Duolingo, unlike Rosetta Stone, Livemocha or Babbel, is free. (The company makes money by charging for text translations, crowdsourced from users. That corner of the site isn’t entirely smooth yet, so it’s a distraction for most learners.) Lessons are available for English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese. Much of the learning happens in the form of rapid-fire quizzes, which switch frequently between testing speaking, listening, and writing. High scores unlock further lessons.
You can compare your progress with your friends’
through Facebook, a successful use of "gamification". Duolingo’s free
smartphone app offers nearly all the same content as the website, too. I
was surprised at how good the app was, since most language apps have
tended to be spartan, buggy or both. Duolingo’s speaking quizzes on the
app seem particularly magical considering the voice recognition tech
behind it was nearly unusable just a few years ago on other software.
It’s
a joy to use Duolingo, in part because its phone app is not only
convenient to use but full of new content. But while it’s a great start,
it’s not perfect. For now, its lessons are deep—I haven’t even spotted
the end-mark of my French lessons—but the language selection is small. I
also suspect that Duolingo’s clientele is limited by its style of
teaching. The quizzes focus on mastering structural blocks, like
relative pronouns or a particular class of nouns. It doesn’t really
teach conversational skills. If I didn’t already know the basics of
French conversation, I’d be helpless in France. The focus is great for
serious beginners or long-term learners, but much less useful for casual
learners or tourists.