Hi there. I'm Drew Badger, the English Fluency Guide and I'm making this quick video both
for parents who want to teach their kids how to spell and read and also for my adult non
native English students who are learning English all over the world. This will really be a
really interesting video for you. It will show you how you should be learning and some
of the typical mistakes that people make when they're designing reading programs, not only
for kids but for adults as well. So I'm going to be talking about Duolingo
ABC, Learn To Read. This is a new app that was just released by Duolingo. So Duolingo
is a popular way of learning languages, which actually I don't recommend to my students
because it basically teaches you to use translations from one language to learn a second one and
the reason I don't want people to do that is because one of the biggest problems when
they're actually trying to speak is they have to think and translate in their heads before
they say something. So they have to think of a sentence in their head first and then
try to translate that mentally and then say that sentence. So let's look at what they
built and see what's good about it and what needs improvement.
Now this seems like an actually pretty big app with a lot of content in it, so I can't
really go through everything about it but I just wanted to talk very quickly about what
I've seen so far just looking at the first few small levels of it. Let's talk specifically
about the kind of learning that apps like this have and why I don't recommend it for
parents. So when you actually get into the app, the
first thing you're going to see, it's a very simple interface which is a great design but
the first level that they have is just a picture of a monkey and they're teaching you how to
read the word monkey. Now, the reason this is a really bad place
to start is if you're just trying to tell someone what a word is and you're just giving
them a word to memorize, you're not actually teaching them anything. You're showing them
a word and hopefully I guess in Duolingo's eyes, we're going to have you repeat this
word often enough that you start to remember it but you're not really learning anything.
The real gamification from something comes from when you can actually discover something
about what you're learning. When you do that, that's when the actual learning process happens.
It's almost like you can feel something like that.
So if I were to use this same approach but teach you Japanese and I'm going to start
just in the middle of an advanced lesson giving you a difficult word, I would give you maybe
the word tornado and then just give you the Japanese word for this, which is tatsumaki.
Now I can give you that Japanese word and just have you try to remember it again and
again but if you look at the word, you have no idea, if you don't know what Japanese at
all, what any of these characters mean or how to read them. Because again, you're looking
at multiple characters and you don't know what part of the word is for what part of
those characters. So how do we read? Is it tatsu and then maki? Or is it tatsu ma and
then ki, or something else? So we don't actually know how to read that but this is the way
people typically teach vocabulary in a different language and this is also what people do for
teaching reading. So when you're learning this way, you actually have to make the language
understandable, almost kind of like a puzzle and that's how you really gamify something
to make it easy to understand. So using our Japanese example, if we're going
to take something like tatsumaki, I would teach, even this I would not begin teaching
Japanese with a word like this. But I think it's just an interesting example because they've
used the word monkey, which is a more difficult example in English. But let's say I teach
a related word like harumaki, which is a spring roll.
Now all of a sudden, if I've got both of these words together for you, you get a little bit
more context. Now you've even got kind of a puzzle where you're looking at what's similar
between these two different words. So we've got tatsumaki and we've got harumaki. So when
you're looking at that like, "Oh, that's interesting, they both have maki in that," and if I actually
write these out in Chinese characters, so there are three different written languages
for Japanese, but if I write this out in Chinese characters, you're going to see, "Oh, that's
the same character for that. I guess maybe that means like a roll, a rap or something
like that," and that's what it means. So that's where you actually gamify something
and the learning, especially for learning a second language and that's what reading
is, so reading is actually teaching someone a second language because it's like learning
hieroglyphics or any other different written language. Because to a child, they might know
the English word monkey if you said that to them or show them a picture of a monkey but
it's basically an alien language, so something completely different when they see it in writing.
That's why you have to remember that a child looking at the word monkey has no idea what
letter, what part of that word makes what sound and so that's why you don't want to
teach a word like monkey before you teach anything else.
So going back to our Japanese example, we're looking at tatsumaki and then we've got harumaki
or we could even have a makizushi. So if we have a sushi, like a regular sushi you would
get at a sushi restaurant but a rolled sushi becomes a makizushi.
So once you see all that, then you really start to become really excited about learning
because your starting to put the pieces together yourself and this is what actual learning
is. It's not about a teacher just telling you what something is and forcing you to remember
it. It's about you understanding how the language works and if I explained to you or just show
you, giving you these different examples like that and letting you understand what the idea
of maki is, then it becomes really fun for you and you don't need anything like a progress
bar telling you how much left to go have this boring lesson there is because you're enjoying
it. That's what gamification really means. So how do you fix this problem? How do you
actually make reading fun and allowed children to teach themselves the language rather than
trying to just have them remember something again and again by reviewing it over and over
again. You, in the same way that we were using the maki example for Japanese, you want to
take English letters, you begin with something very simple and you simply allow students
or children to compare and contrast different sounds.
So that's why we begin with something like a three letter word instead of something longer
like monkey. So we have a cat, so we have the three letters here and we can let a student
actually see what the different sounds these letters are. In this combination, you would
get a, [inaudible 00:06:42], just by using these three letters here and then we would
let students try different letters and see just by switching one letter or two letters,
what does that change and how do the sounds of the letters change because of that.
So we could have cat has a beginning, but maybe we change that C to a B to make bat
or we change the T to a P to make cap and this is where, if a child can manipulate this
by themselves, this is where they can actually teach themselves how to read. Isn't that cool?
So just like our maki example, it's a puzzle. You're allowing children to actually discover
the words and their sounds by themselves and not trying to force them to remember something.
That's exactly what most people do in the classroom and that's why there is a serious
literacy crisis happening not only in the United States, but in other countries as well
and this is why it's so difficult also for most people who are learning languages.
So when you're thinking about what's a great way to learn, you have to remember this idea
about how you're connecting words and how you're allowing children or adults to discover
the rules of the language for themselves. So if you'd like to see more about how to
do this, I created an app that does this exact thing called Frederick Learn To Read and using
this, I'll just show you a quick example here where we're manipulating the different letters
just to show, here's a very simple way to test different letter sounds to show how actual
words are made and instead of the teacher or the program telling you what something
is, you get to manipulate that yourself. That's why it really feels great to learn because
you discovered something and that's what really makes it the fastest way to learn how to read.
So if you'd like to learn more about doing this and then being able to play real games
and allowing you to test what you know after you've learned some things for yourself, you
can click on a link in the upper right of this video or on the description to learn
more about Frederick Learn To Read, but this is a completely new way of learning the language,
but it's the way the mind actually wants to learn.
So to download Frederick Learn To Read, whether you're a parent using it with your own children
or you're an adult English learner, wanting to improve your pronunciation the native way,
the way people really learn a language, click on the link in the upper right of this video
or on the link in the description below this video.
Let me know if you have questions in the comments down below and please share this video with
others who are also looking for a great way to help their kids learn to read.