As many of you know, I moved from the United States to the Netherlands (which is my birth country but not my native language) in 2021 after studying Dutch at home. I found getting over the initial hump of learning a second language very difficult and had several false starts over several years until I hit on the method of hand-copying the Dutch edition of an entire novel that I already knew well in English: not just reading but writing by hand into a notebook (a stack of about twelve notebooks by the end) because this was the right pace to think word-by-word. This finally burned the core vocabulary and grammatical patterns into my mind and my progress became much more rapid. My speaking abilities are still very lackluster (partly because I have auditory processing issues and can't hear a !@#$ thing clearly) but my ability to understand written Dutch verges on fluent. In fact it got to the point that I found myself thinking: "Didn't I want to learn Italian too?"
This thought kept recurring to me until I suddenly said to myself: "why not just get on with it?" and I installed Duolingo.
This led to me learning a moderate amount of Italian, a surprising hell of a lot of Chinese and also incidentally becoming objectively one of the top competitive Duolingo players on Earth. And if you are thinking: "competitive Duolingo?" Yes, competitive Duolingo. They added leagues at some point. You get put on a weekly leaderboard of 30 people at your league rank. The highest rank is diamond, not counting the secret double-ultra Diamond Tournament, which I won by the way. Multiple times. At the end of 2022, Duolingo awarded me the absolute highest tier available for the year, Top 0.1%. I had started in May.
Was this a good use of my time? Yes. Am I stopping the instant that I got the final achievement for streak length, 365 days? Also yes. I can pointedly stop now, or I can commit to doing this forever even though my enthusiasm was already starting to flag and my weekly XP average was dipping from a 0.1% level to like, a mere 0.2% level. I am choosing to burn my streak and go out in a blaze of glory. I completed several courses in that year, and most people never complete one. I have duo'd all the lingos. The owl has no power over me.
Duolingo is a notoriously controversial app. Some people swear by it and some people just swear. I have had complete strangers on twitter get extremely angry with me for using Duolingo and tell me off for being a fake language fan. I told one of them there's no such thing as a perfect language app, just good enough, and they told me there was a perfect one, LingQ. Despite being very annoyed with them, I went and tried it (and paid for it as I paid for Duolingo); it has some useful functionality but it just didn't have that pull for me. It also does not seem very helpful to a beginner, though an intermediate to advanced learner may find it exactly what they want. The best language app is the one you actually use.
I found getting started in Italian to be surprisingly much easier than when I got started in Dutch. Unfortunately, I cannot disentangle what is Duolingo's method advantages, what is Italian just being easier to get a foothold in than Dutch, and what is the benefits from me having already made a serious study of a second language before starting a third. What I can say is that I found it fun enough to log in and practice multiple times a day and to completely 100% all Italian course content. Even the incredibly annoying and needlessly long sections about how to construct sentences like "by then I will have already known that at the time I would not yet have done it" despite not knowing how to say "it's my period." Seriously, designers of the Italian course, you went a little overboard on that part.
Then I started doing the Dutch course just out of curiosity for how it compared to my experiences. It was pretty easy since I already knew virtually all the vocabulary, but I still got dinged a lot for mixing up "de" and "het" (these are two different words for "the" and you just have to Just Know which one goes with which noun, there is no 100% understandable rule like for English a/an, there is no 95% accurate heuristic like in a Romance language). The Dutch course is surprisingly thorough considering that it's not massively popular compared to Spanish or Japanese. If you want to join us in the land of windmills then yes, I do recommend it to get started.
I started (modern) Greek but just wasn't enjoying the vibes. And then I knocked the Latin course, which is pretty short, out of the park. Then I started Chinese. I had been vaguely interested in Chinese for a long time but felt very intimidated and thought it would be too much over my head. But after getting this far in European languages I thought maybe I could handle it.
It was much easier than I thought!
(Other than the tones, of course, because again, I am effectively half deaf. But I am not moving to China, I just want to be able to read Chinese, and that's going fine!)
I went from virtually zero knowledge of Chinese (like, "nihao") to being able to more-or-less read a children's video game in several months. I also felt my ability to construct a completely grammatically correct sentence was pretty good compared to, say, Italian or even Dutch (which is extremely finicky). I am pretty happy with my experience but I do think they could improve matters with learning to associate a specific character with a specific meaning. They spend a lot of time associating characters with sounds without also reinforcing the meaning at the same time, which led to a lot of situations like "okay, sure, that particular squiggle is pronounced jì, but so are a hundred other squiggles, I really kind of need to be reminded of the MEANING, Duolingo!" It can also leave you unsure about the precise form of different characters, as it doesn't spend any time on explaining their internal structure, and so prone to mixing up similar ones or unable to recall them outside of the context of familiar sentences.
Duolingo can get you started but it cannot get you fluent. Having completed the Chinese course, I've graduated to two more specialized apps: Skritter for learning the precise forms of characters (writing them with a stylus on a big iPad screen is very satisfying) and Du Chinese for reading texts that have specifically been written for foreign students and are sorted by the size of the character pool each text draws from, so that you can start with the core 150 characters and build your way up to more complex texts. I am very happy with both. (Skritter is also available for Japanese.)
You can see statistics scraped from my Duolingo profile on duome. Abadidea the Thousand-Crowned, On An App That No Longer Actually Counts Things In Crowns. (I did not hate the new interface as much as I thought I would, for the record.) The XP I earned in one year is almost exactly the same as the total XP of the user with the single longest known streak, Christi from Ohio. I am strong. I am brave. I am really good at vocabulary flash cards.
I am free.
