Duolingo

I have to say that I am not overly impressed by the final section of the Duolingo Italian course.  I started studying this just after we moved in, and have kept my “streak” going all the way through – right up to today which was 267.

So first comment is that as this is free I have no right to complain.  But my observation is this – their method of teaching which is sort of “show and tell” is fine when the content is very simple.  “I eat the apple”, “Maria watches the television”, “Today it is raining” etc. but absolutely useless for teaching grammar.  After three unit blocks (well over 100 individual units) of the simple content, section four suddenly jumps in to pronouns, gerunds, the subjunctive, the passive and all the grammatical weirdness’s that every language has.  It does this all by just providing sample sentences without in any way explaining the grammar behind them.

This does not work for me at all.  After one particularly onerous unit on pronouns, I got my Italian grammar book out and read the section on them.  I understood the parts I had been struggling with for hours in about ten minutes.

So I would say that beyond a certain point the Duolingo approach no longer works.  I would abandon their course and just go on learning with the grammar book and other Internet content apart from the fact that from day one the annoying Duolingo ads have been informing me that I would have a five times better chance of completing the course with the paid version.  So I am finishing it using the free version just to stick my tongue out.

Actually the course has been very beneficial and was very useful when I was in Italy – I did not get on that well with the spoken language because people speak too quickly, but I was able to read more than 90% of the written stuff we came across.

I hope to do more with the spoken language before September when J and I are going to Florence.