, I hate the way we are all drowning in algorithms, but Duolingo has proved a fantastic initial platform and given them a massive head start – in a way they find fun and for free! I’m not going to argue with that.
Of course, one teeny-weeny problem is what this word fluent means even.
Are these oft-quoted and oft-interviewed foreign football managers in the Premier League fluent in English, for example? They talk confidently, they know the phrases and cliches used in football. But despite years of study they have never learned to use tenses properly – no distinction between past, present and future, few conditionals. I fancy many would struggle in a non-football, non-daily life conversation of even modest complexity.
For a person of moderate linguistic talent who already has experience of learning languages, to get to their level in a foreign language would not be all that difficult. A year of a few hours a day would do it, I think.
Given my level and knowledge of French, I think I could achieve that in any of Spanish, Italian or Portuguese, for example.
But is that fluent? Yes, if fluent just means jabbering away quickly knowing one is making quite a lot of mistakes, and having to avoid lots of topics due to lack of vocabulary.
No if it means quite a bit more than that.
I think if you’re fluent you should be able to tell a dirty joke in the foreign language and also be capable of insulting people with some choice phrases! You should also know the word for chainsaw.
Good definition. I would extend it to say that you should also be able to understand a dirty joke in the foreign language
To quote Sebastian Faulks in Charlotte Grey, “It’s one thing to be able to order your lunch in French. It’s quite another to pass yourself off as the waiter”.
Connard! Je vais couper ta pique avec ma tronçonneuse.
Fluent means many things to many people, and most of the definitions are right – and simultanously wrong. In the past I have dabbled in both languages and music, and there are many similarities. You can take up an instrument for pleasure, for sociability, for profit – but at what level are you the musical equivalent of ‘fluent’ in a language? You might play the piano well, but if you define concert pianist standard as ‘fluent’ nearly everyone fails to reach that level. (So is someone who plays ‘pub piano’ fluent?) Many native speakers of English are grammatically inept, and incapable of communicating a complex idea – are they fluent in English? (I would say not. If you are thick and inarticulate, how can you be a fluent speaker?) There was a time when I could comfortably discuss literature and philosophy in another european language, but I could not read a menu. Was I fluent? Not at all.
English speakers are monoglot but also very forgiving of mistakes. There are lots of Englishes out there. By the way Klopp and Wenger are fluent. The rest, not so much.
Some replies here came close to pointing it, but not quite: The richest part of learning another language is gaining a window into those people way of thinking and their understanding of life.
In a world that tries hard to convince us that we all think & feel like USA citizens, such language-granted insight is ever more precious.
I have read many articles decrying the use of language apps. While not fantastic, these apps serve a group of people many if whom seriously wish to learn a new language. Interestingly, I have yet to read any article giving an honest diagnosis of the paradox of people who desire to learn other languages and a society that thinks of this as a foolish exercise. Perhaps rather than criticizing these apps amd the people who use them, we would get further ahead by developing programs that truly teach foreign languages.
I have seen this State Department number of hours thing and I am far from convinced by it. Maybe someone who has tried all three can confirm this (or not), but can Korean, Chinese and Japanese really be lumped together in that way?
Korean writing and so therefore the pronunciation of reading could be learned in a weekend. It is actually easier than learning the alphabet in order to speak English. So that is a huge help right away.
Japanese is a language in which a lot of people learn to converse well quickly but the reading and writing are more complex than Korean.
Chinese has the most complex script of the three and I have the impression (without ever studying it, I admit) that it sounds difficult to pronounce.
So I think if you gave the same amount of time for all three to people of equal talent, I think you would find the Chinese learners way behind the Japanese and Korean learners on a test of overall skills.
Chinese and Japanese use essentially the same pictographic script (hanzi / kanji). A larger number of characters are in common use in Chinese, but in Japanese most characters have multiple readings, whereas Chinese characters usually have only one reading. Japanese also has two other syllabic scripts (hirakana and katakana), used in combination with kanji in complicated ways. And Chinese grammar is also simpler than Japanese.
Certainly the tonal system in Chinese is daunting for speakers of Western languages. But overall, I see no reason to suppose that people would learn Japanese more quickly than Chinese, though I can’t make the comparison personally as I’ve only tried the former.
Hai, Wakaremasu!
