Duolingo (beta)

A fascinating new project from Carnegie Mellon University, Duolingo (beta) (free) helps you learn a new language by asking you to participate in translating the Web. Users vote on the best translation submitted by other users, and eventually, the translated Web pages can be published so that more speakers of other languages can read them. It relies almost exclusively on crowd-sourcing, which may leave many language learners wondering if it's any good. How much can you trust translations that random people on the Internet write? The answer is: more than you think.

Duolingo has tremendous features that work surprisingly well at getting you to practice a language?but not necessarily master it. Because the site is still in beta, the language selection is currently limited to Spanish and German, although French, Italian, and Chinese are reportedly coming soon. ?

How Duolingo Works
To get access to Duolingo, you have to request an invitation from the website by providing your email address and picking which language you want to learn: Spanish or German. I chose Spanish, a language I've studied in the past but never mastered and have been trying to improve more recently. If you want to study both languages, you can elect the second one after you create an account (although the option isn't easy to find; I'd rather it were simply an option in the settings).

If you receive an invitation to join, you then create a username and password so that Duolingo can keep track of your progress and participation. When you sign in, a home screen shows you a roadmap of what you'll learn. Units along the roadmap appear gray until they're unlocked, at which time they become colorful, and a small trophy icon turns gold when you've completed and mastered a unit.?

You can't jump ahead. Each unit is locked until you level-up to it, and if you think you're too advanced for the Basic sections, you have to prove your abilities by taking a test to opt out.?

Language-Learning Components
Each of the units that you can see on the roadmap contain both language-learning components as well as translation exercises (explained in the next section).?

The language-learning parts are solid and replicate some of the typical drills you'll find in more well-known language software, like our two Editors' Choices, Rosetta Stone TOTALe ($249 for Level 1, 4 stars) and Rocket Languages Premium ($99.95 for lifetime membership, 4.5 stars). For example, on one screen, Duolingo will introduce you to a new word, usually in context with other words that you've already learned, and provide the translation. On the next screen, you might be asked to choose which article fits with a word, such as the masculine el or feminine la in Spanish. Two or three screens later, you might be asked to translate the word you learned previously. Duolingo's language-learning tools work because they help you build knowledge logically and slowly.?

You might complete a few dozen screens of exercises?fill-in-the-blanks, typed translations, listen-and-repeats with voice recognition, and so forth?before reaching a completion screen. The progress markers Duolingo uses couldn't be clearer, and they do an excellent job of orienting you and guiding you through the program.

Crowd-Sourced Answers
After you've proved your language skills to some degree, Duolingo invites you to help translate the Web, and this is where the project becomes very cool. You get to choose which pages you want to try and translate?a few options appear on virtual cards with a topic name to give you a sense of what it might contain?and the options are all theoretically within your reach based on your progress so far.?

When you select a card, Duolingo only gives you small snippets to translate, not the whole page. And while some of these sentences don't make sense out of the context of the whole page, there's always a link at the top to see the original source. For example, when I tried to translate a headline that word-for-word read, "Buddha Tire" (as in automobile tires), I clicked the source to see a blog post with a picture of car tires piled into the shape of a sitting Buddha.?

As you translate each bit of text, Duolingo checks your writing against other submitted results, which you can see and rate. The site also compares your answer against the highest rated translation to give you a score (1 to 100). A good match doesn't have to be word-for-word the same, either, another reason Duolingo is a highly intelligent system.?

You earn points throughout for both completing the learning modules and translating text successfully. All of Duolingo's parts are tightly knitted together in this way.

The translations I encountered were still very challenging, but in a good way. I liked trying to read real writing, rather than sentences that are designed based on only the words and verb tenses I know. Language-learning software in general faces this problem, but at least with Duolingo, you're practicing with real content.?

How to Use Duolingo to Learn a Language
Duolingo is the only crowd-sourced language-learning service to get it right. It is by far one of the most exciting educational concepts I've seen. The project currently only supports two languages, unfortunately, but when it completes its beta period, it will undoubtedly be one of the best tools for practicing a new language?but not necessarily learning one from scratch. To fully learn a new language, I do recommend picking up dedicated software that has been tested rigorously, like either of our two Editors' Choices?Rocket Language, Rosetta Stone?or even audio CDs from Pimsleur ($119, 3.5 stars). Pair any of those programs with Duolingo for practicing, and you're sure to learn a lot, fast.

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