Friday 11 May 2018

Duolingo

Apparently 20% of the world’s population can speak English. This means us ignorant Brits can travel the world freely knowing that we will be able to communicate with 1 in 5 people that we come across. We will be surprised when we stumble across someone who doesn’t speak English, but be confident that if we just speak slowly and loudly that we will be understood. English is the language of the world and how very lucky I am that it is my first language. However, I have always wished to be bilingual. I have cursed my mum many a time over the years for not bringing me up bilingually since she is from Mauritius so her mother tongue is French. My dad is also bilingual, he was born in Kenya, but the language of his house-hold was Punjabi. I don’t curse him so much for not bringing me up bilingually yet I am the only cousin who can’t speak Punjabi. If my parents desired, I could have been trilingual! My boyfriend is also bilingual. Although he came to England at the age of 4, his mum made sure that he didn’t lose his birth language and so he can speak Colombian Spanish as well as English. This kind of makes me feel like the only person in the universe who isn’t bilingual!

Since achieving my A* in French at GCSE, obviously helped massively by my mum, I have always regretted not continuing with the language. Over the years I have looked at attending an adult learning course, but have never got as far as applying due to worrying about the accessibility. In this technological era that we live in it never occurred to me that there might be an app to help me learn another language, which seems pretty foolish when I look back now as we all know that there is an app for everything these days. By chance I saw a friend share a link to Duolingo on Face Book and clicked on it to learn more.

Duolingo is brilliant. Not only is it free, it is accessible and allows you to learn at your own pace. I have been using the app in conjunction with the website for around 6 months now and I am thoroughly enjoying learning. In the beginning I tried learning French and Spanish together, but found I was confusing the languages at times so have decided to focus on learning just Spanish for now. Duolingo has a variety of exercises that includes translating sentences from both English to Spanish and Spanish to English as well as speaking and listening exercises. This means I am learning to speak, read, write and understand Spanish, which is great. It is also useful to have the boyfriend to correct my pronunciation and have a practice partner. His mum speaks a lot of Spanish at home and I get excited when I can understand the odd word, then deflated when I realise how far I still have to go before I am remotely fluent in the language.

The Duolingo app works with Voice Over on the iphone, the only slight glitch I have found is that sometimes Voice Over switches into Spanish within an exercise, but the sentence you need to translate is in English so it reads it funny. The work around is to swipe through character by character, a little time consuming, but a work around nonetheless. Personally, if I have access to my laptop then I prefer to use the web version with my Supernova screen reader. I just find it more efficient for typing.

Recently, Duolingo did a major update to their app and website making it no longer accessible to screen reader users. I was very impressed that after I posted about the issue on their troubleshooting forum that they fixed the accessibility issues promptly and notified me when they had done so.

I admire anyone who can seamlessly switch between languages. They make it look so easy yet it really is quite challenging learning a foreign tongue. Now that I have discovered Duolingo I am pretty committed to becoming multilingual although I fear that whenever the opportunity arises I will end up taking the easy way out and conversing with someone in English instead!

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