A few weeks into his attempt at learning Spanish only with a smartphone, Alan Haburchak is beginning to doubt he will succeed with tech alone.
Don’t go at it alone. Language learning sometimes needs the help of others. Photograph: Alamy.
It’s been a few weeks since I started this journey to learn Spanish using nothing but my smartphone. And don’t get me wrong, Duolingo is a well-designed app with lots of fancy features like gamification, social media integration and even offline lessons (so I can use it on the train). But at this point I need to admit that there are some issues with trying to learn a language this way.
The biggest issue is structure, or lack thereof. Both of the foreign languages that I previously spent time learning (German and Mandarin Chinese), I learned in a classroom – at school and university. These classes provided a certain motivational structure for keeping up with your lessons. Namely, if I didn’t learn all the vocabulary for the next day’s German or Chinese lesson, my teachers Herr Belmont or Xu Laoshi would give me a seriously nasty look and I would feel ashamed. And perhaps shame’s not the best motivation tool out there, but here’s the thing – it kept me motivated.
With Duolingo, I’ve found that my initial fondness for using the app – a sort of “hooray, shiny new toy!” enthusiasm – has waned. I’ve definitely done my best to keep up using it daily, but… you know how life, work and trips to New Orleans and Las Vegas can get in the way (the Vegas trip was for work, I swear). And the issue is that (other than my editor) it doesn’t really affect anyone whether I review old lessons or press on to new ones in the app. There’s no teacher to admonish me or (perhaps more importantly) peer group to keep up with.
I think ultimately, language learning, much like language itself, might be an inherently social pursuit. There’s a very obvious facet of this, one that I actually haven’t even touched on yet – languages require speaking to other people, which is completely absent from how Duolingo works. But I’ll get to that in my next post.
Really I think the social dynamic of language learning goes beyond speaking, because I actually had a somewhat similar experience a few years ago when I started going to a Mandarin tutor in Chinatown here in New York, in anticipation of a move I was about to make to Beijing, years after studying Mandarin in college.
I’d go to Mr Wu’s office once a week, and we’d have conversations reviewing the Mandarin I studied in college. And it was great, but really only during the hour I was in his office. Once I walked the few blocks out of Chinatown and back into my Mandarin-less world, I’d immediately start losing what we’d practiced, and without any real community of Mandarin learners to stay on pace with, I didn’t really feel motivated to practice before the next lesson.
I’m going to keep at it for the next couple weeks with Spanish on Duolingo, but I’m a little sceptical that any person can really learn a language without other people playing a part.
lab4free 