Don’t know Chinese, but I do speak a tonal languge. When used in sentences, the tones rarely make much difference. There are a few banana skins, where the wrong tone has you saying something rude, but the locals soon let you know about those. It’s mainly a problem on the rare occasions when you’re trying to say a single word out of context, or when two words that differ only in tone have similar meanings (‘dog and ‘horse’ in this language).
Korean writing is phonetic with very few syllable glyphs.
I’m a Viet-Brit living and working in France for the last 35 years. I’m trying to brush up on my Italian and struggling hard with Russian. What i deplore most about foreign languages, whichever the media through which you learn, is the way you find out how poorly the native practice their own language, both in spoken n written forms. People nowadays say that I’m old-fashioned to bother with grammar at all. But then, it’s just like fast food, or fast tourism, fast languages are… consumed quickly to say…”been there, done that,” but at the end of the day, what is the point of clocking up dozens of languages that you’d never make use of?!?
In the above article the French errors were, I guess, deliberately left as such to show the level of disrespect or ignorance of written languages in series and films.
I’ve been working on Italian on and off for years and, FYI, I’ve tried all the apps–hands down the best method is Pimsleur which I typically got form the library though now they have a subscription service which is, IMO worth the money depending on your priorities and especially if you have a deadline/target date and really use it. App has updated recordings along with games and multiple choice Q and flashcards. But the recordings are really good on their own. It’s spaced, intermittent repetition.
The best and quickest place to learn a foreign language is in bed with a native speaker. It helps to have a basic grasp of the language you want to learn and a tolerance for constant correction but the result is impressive.
“Apps like Duolingo have turned studying languages into a worthless game”. So if you are not willing or able to spend the time to reach native-level fluency, with every verb conjugated perfectly, you’re wasting your time? The idea that if you cannot achieve total mastery, you’re wasting your time is absurd. No-one would suggest that the millions of people who play chess at a novice level are wasting their time on a worthless game.
The article starts off as a critique of the claims of Duolingo and the YouTubers regarding fluency, but quickly descends into a snobbish rant against those who wish no more than to be able to ‘get by’.
Dear Mr Haynes,
Which app/game was it that translated hors d’oeuvres for you? It’s just that I’d like to avoid it!
There was a viral post from a guy on twitter who said he had competed German in Duolingo. He got an award in German which he could repost as an image. Ironically, he said, he didn’t understand it.
Unfortunately, a first year university course in a language isn’t always available. I am trying to teach myself Serbian, the mother tongue of my wife and stepson. The only Slavic languages taught at universities in my city are Russian and Polish. I found the Relaxing Serbian course online helpful, although I have gone through all the available lessons and I don’t know when or if the pleasant lady who puts them together will create some more. There don’t seem to be nearly the resources for learning Serbian available in terms of books and manuals that there are for Russian. For example, nothing like Pirigova’s superb “Complete Handbook of Russian Verbs” seems to be available for Serbian. Very interesting that 550 hours is the estimate for the number of hours to become fluent in Russian. I suspect that for Serbian it is less, even accounting for inferior learning materials. Je garde espoir. (I remain hopeful.)
What you need is native Serbian speakers — not your family — to meet and talk with, organised about an activity that you are familiar with and enjoy. Before covid I was one of the people who organised weekly meetings for boardgaming, aimed at immigrants – but native Swedes were welcome too. Indeed we needed a certain number of native speakers to catch us out when we made errors. The only rule was that you had to play in Swedish. There are cooking classes organised along these lines here too. Check around the Serbian community and see if there is something happening.
Don’t forget that language is about respect and appreciation of the culture you might find yourself in. Learning how to say please and thankyou in the language of where you are on holiday is a minimum in that respect. Whereas shouting loudly in english does have some comedy value, but little more.
Sorry to be rude, but it’s amazing how so often on this supposedly intelligent and free thinking site, people don’t even engage with the arguments the author makes.
In this case, not whether learning another language is a good thing, but whether apps with their obvious intention to create ‘click’ dependency on them, are the best way to go about this.
All part of the social-media-driven you-can-do-anything world we now live in. Next, download the new game “Be Prime Minister of Britain – For a Day !”. Be President of Italy – For a Day !”. 10 UK pounds a shot. Cheap !