Learning a foreign language in adulthood can feel like an exercise in futility. At best, you will struggle to find time to practise, lack a support network and never really be able to experience the total immersion required to become fluent.
Your woes may be compounded by a paper published in the journal Cognition, which suggests that those who start learning a language after the age of 10 are doomed to never achieve fluency – and that even basic learning abilities fade by 17 or 18.
But, peer-reviewed journals be damned, I’m determined to prove the doubters wrong. And so, every morning for a little more than eight months, I have done the same thing: opened the Duolingo app and spent 40 minutes learning French and Japanese.
The service, which asks you to finish 10 minutes of simple sentence construction and vocabulary-learning exercises each lesson, has become a fixture in my life.
The basic principle of Duolingo is that language learning is best achieved by doing a little bit of work, frequently, and over a long period of time. Rather than having an hour-long lesson once or twice a week, it is far better to spend 10 or 20 minutes a day, sometimes learning something new, sometimes revising something old, and slowly but surely improving your abilities.
At the heart of it all is the concept of the streak: logging on and fulfilling your stated goal of 10, 20, 30 or 50 minutes of lessons a day. Each day you meet your goal, you’re rewarded with a happy chime; if you don’t, your streak is over and you start again at zero.
If, like me, you are a creature of habit, the app can feel like the best route to self-improvement you will ever find. By 6.30am every day, I’m sitting at my kitchen table with coffee and breakfast. I spend 20 minutes doing two French courses, 20 minutes doing two Japanese courses, and then I leave for work.
A lot of the techniques the app uses are reminiscent of the sneaky methods that free-to-play games and social networking services use to keep users hooked. Encouraging you to return every day turns an idle experiment into a regular habit; push notifications keep you engaged with the game even if your daily grind is broken; a basic system of counters and rewards provides short- and long-term goals, helping you feel you’re progressing with every lesson.
Duolingo was founded in 2011 by Luis von Ahn (who invented reCaptcha, a service, bought by Google, that transcribes library books while checking that website visitors are really human), and has raised more than $100m in venture capital funding since then. It makes money from users by selling advertising and some paid features (offline use, unlimited daily lessons, streak freezes), and it also has more academic-focused services, including a $49 remote English-language certification that universities can use instead of more expensive in-person testing.
But how much of the language do you actually learn? According to the app, I have 56 “crowns” in French, and 49 in Japanese. I don’t know what that means, and I’m not certain Duolingo does either. It certainly doesn’t give me the ability to follow along with francophone films. Yet I am noticeably more confident speaking and reading French, and as for Japanese – well, I’ve gone from zero ability to a tiny, yet appreciably higher than zero, ability.
The academics are probably right: even with the help of smart new technology, I’ll never be fluent in a foreign language if I started learning in my late 20s. But that’s no reason not to try – fluency is overrated anyway. Why not aim for a simpler goal, such as reading the signs on doors? After all, pushing a door marked “pull” looks stupid in any language.
