Language learning apps have become all the more popular in recent times. Apps like Duolingo, Babbel, and Memrise, with millions of active users daily, have offered revolutionary ways to begin learning languages in fun, entertaining ways. Users are able to set their own personal goals in terms of their language learning, and the self-paced nature of them allows the users to determine how much time they’re willing to spend on them. That, coupled with the convenience of the lessons being easily accessible right from your smartphone, makes these apps all the more appealing than the pioneer learning software, Rosetta Stone. But just how effective are these apps in actually learning and acquiring language?
Languages have three integral parts that are necessary to master in order to acquire them: speaking (as in, being able to pronounce the words correctly), grammar, and vocabulary. Language learning apps tend to fall short on at least one of these integral parts; Duolingo, for example, is a great aid in learning a language’s essential vocabulary, but its text-to-speech inherently sounds off and doesn’t help with getting down the nuances of native speakers’ accents, and does not offer many exercises related to speaking. Memrise, while offering extensive speaking exercises and common phrases, faces criticism due to its lack of vocabulary. Both of these apps face criticism for their lack of explanation in grammatical rules of the languages they teach.
Another issue that arises with most of these popular language learning apps is their lack of information density. Each of the languages within the apps follows the same cookie-cutter approach to learning. Duolingo, as an example, follows the format of starting the user off with basic vocabulary related to a given topic, such as starting the user off by teaching them different animals, then different food, and so on, then will occasionally review these words as the user progresses to acquire more vocabulary. This format may work well with languages where the vocabulary is much harder to master than the grammar rules, such as Mandarin, but does not translate well with languages where the syntax is more complex than learning the vocabulary, such as Hungarian or Finnish; without first learning the grammatical rules and syntax these languages hold, no amount of vocabulary learning will help the learner acquire the language. Essentially, a one-size-fits-all approach is not an effective way to go about language learning, and while it may help to some extent, traditional language learning textbooks hold much more information density as they focus completely on one language rather than several.
In my opinion, these language learning apps are still progressing and I’m fairly optimistic they will continue to be great tools for casual language learners; however, for now, they should only serve as a supplement rather than a primary resource to fully immerse oneself into the path of language acquisition.
I have used Duolingo to learn French, but I keep losing interest and motivation. I think the app is fun and can be used as a supplement when learning a language, as you said, but they greatly rely on the user to be super motivated. We also cannot expect our learners to open a language learning app after long hours of learning and feel like they are doing homework. I also think that most of these apps lack sufficient language teaching methods; when explaining how to use a new vocabulary or grammar, they do it from an academic or linguistic point of view, and many learners become frustrated the moment they don’t understand a term used while explaining. I am also hopeful and optimistic about the advances in language learning apps in the coming years, particularly, the use of AI and voice recognition technology.
Hi Tasmeen. I had a similar experience using Duolingo. When learning a new language, they expect people to automatically know the word order of sentences and it felt very trial and error in the beginning with no lesson to pass learning first. In another course I’ve taken, one effective way they found was to use the learner’s own language first. For example, they first had the learner’s known language, then had them identify the keywords, translate the keywords to the target language, then put them into the L2. Efforts to integrate the user’s first language can make these learning apps more constructive.
Hello Tasneem,
I found your post interesting and detailed. I completely agree that these apps should be used as a supplemental tool. At one school I was at, students had to learn Indonesian and new learners were asked to use Duolingo until they learnt enough to join the regular Indonesian classes. Students quickly became bored with this and the school had to come up with a new solution. I think an important factor to consider with any educational technology tool is how it is interacted with. If it’s used simply to replace an existing method/tool without considering interactions, it will not be as successful as it could be.
Very interesting topic and currently working on mobile games and language apps with my group so I agree with much of what you talked about and we are exploring the gamification trend also with language learning. I think there are many benefits but I also agree with Sam’s point that it doesn’t prepare you to interact with others if they are fluent in that language. I think it is a good tool to use as part of your learning toolkit when looking at learning a new language and it does make it a lot more fun, interactive and personalized to you interests.
Hi Tasneem, This is a great topic! I know in my own work, we have been exploring a lot of the gamification trend. Apps like Duolingo use gamification principles to help motivate learners to return to the app for daily language practise. However, where the issue arises is when we lose interest in those extrinsic motivations. I agree with you as well that language is such a complex topic and requires a learning environment with deeper impact. Obviously these kind of apps are innovative tools, however I believe their reach is somewhat limited by their design.
Hello Tasneem,
As you said, those apps are a great aid. They lack different components to be considered a complete tool to learn a new foreign language. Still, they have great advantages to help people in keeping in touch with the new language. They are flexible, lessons’ duration is suitable for short periods of learning, and the repetition helps create strong links to long-term memory.
I have tried to learn Mandarin through “Chinese Skill” and while it was fun, it didn’t really prepare me when I traveled to Taiwan to interact with others. Google Translate on the other hand was an amazing tool to communicate and even read store signs.
This was something that I also found annoying with Duolingo. When you first start learning with it, the sentences they teach you are things like “the woman ate the lunch with a spoon”, rather than you know, sentences and phrases that one would actually use in a real-life setting. That’s one reason why I prefer Memrise for casual learning, as the app teaches common phrases and words before diving into specifics.