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Speaker 1:          00:00          Good day everyone. Welcome to the Lange focus channel. My name is Paul. Today I'm going to be talking about something that has been all the rage recently, something called duo lingo. Now this is a totally free language learning platform. It has a online desktop version and also a smart phone version. It's something that I haven't gotten around to trying until just recently because I've been so busy with other things, but everyone's talking about it. People keep asking me, hey, have you tried to do a lingo? So I had to get on it and see what I thought of it. So I started duolingo lingo just a few days ago. I started with Esperanto. Why did they choose Esperanto? Well, I wanted to start with a language I've never studied before just so I could try out the platform and focus on that. I'll test out Esperanto and duo lingo at the same time. That was my thinking. So my basic impressions of duo lingo is that it's a great free resource that you can use a, it's excellent, it's motivating, it's fun, but it's not the only thing that you should use for reasons that I will get into in a minute.

Speaker 1:          01:01          So let's just have a look and see how it works. You can see right here, this is my profile page that's me over here, Paul Jorgensen. And you can see over here on my language is Esperanto level six. Let's look back at this page over here. The basic theme of duo lingo is gamification. They want language learning to be like a game, something that can motivate you and keep you studying every day. Because one of the biggest problems with language learning is that people give up and there are not consistent. I have a video about consistency. It's very important. Consistency is king had. You really need to study every day if you want your skills to keep progressively improving. So they're trying to solve that problem of lack of consistency by making it a game. So if you look over on the left down here, we have an Esperanto skill tree.

Speaker 1:          01:50          They have that for every language. Of course it starts off with basics. So you go in here, this is one skill. Then you have a few lessons for each skill and then you move on to the next one, to the next one, and as you move down, you're achieving targets. You're getting something called experience points. So over here, like my goal is set at 20 experience points per day. If I get that, then I've met my goal today. I went on a rampage, I've got 380 because I wanted to just get a lot under my belt before talking about Duolingo. But if you meet your target, it's just like a, you know, you're patting yourself on the back thing. Yay, I got, I met my goal for my experience points for today and you get something called a streak. So I'm on a two day streak yesterday.

Speaker 1:          02:31          I surpassed my 20 experience points today, surpass by a long shot. So if you keep up that streak, then you start to get some other rewards as well. The experience points that you get when you are on a streak. But also when you finish some of these skills and when you do some translation services or when you do some kind of a time to practice, you get these experience points and they're basically just a way, a symbolic way to motivate you. But there are these other reports called lean gods I've been got from, it gets whatever you call them and you get these when you finish a new skill for the first time. And also when you've leveled up to a new level, then you get a certain number of [inaudible]. So if you level up to level four for example, you'll get four ling got sore.

Speaker 1:          03:13          If you pass level 10 then you'll get 10 lingo. It's like that. And then when you finish a new skill and you get, I forget how many exactly, you get to mingle or something and they build up. So when you get enough of this lingo I these little jewel things, then you can go to the link. Got Store and you can buy some neat stuff with them. Now these are mostly just for the purpose of gamification and nothing useful. You can't order like the tee shirt or whatever as far as I know, but you can do stuff like this, a strict freeze. So if you need to take a day off and you don't want to end your streak, then you can buy a streak freeze for four 10 link dots. Or here's a little gambling, a fun activity, double or nothing. You can bet five lane guts and maybe you'll, you'll get 10 link God's back if you maintain a seven day streak.

Speaker 1:          03:57          So it's just basically wagering on your own ability to maintain your streets. So it's just kind of a fun way to make use of this lingo lights. Another couple of things. You can take a time to practice so you can see how well you're doing. That costs 10 lingo. You can take a quiz, a progress quiz, and that costs 25 lingo. So all these things that you can buy with those lingo that you earned. There were also a couple of additional items available on the smartphone only and you can buy some special clothing for the duo mascot, a mascot and duos an hour and you can buy some clothing for him. So when he appears on your screen to congratulate you on a job well done, he'll appear in his new updated closing. That's another reward you can buy with your lingo. So again, it's just a fun thing to motivate you.

Speaker 1:          04:44          Having things like experience points and rewards for your successes, that's something that will appeal to a lot of people who are into role playing games or video games, that kind of thing. And it's really expanding language, learning into off all new audience. And I think that that's really great. Another element of duo lingo that helps motivate you in a game like way is that you can connect with your friends and you can follow each other's progress. So you can see how much they've done today, how many experience points they've gotten today. And if you've got more than you can call them out on that and you can challenge them or you can make bets with each other, that kind of thing. So it's really good just to keep each other accountable. Some people don't need that personally. I don't really need that kind of accountability, but some people really do.

Speaker 1:          05:24          And for them it's great. Okay. So getting into the actual language taught and the learning method, I really liked the order of the language that they introduced. It's a very logical, and it starts from the beginning and progress into the more advanced material starts with very basic sentence structures, like a basic vocabulary, like uh, the translation for men. Okay. Veto, right. So that's correct. Yes. I know what's correct. So continue me and the STSV. I am not you. That's what that means. I am not used to put that in. Check it. Get lost a CC cleaner. Don't need you. Right. So that's correct. Let's continue.

Speaker 1:          06:04          LACMA, marbles, and that means the boy. So it's just basic vocabulary and it's just basic sentence structures. Like, I am you, I am not you. I am a boy. I am a man starts with very simple stuff. Just a equals b sentences. Yes. Okay, go back. Um, and then it progressively gets more of advanced start building up some more basic grammar and some basic vocabulary. The accusative, plurals possessive, uh, animal vocabulary, country vocabulary. So it's very basic stuff. But as you get down here, then you get more into the advanced grammar, more events, topics, health, travel, education. So it, it looks quite good. I haven't gotten through all of it yet, but I'm a third of the way through or something. And I think the order that they teach the language and it's quite good, the selection of vocabulary is quite good. And the sentence, it gets you to produce our, well, not totally natural there.

