What's up guys In this video I want to talk about Duolingo which is a free online program
for learning languages and they have quite a good number of languages on there that you
can learn so if you don't know what it is or you haven't tried using it before I definitely
recommend you check it out because even if you don't like it it's free so you're not
losing anything Now if you've been watching my channel for a while you've probably noticed
that I haven't posted any videos for a while and that's cause I'm a busy college student
and I've got a lot of things going on and video editing takes time and so I kinda got
lazy and fell off the video wagon for a little while but I have been reading your comments
and I was really encouraged by a lot of the things you guys have had to say to me and
honestly it makes me feel pretty good that you guys like my channel that much and that
my videos have been helping you learn languages so I decided to get my butt back into gear
and I'm gonna be working on more videos now So what do I think about Duolingo?
I actually have a lot of experience using Duolingo because for several years I used
it to polish my Spanish I used it to learn French to start my Esperanto learning to start
Romanian I also used it to kinda dabble in a few other languages like German Portuguese
Ukrainian and a few different other languages so I have a lot of experience using Duolingo
and I've kinda seen the goods and the bads and I just wanna share some of these insights
with you guys So what do I think about Duolingo?
Well honestly I have sort of mixed feelings about it I can see some good and some bad
and I guess I'll just start off by talking about some of the good If you are brand new
to learning a language and you don't know any words in that language Duolingo can be
a pretty good place to start for example if you want to start picking up Ukrainian and
you don't know a single word in Ukrainian where do you start?
Well Duolingo is a pretty good bet because they do a good job of starting you off from
scratch just very basic words man woman to be eat bread You know the very basics So you're
not gonna be overwhelmed if you start learning with Duolingo from the very first day and
they have a gradual progression that's gonna ease you through the different levels of your
language learning to start you off easy and slowly get more and more advanced and more
complicated and they do a good job of introducing new material to you and that's pretty good
The other thing that I like about Duolingo is the community It's a very community based
program its not just you sitting at your computer or on your phone by yourself learning a language
I mean it can be that if you don't of the community but first of all you get to add
friends so you can send out requests to your friends on Facebook and stuff and you'll get
to compete with each other You'll get to see how well your friends are doing and there's
a lot of other people that are learning the same language that you're learning and they
have the same questions that you have a lot of them are at the same stage that you are
so they have forums and question and answer areas where you can ask certain things or
read questions that other people have asked and it can be really mutually beneficial for
you and for all the other people that are in the same stage as you in your language
Every sentence that you're asked to translate on Duolingo is gonna have a little discussion
forum so every problem every question that you have to answer if you don't understand
something or if you don't understand why you got the wrong answer you can always click
on there and see the discussion threads and there's usually gonna be someone that has
asked the same question that you have and then other people that know more moderators
or people that already speak the language that are willing to help and that's very useful
Now is Duolingo really everything it's cracked up to be is it everything they're trying to
tell you that it is?
No honestly Duolingo is not my favorite language learning technique I think there are other
better more useful ways of learning languages and for me personally much better uses of
my time