Learning the Lingo

As I’ve mentioned in recent posts, I’ve been learning to speak French at an adult learning centre since September. The course is interesting and I’ve learnt a great deal. I’ve also been using an on-line app called ‘Duolingo’. I have it downloaded onto my computer and my phone and use it for about 15 minutes a day. One of the best things is that you can register with your email address and it will give you a daily reminder to complete your lesson.

There are 21 courses for users who know English. They are:

Brazilian Portuguese, Latin American Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Irish, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Norwegian Bokmal, Romanian, Polish, Hebrew, Esperanto, Ukranian, Greek, Welsh, Hungarian and Vietnamese.

Courses that are currently under development are:

Yiddish, Czech, Korean, Swahili and Indonesian.

This great app keeps a track of your progress, and you can only move on to the next section when you have answered the questions correctly. There are 77 units with the French course and it is very in-depth. It starts you off very slowly, then incorporates the more complex forms of language learning at about unit 10. If you happen to miss a few days or weeks, you will need to go back to the previous units and complete a quick refresher.

It also records your voice for the correct pronunciation, with the addition of typing in your own sentences, so it’s a useful companion on the way to fluency. After all, au long aller, peti fardeau pèse.