What a treat!

An extra post this week!

I know, it’s weird, but I had to share with you my secret challenge I’ve been excited to do this year! In honor of Chinese New Year yesterday, I spent the majority of the day (when I wasn’t in classes) learning Chinese! Finding resources, as well as making progress in those resources.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to try to use ChinesePod101 or Duolingo and try to finish the tree. I knew I wanted to say actual, useful phrases at the end of this blog post. I decided to use Duolingo with ChinesePod101’s 3 minute Chinese YouTube videos. I counted and there are 88 skills in the Duolingo Chinese tree. I ended up choosing Duolingo because it’s free without emails being sent to you two days a week. I have had the worst week, so I needed this challenge to go right. Lucky for me, it went great. Sure I lost a few hours in classes. It went exactly how my week went.

So, this blog post was a discussion on my Chinese New Year challenge but turned into a discussion on if Duolingo helps or hurts your language learning experience. Long story short, there were 88 skills in Duolingo, and I only got 12 finished. This took me about an hour to do each lesson because I could never remember the characters, and we wouldn’t know what they meant until a few steps in the lesson after we’d learned them.

This was my first time taking lessons on Duolingo, with a different alphabet, and to be quite honest, it might be the last. I’d never get anywhere if I used only Duolingo as a resource. I am very disappointed that I can’t say useful phrases on here!

Was it a stretch to try this in one day? Yes. Especially since it was a weekday and I was in classes for a few hours that day. I could’ve done more, but learning Chinese was exhausting, and discouraging at times. It was hard to bring my confidence back that I could learn a few words of Chinese! I woke up today, and can’t remember any words. There weren’t any recording parts of the lesson. Where you have to record what they tell you to say in your target language and it tells you if it’s right or wrong.

I guess I knew I was not going to learn useful phrases on Duolingo, but I didn’t want to use ChinesePod101 because I didn’t want more emails from another language learning website. Duolingo doesn’t teach you the best phrases, or the most useful phrases. It tries to come up with sentences for animals, but unless you’re someone who works with animals, you won’t be using that vocabulary in your daily life.

Even Duolingo Spanish and French, are not the best at teaching useful phrases and vocabulary. I’m a level 11 in Spanish and still don’t know how to order food according to Duolingo.

Anyways, coming from a Duolingo level 4 Chinese speaker, this was a bummer and a fail. However, I’m happy that I could do a better review on Duolingo after this challenge. Happy late Chinese New Year! Someone said this year was the year of the dog? I don’t even know how to say dog in Chinese, or how to wish someone Happy Chinese New Year in Chinese.

Long story short, don’t use Duolingo as your only resource, or to prepare for a trip. You can use it to keep up a language and to still have the language in your life for a little bit each day.

I hope this review on Duolingo helped! See you on Monday, for a happier blog post!

Marina.