Tons of English dog-related vocabulary: wag, tail, animal, pet, mammal, canine, paw, chase, cat, squirrel….Various memorable dogs you’ve seen in your life:.To expand on that last point, when you think of the word “dog,” your brain brings up thousands of associations, such as: Practicing translation doesn’t significantly improve your ability to speak a new language.Translating sentences is quite challenging work (there’s a reason translation jobs are considered jobs rather than recreation activities) and most importantly.They’re actually fairly hard to remember long term.Translations are kind of boring to memorize.

But it introduces some really central problems: It makes for a really straightforward app in terms of knowing what to do and how to do it. Translations are extremely easy to understand. Translation exercises don’t build language skills…ĭuolingo’s most frequent exercises all involve playing around with translations. They have a $6.66 monthly subscription that removes ads, enables skill test-outs, and allows a streak ‘repair’ each month. Basic Duolingo is ad-supported and otherwise doesn’t cost you a penny. From their expansive skill trees, to their satisfying buttons, to the regular rhythm of “You did it!” and “Good job!” success markers, they’re just nailing the pleasure chunks of app design. Excellent gamification and a wonderful user interfaceĭuolingo has done a ton of R&D in ways to gamify the language learning experience so that you can feel good about your daily interactions with their app. In the early days of the Fluent Forever app, before we developed our Learning Reminders, we actually had some users tell us that they were using Duolingo’s notifications to remind them to use our app, which was hilarious and also brilliant. It was effective enough that it became a meme. What Duolingo gets right Goal setting and notificationsĭuolingo’s little owl, Duo, is a brilliantly engineered motivational tool. In this article, I’d like to go through four of the central issues in Duolingo, and what we’re doing at Fluent Forever to address this stuff.īut before we get there, I want to make a brief nod to what Duolingo does really well. If you’ve been using Duolingo to learn languages, you may have noticed that you’re learning words and completing a bunch of modules/skills… but you don’t really seem to be progressing.

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