Do language learning apps work? My real experience with Babbel and Duolingo
es, they work, but not for learning a language and speaking it fluently with their exclusive use. First of all I want to clarify that this article is not sponsored content. I don't have any kind of commercial relationship with the applications I'm going to try to review in this article. I simply used or use them, and I want to tell you about my experience using them. On the other hand, I want to give my personal opinion about something related to foreign language learning. Discouraging, if you will, but realistic. From my point of view nobody acquires a foreign language using exclusively an application, just as nobody will speak fluent Spanish using exclusively the content that I publish, and nobody learns to speak a foreign language fluently in 6 months. Learning to speak a foreign language fluently is a process that takes years. I am Uruguayan: our country has borders with Brazil and in Uruguay a lot of Brazilian content is consumed, so in our country we are very exposed to the Portuguese language. In fact I have been to Brazil several times and, with me speaking in Spanish and my interlocutor of the moment in Portuguese, we have understood each other without too much difficulty. And I don't speak Portuguese, but if I read a text in Portuguese I understand almost everything, because Spanish and Portuguese are languages with a very high degree of mutual intelligibility. Even so, I don't think I could speak Portuguese fluently even if I went to live 6 months in Brazil in order to learn it by linguistic immersion. Not even doing an intensive course at the same time. That is, it's a language very close to mine and if I did that I would probably acquire an acceptable level and I could communicate without problems, but that and fluency, at least what I consider fluency, being quite demanding with myself, I wouldn't achieve it in such a short time. Fluency, for me, is being able to speak in a foreign language without my head having to work like a computer, something that, of the languages I speak and learn only happens to me with English. Anyway, this introduction is getting too long. The idea of this article is to answer a couple of questions, always from my point of view. Can you learn a language using an app? From my point of view, no. Are apps useful for supporting language learning? From my point of view, yes.
Babbel vs Duolingo.
A few years ago I traveled to France on my vacation. At that moment the language geek that I am today was being born: a couple of months before the trip I installed Duolingo on my phone, bought a couple of dictionaries for tourists and dedicated my free time to learning French, a language of which I had zero knowledge. But my strategy worked: I was able to get by in Paris with my rudimentary French. Far from speaking it fluently I was able to communicate in shops, give directions to a taxi driver, etc. Although I had learned phrases in dictionaries for tourists most of my French at that time, and everything I knew about pronunciation, came from Duolingo.
A year later I traveled to Austria. I tried to implement the same method: Duolingo, a couple of books and online tutorials. I couldn’t learn a single word. This, obviously, depends on the type of learner that each person is: I need to understand the grammar, understand why each word is there, what it means and what its function is. German, clearly, is a language much more distant from Spanish than French and also has a very complex grammar, so I decided to go to classes. And I used Babbel. As a result, after two months of practicing German and twelve classes at the Goethe-Institut in Montevideo I was able to do things like call a taxi by phone, interact in restaurants and, on my last night in Vienna, have a very funny conversation with two locals, among them the girl who was working at the bar I had gone to that night, in a mixture of Spanish, English and German. The bar closed at midnight: we stayed until 3 in the morning talking about languages and cultures.
Are apps useful for learning languages? Yes, they are useful. Can you learn a language using exclusively an app? No, you can’t. They work because they keep us hooked: using an app we can practice our target language at any time. While we’re commuting to work, in any free moment, etc. That connects us all the time with our target language and, in fact, and I say this because it has happened to me, it often leads us to leave the app to google something that caught our attention.
Duolingo.
It has two advantages. It’s a freemium platform, that is, it can be used for free with advertising, and it has a paid version. Also it’s very gamified: there are competitions against other users, prizes for usage streaks, etc. That is, it’s fun to use Duolingo. For those of us who like to play online games, especially, it adds the incentive of competition. Against other users and against ourselves, because of that thing about not losing the streak. It’s ideal, from my point of view, to use at times when, instead of learning something, we would be for example watching funny videos or playing online games. It also has cons: the explanations of grammar are scarce or nonexistent, that is, one has to intuit the rules, and the example sentences it presents are weird. I’ll never forget le chat rouge mange une pomme noire (the red cat eats a black apple). From my point of view it’s ideal for someone who is starting to learn a language, for someone who wants to learn a language close to their own (Spanish/Portuguese or German/Dutch, for example), or for someone who wants to learn the basics of a language to take a trip. Or, of course, because of its gamification, for those people who require an extra stimulus beyond learning itself to get motivated.
Babbel.
The first disadvantage is that it’s paid: it offers access to one free trial lesson, but to continue you have to pay. I have bought memberships, both to practice German and to practice French. I really like this app, especially because I want to deepen my knowledge of the languages I learn and because, given the type of learner I am, I need to understand the grammar. Babbel offers quite deep grammatical explanations, even at C1 level, with materials available for download. As a con, it’s less fun to use Babbel than to use Duolingo, that is, it’s less suitable for the free moment when we decide to play something but more suitable as support material when we want to achieve fluency in a foreign language.
I’m going to include myself in this criticism: nobody acquires fluency in a language, at least from my point of view, using apps or content like what I myself publish. What apps and those of us who create content about languages are useful for is to keep the learner in contact with the target language and to acquire probably specific vocabulary, by repetition in the case of apps, or colloquial language, in the case of those of us who create content being native speakers. And I’m not just saying it: I have used and use apps, and I also follow content creators of the languages I learn. My final message is the following: don’t reject resources, but don’t forget that nothing substitutes academic learning and, if possible, at the same time, linguistic immersion or regular contact with native speakers, at least. Have you used or do you use apps like these to learn Spanish? What do you think of them? I’ll read you in comments!
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