{"id":1700,"date":"2023-05-31T08:23:30","date_gmt":"2023-05-31T07:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/?p=1700"},"modified":"2023-06-05T10:32:43","modified_gmt":"2023-06-05T09:32:43","slug":"give-duolingo-a-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/?p=1700&lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Give Duolingo a go!"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Richard Peters<\/em><\/p>\n

Let me start by saying how wonderful I think Duolingo is: I love it! (Disclaimer: This post is in no way sponsored by or affiliated with the makers of Duolingo; I\u2019m just a big fan!) As a free-to-use app (or for just a few euros if you prefer your experience to be ad-less), it puts language learning in easy reach of anyone with access to a smartphone \u2013 and that\u2019s most of the people on this planet. Plus, as a language lover, how could I not adore an app that shares my passion?<\/p>\n

One of the things I like about Duolingo is the way it uses nonsense to help you learn. As someone who talks a lot of nonsense himself, both at work and in my free time, I respond positively to the wild statements I\u2019m presented with in whichever language I happen to be working on. I can see how learning about, say, the antics of a green elephant is more memorable than hearing about the wheels on a green car: the playful pachyderm is just so much more entertaining as a visual cue.<\/p>\n

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Naturally, Duolingo is gamified to make you persevere. For example, each time you finish a lesson, you\u2019re rewarded with gems, which you can use to buy special features. The app praises you for practising every day. It features a leader board for weekly leagues that pit you against 29 random strangers from around the world. The longer you learn, the more special the app tries to make you feel.<\/p>\n

One aspect of the app that I hadn\u2019t really given much thought to until recently is how thoroughly it makes use of AI\u00b9<\/a>. Soon after Duolingo was founded in 2012, its developers saw the potential to improve their product by using this cutting-edge technology. Their first use case was a model that predicts when you\u2019ll forget something in the language you\u2019re learning because you haven\u2019t seen it very often or very recently. This model helps select which exercises Duolingo serves up to users every day.<\/p>\n

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Ultimately, even if the app is trying to teach the same 20 words to all its users, every user\u2019s experience will be different because they\u2019ll see lessons that include those 20 words but are tweaked to their own proficiency: while learning the concept of \u201ctree\u201d, you might see \u201cThe tree is very tall\u201d or \u201cYesterday I climbed the tree\u201d, depending on whether the AI decides, based on how you\u2019ve done in all your previous lessons, that you need to practise adjectives or verbs.<\/p>\n

Other uses of AI include a machine learning model that predicts how hard any given sentence will be for you to understand. This prediction takes the form of a probability that you will correctly answer an exercise that uses the sentence. The clever part is that to keep you motivated, the model will react to how you\u2019re doing during a lesson and give you exercises that are harder or easier; its ability to calibrate the difficulty of those exercises in the first place is another AI-driven feature that draws on the data from all the app\u2019s users.<\/p>\n

Yet another AI-powered aspect of how Duolingo actually teaches users, rather than just showing them phrases in a foreign language, is that it determines the nature of their mistakes so it can have them practise precisely those aspects in future lessons. Was the wrong answer down to a typo? Did the user conjugate the verb incorrectly? Or was the adjective in the wrong place? And does this fit into a pattern for that user? Do they often make the same kind of mistake? That is computationally much more complicated than simply comparing the user\u2019s input to the correct answer and telling them whether they got it right.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m a regular user of Duolingo. I find its suggested daily learning time of 15\u201320 minutes is enough to immerse me in whichever language I choose in a way that the new vocab and grammar soaks in \u2013 rather like dunking a biscuit into an exotic blend of tea. Personally, I feel that devoting just five minutes of my time each day would leave my biscuit too dry, with the new words and phrases dripping off and soaking into the fell napkin of oblivion. That said, I still agree with the makers of Duolingo when they claim that even five minutes is better than none; a crumbly biscuit is, after all, better than a handful of dust.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s only fair to say that the app also has its drawbacks. After I first started using it maybe four years ago, I was soon routinely tapping away at my smartphone\u2019s screen to type in sentences or select words to assemble phrases. But it wasn\u2019t long before I found that all that tapping was earning me not just gems but also pain in my fingers, thumbs and shoulders. In the end, I abandoned my pursuit of perfect Portuguese to defend my digital dexterity. A couple of years ago I returned to Duolingo, this time in a mad dash to learn some Greek before making my first visit to the country. (In the end, I didn\u2019t speak a WORD of Greek while I was there! But that\u2019s by the by.) Since then, I\u2019ve managed to use the app more or less daily \u2013 but I\u2019ve made a point of looking after my hands a bit more, and so far, so good.<\/p>\n

In a world where everyone is jittery about the potential impact of AI on all aspects of our lives, it\u2019s good to remember just how many upsides there are to this technology \u2013 and greater understanding between people who speak different languages is by no means the least of them.<\/p>\n

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\u00b9 I am grateful to the following article for providing the details of how Duolingo uses AI: https:\/\/venturebeat.com\/ai\/how-duolingo-uses-ai-in-every-part-of-its-app\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s synonymous with gamified language learning \u2013 and it\u2019s fun! But in much of its functionality, Duolingo is also an AI pioneer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[689,688,690],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1700"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1744,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700\/revisions\/1744"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}