Speaker 1:          06:59          They're basic and they are the sentences you should be learning at this level. I think. So let's go into another skill that I was doing more recently. We'll just kind of, I'll redo it and walk through it with you. So this one Bonai Pat Toi have us long Gyne Tago in. So that means I know what it means. Literally. I don't know what they're trying to say, but I mean it's good fathers have long days. What the heck does that mean? I'm not quite sure, but that's what it says. So when you are looking at a sentence like this, sometimes you have to translate it and sometimes from Esperanto into English, sometimes English into Esperanto. Sometimes it just asks you to translate a word or um, just look for vocabulary matching, that kind of thing. But under each, each point there's a link here. You can discuss the sentence with your peers. You can look down here and discuss and ask questions about the sentence. Like this one, people are saying, what does this mean though? Cause they don't know what the message of that sentence is. What the community interactions kind of neat gives you a chance to discuss things and get further clarification if you need it. Vito Estos Bella. Okay. So that means, oh man is handsome. So that's another very basic sentence. Of course

Speaker 1:          08:17          oil, it's the plural form, right? Veto a with the J at the end. If your toy men are handsome. So it gives you the correction down here at one thing I don't like is that it doesn't give you a chance to enter the correct sentence if you get something wrong. There's actually, you know, psychological reasons behind this that you should have a chance to correct the mistake. So for me as a teacher, when I'm teaching my students, if they make a mistake, I always have to give them a chance to correct themselves. I don't want to leave them hanging. It leaves a kind of open loop where they feel like they've failed and they haven't actually fixed the problem. So it just, it creates a kind of lingering dissatisfaction. I don't like that. I would prefer if they change so that you could enter the correct sentence right here after you have gotten it wrong.

Speaker 1:          08:59          That's just a psychological thing and educational concept that I think is important. I hope they can fix that in the future. But anyway, moving on, Julep has sona, it's dust. Malibu owner is the person in bed. That's what it means. Is the person bad check it being yes. So you can see as you get them correct. Then this progress bar starts moving towards your goal at the end here. And when you reach this area, then that means you're finished the skill. But the exercises are slightly different on the smartphone application. It's not always entering them in a box. Sometimes they have a bunch of tabs with words on them and you can arrange those words. So you're practicing the syntax. Some of the smartphone exercises are a little better than the online version. Um, but both of them are good. You can do both. Now, one thing that you might notice is that it's all just sentence translation.

Speaker 1:          09:56          You're given a sentence and you have to translate it or you're given a phrase and you have to translate it or you have to just complete a sentence with a word like that. That duo lingo is great for learning the basic sentence structure of a language and the basic vocabulary of a language basically for making sentences. It's similar to something like the Michelle Thomas Method, which I think is useful, but it's kind of limited because you just learn how to translate into your target language basically. So it's not really giving you the interactive skills, it's not teaching you the discourse skills that you need to be able to communicate in a real context, so that's its main weakness, but it is good for teaching you how to make sentences. Now, another weakness that I think is actually quite critical as that duo lingo can't really effectively be used offline.

Speaker 1:          10:43          I was in Philippines just this week and in Philippines they don't have reliable internet. With your data connection with your smartphone or on even on your laptop at home, often there's an inconsistent wifi connection, so it made it really hard and almost almost pointless to use duo lingo when I was out on the go, especially with my data on my smartphone because you just walk 10 steps and you're out of range or you, you turn a corner and you're out of range, you sit in a coffee shop and you're out of range. So I would have to sit there and wait to know if my answer was correct or I would know it was correct, but I would have to wait for the next question to load until I got into range and just made it basically too much trouble to even bother. So I really didn't bother with duo lingo when I was in Philippines this week.

Speaker 1:          11:27          So that's just one thing that I think they have to tackle, especially if they want dual lingo to be a truly global service. They're going to have to make it so that you can do it offline. Like you can download some of the levels or you can download a certain number of skills, do them offline, and then you can upload your progress once you get in range of Wifi or data. I think that's really important. They really need to do that. I know that some other applications do do that, so I hope duo lingo gets on top of it. That will be really useful for people like me who travel and really useful for people who are in developing countries or places where there's inconsistent connection. But in conclusion, I think duolingo was an excellent free resource, especially because it's free. I just think that that's really cool that you can get the service for free and then maybe an exchange volunteer, you're a translation services just as a gift back to them.

Speaker 1:          12:15          I think that that's a really cool way to do it. Using crowdsourcing in exchange for some kind of free service. I think that's awesome and it just shows where we are in 2015 it's an awesome online economy as far as I'm concerned. So I think if duo lingo balances the skills taught a little better, if it gives you more opportunity to do some kind of simulated interaction, like some question and answer exercises and that kind of thing, it gives you a little more listening practice, then it will become even more useful. So I hope they keep expanding the features include some things like that, but even as it stands, it's great. It's a fun way to just practice on the go. It's a fun way to dabble in a new language a little bit. If you want to see what it's like, it's free. It's easy to start.

Speaker 1:          12:55          It's fun because of the game of vacation features. So I think Duolingo is on the right track and they're creating something pretty awesome. So I hope you try it out. Thank you for tuning into length focus. This is Paul. Have a good nights. See Ya all over the world. There are people who speak closely related forms of communication. Sometimes they are called different languages. Sometimes they are called dialects of one language. So how do we decide which one they are? Sometimes there's some disagreement about which one a particular form of communication is. Is it a dialect or is it a separate language? Putting them off into the future after you finish achieving this current goal right now, for example, getting really good at French in the future. Beyond that, you can see the next goal in front of you, which is to start learning Spanish or whatever your language of interest. Yes.