In this day and age, multilingualism has become more important than ever. The ability to speak a second language carries not only professional benefits, but also social ones. It enables you to better understand another culture and its people, and knowledge of a foreign language enhances your cognitive and analytical abilities.

Many view learning a second language as time-consuming, boring and difficult. However, with the Duolingo app, you can easily learn a language for free and have even have fun while doing so.

Duolingo has over 200 million users and 23 different languages to choose from: Spanish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Vietnamese, Hebrew, and Japanese, to name a few.

How It Works

Once you download Duolingo, you are prompted to sign up with an email address and password, or you can link your account to Facebook or Twitter. Once that’s done, you can pick which languages you want to learn from Duoling’s list. You can sign up for as many languages as you want.

Once you choose a language, you have the option to start learning as a beginner or test into a higher level by taking a placement test. Duolingo also keeps track of your progress and participation as you learn, and lets you pick up your lesson where you left off.

Learning is done through various exercises that are that are bite-sized and gamified. They cover reading, writing, listening, and speaking, though speaking has the option to be turned off. There is no live interaction with other Duolingo users or teachers, speaking exercises are done through voice-recognition and conversational bots.

Exercises build on one another, so there’s a natural progression. Each lesson varies between multiple-choice questions, listen-and-write exercises, translation exercises, and spoken exercises. New vocabulary is often taught with images, and grammar notes are explained in speech bubbles. This structure makes Duolingo very suitable for beginners.

When you sign in, a home screen shows you the game plan of what you’re going to learn from that session. It gives you a clear guide of what you can expect to study next, and how much more you have to learn versus what you already know. If you already know the content, then have the option to test out of certain lessons, but if you don’t past the test then you can’t jump ahead. You must work through each lesson and unit in order.

Duolingo’s goal-setting feature prompts you to develop consistent study habits. For example, you could set your goal as studying every day and earning 10 points. Ten points is equivalent to completing one lesson, which takes around 5 minutes. The app will record how often you hit, miss or exceed your goal and reward you with happy messages and game credits, or send you encouraging messages instead.

Once you complete a course, you can redo any of the lessons to keep your language skills fresh. Each lesson has a curved bar graph that shows your strength in the targeted skill it teaches, so you can practice your weak spots. You can also take a series of exercises that Duolingo puts together for you based on which skills you are weakest at. Another option is an assessment test that you can take periodically to keep track of how much you’re remembering.

Final Thoughts

As someone who has spent much of their life studying languages, Duolingo definitely takes the pain and effort out of learning. It keeps you motivated and gives you a sense of progress — the games makes you feel like you are moving along with each point earned and each lesson completed, and all this is done without being “lectured” at. There is very little reading or explicit instruction and a big focus on natural discovery and learning. Additionally, Duolingo does a good job at balancing difference exercise-types so that you don’t get bored. Overall, the app is successful in making you feel like you’re playing a fun, educational game rather than learning a language, and the sleek design and colorfulness of the app adds to that. The best part? It’s completely free.