The app may feel easy, but it's working and I can feel my understanding in the organic sources expanding as I go. That part is very neat.Īnyway, the app certainly isn't for everyone, but as a total beginner who's tried other language learning approaches, mixing Duolingo (for consistent vocabulary acquisition) with organic language sources (in my case: games and TV in Spanish) seems to be really effective. and then it 'clicked' and I got a feel for it. For example, 'a la' (roughly 'to the') condenses to 'al' in Spanish, and that was never explicitly taught in a lesson, it was just introduced in a sentence one day. The vocabulary matches that lesson, but the app is also careful to sneakily introduce grammatical constructs over time as well, and if you don't read the tips (I don't if I can help it), then you end up picking up a lot of those rules organically. The other key takeaway of course is that the 'subject' of a given lesson is a head fake. The practice feature does actual spaced repetition I think, but I like this guided approach more. So far, this seems to work surprisingly well it's kindof a crude, guided spaced repetition. Right now most of my coursework is level 2, and the top like 1/5 of it is level 3. Then once I'm past a checkpoint, as I have extra time, I slowly level up the stuff I've already completed. That gets me basic familiarity, and I move through the coursework fairly quickly.

I'm getting each skill to level 2, which is the point right before lessons start asking you to type answers and take away the word bubbles.

I'm going through Duolingo to actually learn Spanish for the first time, and I definitely agree that the direct approach for leveling up a lesson to level 5 is.

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