Duolingo: Language Lessons

Duolingo has been inhabiting the space of one of my Android tablets (yes, I have more than one) for some time now. I initially installed it out of curiosity. I then started exploring the Dutch course and got up to about 9 lessons. I must say that for a free app, it is mighty impressive.

The Duolingo language courses are developed by the community. Each course has a small team of dedicated people behind it who have offered part of their free time to help others become polyglots. Most courses are made for non-English speakers, although English speakers get the biggest diversity of courses (if that makes sense). When you begin a course, you may take a placement test, or start right from the basics. Lessons start with the most basic things and progress to higher grammar concepts, also introducing new word groups along the way.

Throughout the course you will also be able to "strengthen your skills" by taking a custom lesson which includes content that you have previously gone through. You can do this at any time in order to keep up with what you've already theoretically learned, but also to keep your daily streak. The daily streak is a measure that you set up. It's a sort of pledge or quota that you decide to follow in learning and practicing each day. You can set up a streak for every language that you are studying, in this case Duolingo can take up just minutes of your day, or be like a full time job if you have nothing better to do.

Maintaining your daily streak as well as advancing through the lessons will win you lingots. These act like an internal currency and can get you a couple of powerups that help you by either freezing your streak (to get some time off) or spend as wager for maintaining a seven day streak in the hopes of double returns.

All in all, Duolingo is a platform that gets constant updates. The courses are refined, new lessons are being introduced and the community is well and active both on the development part and on the user discussion part.