BACKGROUND
This blog is a spinoff from the very long-running, wide-ranging and overly verbose kind-of-personal journal, found at Chaosnode.net.
As I continued to mess around with the language learning tool Duolingo, it occurred to me that this could interest people who have no interest in my other activities, and that most people who read my old online journal probably have no interest in Duolingo and linguistics in general. So that is why I decided to spin it off into a new blog.
INTENDED AUDIENCE
- People who use Duolingo and are looking to get or give helpful ideas.
- People who consider learning a new language with Duolingo and wonder how that feels.
- People who want to learn a language from scratch, for free, anywhere, and have not yet seen the glory of Duolingo.
- People with a general curiosity about languages and the process of learning.
CONTRIBUTORS?
So far there is only me, the world’s only Magnus Itland. But I’d be happy to take in guest entries or even regular contributions. On the other hand, this blog probably won’t become a big hit that takes the Internet with storm, sorry. So, perhaps there will just be me.
Magnus Itland is a Norwegian man, born in 1958, fully employed in computer support at this time. Like most Norwegians, he learned English in school as his third language (besides the two Norwegian languages, Bokmål and Nynorsk). He also learned some German in middle and high school, and a little French in high school. He was not really proficient in English after graduation and for the first years of his career, but this changed when he started reading English paperbacks, starting with the prolific fantasy writer Piers Anthony. This was certainly an efficient way to expand, enhance and extend vocabulary. But learning a language from the ground up is a different matter, as he found out when he failed in many different ways to learn the basics of Japanese in the early 2000s.
Currently re-learning French after almost 40 years, and learning Turkish from scratch, using only Duolingo.
WHAT IS DUOLINGO?
Duolingo is a website and an app (you can use them more or less interchangeably) to learn a new language from scratch, for free, using only a computer and/or smartphone / electronic slate. It is scientifically proven to be better than classroom instruction for learning the basics. It uses some of the most up to date knowledge about how humans learn. And it does so for free. (Well, you can contribute by translating texts for them as part of your training, once you get good enough.)
Obviously it cannot perform miracles. It’s only science after all. So you still have to put in time and a bit of concentration. But it is made into a game of sorts, not as much fun as actual computer games, but a lot more fun than work or most studies.
There are currently 14 languages available for English-speakers. English is available for speakers of a number of other languages, but apart from that their selection is generally very limited. New languages are added over time by volunteers, and you can see a list of which are ready and which are hatching when you go to their official site, Duolingo.com.