Duolingo - The app that started it all…
Duolingo was the first app I used to learn Vietnamese. So how did it work out for me?
When I first started learning Vietnamese, I started out on the app Duolingo. For those of you who don’t know, Duolingo is one of the biggest language learning apps out there. You can download it for free on a smartphone, with an option to upgrade if you want unlimited attempts and no ads.
You can see why it’s popular. The app looks fun with cartoon characters jumping all over the screen. The fire and lighting animations made me feel pretty good trying to pick up a new language. This was going to be my ticket to understanding my family at dinners - at last! I bought the premium plan and stuck with this for about 2 years as pretty much my only way of learning Vietnamese.
If at some point you’ve thought about trying Duolingo, and you want to know how it helped me learn Vietnamese then read on ahead.
First sentences
Duolingo helped me take my first steps in learning Vietnamese. It helped me learn the basic sentences like:
I drink water
He drinks water
She likes coffee
They eat apples
The bat is at the train station
Considering that I couldn’t make a single sentence for the majority of my adult life, I thought this was fantastic progress and felt like I was slowly beginning to understand the basics of Vietnamese. It was also good for teaching me possession words like “của” as well.
Building the routine
One of the most important things in learning a language is consistency. And the way that the app is designed does encourage you to do this. The streak feature of Duolingo is good, and was the first routine that I could stick to. That friendly green bird will turn on you in a second if you even thought about skipping a day of learning.
There is a structured plan that you can follow everyday which is fairly simple, you just turn on the app and continue where you left off.
Did my Vietnamese get better?
Yes it did get better, it taught me the basics of Vietnamese, which I’m very grateful for. However after spending a few years and getting to a 400 day streak at one point, I actually thought that I needed to use other ways to take my Vietnamese to the next level.
I found that I still struggled having basic conversations with people. With Duolingo you have to follow a specific plan on the app, and means you learn the specific words in the course vocab in the order that is set out.
Another issue I had was that I could not talk specifically about myself to others. If I wanted talk to people about my holidays for instance, I’d have to complete a lot of other modules first before I could finally get to the thing I wanted to speak about.
Also some of the phrases that it teaches you made me sound a little too formal for speaking and unnatural to my family. The Vietnamese course on Duolingo uses the Northern accent and so words sounded very different to how my southern family pronounce them.
Would I recommend Duolingo?
If you are completely new to Vietnamese, and have absolutely no idea where to begin, then I would recommend Duolingo as a starting point. I think it set me up well for when I eventually did started taking lessons.
I have found that the best way to get better at speaking in Vietnamese was to keep speaking Vietnamese to someone like a tutor or a native speaker. I think if I’d have known this sooner and got a tutor earlier on, I would have progressed a lot faster. I write about what really helped me progress with Vietnamese as an adult in this post here.
However, having said that, working through Duolingo did make me feel for the first time in my life that I could learn Vietnamese as an adult. And if it starts people on their language learning journey, then that I think is a success in itself.
What’s your experience been with Duolingo? Get in touch and let me know. Would love to hear from you.