Yep, I’m talking about Duolingo. As some of you know, I’ve already posted about Rosetta Stone — another language platform. Yes, I’ve used both, and no, I’m not going to slam either. They’re both good, for different reasons.
Rosetta Stone offers a lot of languages (I provided a list in my post). So does Duolingo. As of when I’m writing this, they have Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish, Dutch, Swedish, Hindi, Greek, Irish, Polish, Norwegian (Bokmal), High Valyrian, Hebrew, Latin, Vietnamese, Hawaiian, Danish, Romanian, Czech, Welsh, Indonesian, Swahili, Klingon, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Navajo, Esperanto, and Scottish Gaelic, organized by number of learners. As you may have noticed, some of these languages are from fictional universes, like Klingon. No, that’s not a joke. Yes, they legitimately cover those.
I also made a point of saying, “As of when I’m writing this,” because Duolingo is always adding new courses. They also add them faster than Rosetta Stone, namely because, as a subscription service, Rosetta Stone has to have the full course ready before they make it available. Duolingo, on the other hand, puts it up in beta and keeps adding to it.
That’s another point — Rosetta Stone costs money, Duolingo is free. Like I said, they’re both good, but, again, for different reasons. Rosetta Stone has the breakdowns I mentioned in that post, focusing on different parts of each lesson, whereas Duolingo really doesn’t (the closest they get is Tinycards). On the flip side, because there’s not a set amount of time until your subscription runs out, with Duolingo you don’t feel pressured the same way, which allows you to pick up multiple languages without concern over money and time management. I’m currently taking five.
Duolingo lessons also tend to be, in my experience, more… bite sized, I suppose. They’re faster and have less content per lesson to memorize, which allows me to binge Hawaiian lessons without running out of steam. Rosetta Stone lessons tend to be longer, taking an estimated ten minutes for most of the exercises.
As a final note between the two, Rosetta Stone gives you words in the target language and a picture to match it, whereas Duo gives you the English translations for the words. As I said in my Rosetta post, I don’t really know how to feel about that, or which I prefer, but they both work.
Overall, I’d say if you’re seriously intending to put a lot of focus and effort into learning a language, Rosetta Stone is the way to go, but if you just want something that you can work on in your spare time, or for fun (I picked up Hawaiian on a whim, for instance) you might prefer Duolingo.
