A discipline

In July 2025 a special promotion of Duolingo to English teachers launched a month long competition, which also gave the participants a free year long "Super" membership. This basically meant that those who took up the offer could use the app in an unlimited fashion, without needing to watch ads to top up the free daily time quota of use. I had used Duo over ten years previously and had not been terribly impressed, but free was free, and I decided to take the offer, and use it as a familiarisation tool for learning Vietnamese from scratch, which I did want to pronounce correctly, understand the contours of the language so I could relate to it more, and maybe even use in some travel in the future.  

I shouldn't have been surprised that the app's quality had increased and I really started enjoying it to the point that I made it an important part of my daily routine. Unfortunately, the supply of Vietnamese units was limited so late last year I decided to broaden the focus to re-activating my Japanese, and start on Portuguese. Later, I decided to bring Korean into the mix (which I have learned before), then in the last month of the trial, I thought I may as well learn Cyrillic through Russian, and then recently decided to add French and Spanish. (And I cheat on the bird to learn Persian, which I wish it had, but use my own tools to learn.)

Writing all that, it does sound rather manic, and one may ask how much one can actually meaningful learn a language through an app, let alone eight languages concurrently, in a year. In fact, there are plenty of youtube videos and Facebook ads that would encourage you to "dump the bird". (Duolingo has a green bird, Duo, as its symbol and mascot.) The videos tell stories of people with their multi-year streak of use still not having no communicative competence once they achieve their goal of travelling to the country of that language. And if you are like me and you have any interest in language learning, Facebook's algorithm knows it, too, so I am inundated with the AI-based language learning products that will claim to give you real competency through conversation. 

Yet I persist with "the bird" and in fact have paid my own cash for an extension of Duolingo but with "Video Calling" included (where you can talk to AI bots). My reason is based in how I see language learning for almost three quarters of my life and teaching it for over half. 

When I speak to students about learning English, I always give an analogy that learning English is very similar to learning to swim. "Can you learn to swim reading a book about swimming?" "Can someone tell you how to swim? Or can you watch youtube videos and become a good swimming?" "The only way to learn is to get in the water, try as much as you can to float and get training while you're in the water." And thus I encourage our students to be active as possible with the language, and they learn by themselves using English as much as possible, and they shouldn't just speak to and listen to the teacher.

To be honest, swimming isn't the best analogy with language learning. I sometimes think a triathlon might be more apt; sometimes I think rugby; occasionally I ponder about a dancing analogy for grammar. It almost has to be with a physical component because there is a physical and neural dimension to language learning that is not really appreciated by those who wish to learn. 

To use language completely, you have to master four different skills in a range of different contexts: being able to listen and understand when that language is launched at you, to be able to speak and produce understandable language when you need to, to be able to read when you need to understand written language, and finally be able to write or type in an acceptable format what you need to commit to text. Depending on your purpose, you don't even need all four. Many people who learn Chinese cannot read, and even if they can, they might not be able to write. And even if they can, they might be able to write words but not necessarily into the format expected for the many genres of writing (e-mails, articles, diary entries, etc.). 

The advantage of analogy is that in can get around some of the pre-conceptions. If I were to use rugby as an example, if we were talking about passing a rugby ball, it is clear not everyone, even if they've watched TV before could walk up to a rugby ball and pass it to a stationary person two metres away. I think I've seen people throw them straight in the year at first attempt! It's an odd shape and you have to hold it the right way; and passing involves coordinating the arm, wrist and hips. Physical movement like that, if you haven't done it regularly before, is hard because there are no neural pathways to automate the process. You need to consciously think about your wrists, and arms. When you get going at it, there might be little confidence of getting it right on target, into their arms, without the receiver moving. And then once you can do stationary passes, then you need to learn to pass on the move. Then maybe how to spin the ball for distance, how to pick up the ball and pass.

No one in their right minds would think that just that one skill could be taught quickly, or retained. And then that skill has to be deployed eventually in a real game, with pressure, to the right person, quickly and accurately. 

It's not unlike learning to pronounce unfamiliar sounds in your target language. Portuguese is actually my first foreign language with a strong "r" sound, and took some time to hear and get right. The work there though really helped with learning Persian, which had a similar R. Persian was the beneficiary, too, of the hard work I put into getting "kh" sound in Vietnamese, which is similar if not the same as خ. I can remember the difficulty and work needed to hear and produce a correct different sound reliably in Mandarin for "ch" and "q" (both which sound like "ch" in English). 

All of these literally were coordination of mouth, lips, tongue, throat and muscular training. I remember having my face go numb after practicing Mandarin tones for too long in university. And that is just to produce them in isolation, then you have to make them with a range of words, then in sentences with a lot of other sounds bumping into each other. And then you need to do that feat of oral coordination on demand. Now you're running and passing!

If only it were puffing the sounds out, you also have to do it meaningfully. And in that it takes two to tango. I enjoy being a blissfully uncoordinated on the dance floor, and the thought of actually mastering a dance routine, or a system of dancing, like tango would scare me, as much as it scares others to speak in a foreign language. But dancing is not a bad analogy for grammar. There is a pattern and with a bit of practice, you can put those steps together in a wooden way. Again, it takes a bit of laying down new neural pathways and muscle memory, and then you can do it. But remembering the steps when you need them, and maybe with a different partner, might be challenging, especially if you need to do a boogie here, a tango there, and passo doble over there. Grammar patterns are like that, but worse. Knowing the steps, and being able to physically do the steps when needed are not a waltz in the park. 

But it is not just grammar, on the other end of the continuum is vocabulary. Each word is a little bundle of knowledge, and vocabulary is the closest to actual "knowledge" that languages have. And it is huge! I spent hours on Vietnamese without being able to read much or understand much outside very controlled texts or recordings. For Chinese at least there are not the inflections of European languages - but god all mighty, Russian! Nouns have so many cases. The verbs need to be conjugated, too. The main limiter to fluency is vocabulary.

So why Duolingo for me if it doesn't do all those things? The point to realise is that expecting any one of "classroom lessons", apps, an online tutor, or a textbook to give you the ability to use a language in one or more of the four skills is a pipe dream. There are so many sub-skills to these that any one is not enough. You need to commit to a lot of different kinds of training, basically all opportunities available for you to receive and produce that language, with tools to give you the grammar and knowledge, and hopefully the feedback when you're not doing it right. 

Duolingo fills some of that. It does give you the vocabulary. It gives you a few dance steps. It helps you learn to hold the ball, and maybe pass it. And it does it in a repetitive way to get some of the neural pathways working. Is it complete? No. Is it part of an arrangement of tools and experiences that can get you toward capability in a language? Very certainly. 

So thus Duo and I will be getting our learnings worth, and hopefully with the right expectations, find more experiences and resources to build on the foundation built. Language learning is a discipline, and one that takes a lot of discipline to develop.