DuoLingo
© 2013 DuoLingo
Ideal for children or adults, and on just about every platform, DuoLingo brings the often elusive job of learning a second (or third) language closer to reality, through a crisp, smart, adaptive interface and a recommend daily practice regime. First introduced in 2013 by a Carnegie Mellon professor studying crowd sourcing, the structured tutorial makes itself smarter over time by using crowd sourcing. In other words, the curriculum was designed by thousands of native speakers -- and is continually updated. You start by creating a profile and select which of 22 languages you want to learn, along with the amount of time you want to dedicate to your language. This system doesn't dance around the fact that daily practice is needed. Next you work your way through a series of screening exercises that include matching pairs of words, matching pictures with words, translating a sentence, listening to a spoken phrase and typing it, and so on. At any point you can test out of a level. It is possible to use DuoLingo in guest mode, and avoid giving your personal information, but you do need to create an account with a valid email in order to save your progress and get the reminders. We tried the first level of Italian on Version 4.5.2, and found it to be an effective experience; in fact one of the best language tutorials yet. The interface is crisp, clean and gimmick free, and it is useable by either children or adults. Note that a school version is available, with classroom management features. The publisher suggests using Chrome (remember Google is one of the funders), but IE (version 9 and above), Safari (version 5 and above), and Firefox are also supported. So what's the catch? How does DuoLingo make money? We're not sure. DuoLingo is venture financed (Google is one of the supporters) and so far it appears to be gimmick-free, with no ads or in-app sales. The only thing we could find for sale is a T-shirt. Of course the big question is, what happens to your information over the long term? And remember, this could include detailed information about who you are, where you are, when you study and your level of proficiency. Welcome to the information age.
iPad, iPhone, Android, Kindle, Windows, Mac OSX, Chrome
Teaches: English, Arabic, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
CTR Rating: 97.5%