They constantly discourage you from trying to memorize or remember the word and instead encourage you to use your principles to 'find it' or 'think your way there'.įor example, they teach you that virtually any English word that end in 'ation' will correspond to a Spanish word that sounds virtually the same, so for example:Īnd the Spanish verb will be the Spanish word minus the 'acíon' plus 'ar'.

The method uses your native language to scaffold the target language using patterns and rules. So I've been using Language Transfer English to Spanish.

Maybe it makes up for that by getting a large number of people started who then go on. I also worry that it's promises and gamification trap and frustrate people who could have done more. Maybe other people have had a different experience, but I think it's good for the light hobbyist until they are ready to move on to something more serious, but that's about it. And I found that it doesn't pair well with more intensive learning. So as discussed in the article and here, Duolingo can't get you even to a low intermediate level, just the basics. You can test out of things, but if I wasn't ready to test out of the whole block I still had to go through a lot of material that wasn't useful (i.e., even testing out skill by skill, was tedious and time-consuming and counter-productive). Due to the way their system worked, I had to go through a lot of exercises that weren't useful for me because I had picked up the content with other learning methods. It helped me practice, but there were so many exercises for each set of vocabulary. I found as a few others have mentioned that Duolingo actually got in the way. Interestingly, when I was starting out, I was in Peru with a Spanish speaking significant other, and using Duolingo as well as taking private lessons. I'm probably approaching a B2 level of Spanish right now (based on my experience attaining a B2 and then C1 level of French once upon a time). I lived in Peru for a year and a half leading up to April 2022. I am just about to return to the US after 4 months in Buenos Aires.

Duolingo spanish audio lessons