How Duolingo helped me retain my Portuguese
After two years of sharing a dormitory with Brazilians in the United States and six months of being surrounded by the musical language of Portuguese in sunny Rio de Janeiro, I found myself in South Korea. Now, the natural problem arose: How was I going to retain this language? The last thing I wanted was for all those years of study going to waste! Especially considering that I visit Brazil at least once a year, I suddenly found myself in an odd predicament -how can I, a Korean American person that teaches English 40 hours a week, keep up with Portuguese in a country that speaks none of it?
What now?
One solution I came up with was to haul all my Portuguese textbooks from university and study an hour a day. I had them all — a Business Portuguese book, intermediate grammar textbook, reading comprehension, and a copy of “Meu pé de Laranja Lima.”
As you may have guessed, that did not last very long.
It is pretty obvious why — to be quite frank, it just felt so monotonous. Language learning is not supposed to be like this. It is supposed to be engaging, fun, and it should not feel like work. Like any 20-something millennial would do, I turned to digital apps.
I knew about Duolingo for a while and used it a couple of times in the past. However, I did not need it at the time since I was taking in-person classes anyway. Now that I did not have access to those, Duolingo became even more useful to me. It provided a great user experience, thanks to its bright colors, graphics, interactions, and concise copywriting.
When I tried studying with textbooks, I did not feel very motivated. Even more, I could not decide which chapter to start with, so I ended up starting from the beginning of the book. Duolingo solved that for me with its placement test feature.
My favorite activities are listening and speaking. The option to slow down the audio was also practical for a non-native speaker like me.
In short, Duolingo is a distinguished product because it evokes confidence in the user, creates learning habits, is easy to learn, and solves existing problems in a better way. As an elementary school teacher, I have a love-hate relationship with educational apps because they seem to interfere with real-life interaction sometimes. Nonetheless, I would be glad to recommend Duolingo to my 5th graders that are learning English!
