Of all the free language learning websites available, Duolingo is the easiest one to use, making it a lot of fun learning a new language. It’s really more than just “fun”, it’s downright addictive.
The website is friendly and interactive to make it both simple and fun to learn a new language. In addition to text, Duolingo utilizes your microphone and speakers to teach you how to speak and understand other languages when they’re spoken. There’s even a dedicated app for kids who are just learning to read.
Languages You Can Learn at Duolingo
Visit Duolingo Language Courses to see which languages you can learn based on the language you speak. For example, German speakers can only learn English, Spanish, French, and Italian, whereas English speakers can learn all the languages listed below:
Spanish, French, Japanese, German, Korean, Italian, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Portuguese, Dutch, Latin, Swedish, Irish, Greek, Vietnamese, Polish, Norwegian (Bokmål), Hebrew, Indonesian, Hawaiian, Danish, Finnish, Romanian, High Valyrian, Welsh, Czech, Scottish Gaelic, Yiddish, Swahili, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Klingon, Esperanto, and Navajo.
How Duolingo Works
There are dozens of lesson sets here. Some that we’ve seen include Basics, Phrases, Food, Present, Adjectives, Plurals, Family, Questions, Numbers, House, Colors, Locations, Shopping, Animals, Prepositions, Dates & Time, Nature, and Medical.
The lessons include images, text, and audio, and sometimes have you speak into a microphone (if you have one) to test your speaking and pronunciation skills. This goes above and beyond the older style of language learning services that work more like a silent, non-interactive textbook.
You can take each lesson one after the other to gradually move into more difficult concepts, or you can choose to test out where you take one quiz that combines a little of each lesson into one big test. Test-out options are available for a handful of skills. If you pass a test-out, you can pass over all those lessons and start somewhere a bit more advanced.
Because Duolingo has this option, it can be beneficial for both someone who needs to brush up on their language skills and someone who is brand new to the language.
There’s also a section called Stories that’s perfect for intermediate and advanced language learners. You can read mini-stories in the language you’re learning and then take a quiz over the story to find out how much you understood.
If you like podcasts, you’ll love the dedicated podcast page, where you can improve your language skills by listening to real-life stories in any of the supported languages. The last time we visited, English speakers’ options were Spanish and French; Spanish and Portuguese speakers can listen to the English version.
Even children can use Duolingo! Check out Duolingo ABC to learn more. It’s a free iPhone/iPad app with hundreds of lessons on the alphabet, phonics, and sight words. Through that link are also free printable PDFs to help kids learn.
How to Start Using Duolingo
Duolingo is available through their website, but you can also download the app for your computer (Windows 11 and 10) or mobile device (Android, iPhone, and iPad). A user account isn’t required, but it’s recommended if you want to keep track of your progress.
Thoughts on Duolingo
Duolingo’s website and app is super user-friendly. The simple design ensures you aren’t confused when using them, which is great because learning a language can be difficult in and of itself.
We like the keyboard shortcuts because they let you quickly submit your answers, play audio, move through lists, choose multiple choice answers, and more.
Some other parts of the website that we didn’t highlight above, but that you might still find interesting, include Duolingo for Schools, Duolingo online events, and the translation dictionary.
This is one of the better places for learning a new language. The mixture of audio, images, and text, coupled with your own voice input and various other exposure methods, makes you put more focus into the learning process, which is more than you can say for traditional language learning resources.
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