Learning a New Language while Deciphering the Internet

While talking to some people, someone mentioned a site called duolingo.com which allows you to learn new language for free. I was a bit skeptical but I decided to try it out anyway. I looked into it, and the reason it is free is because it slowly translates the web from the language you are learning to the language you currently speak (in my case English). This works better than Google Translate since this is crowd sourced, so whenever you put what you think the translation would be, it gives you the option to up-vote translations from others since direct translations don't always work.

After signing up for the Beta and taking many months to get a response, I eventually got signed up. When starting, I was given the option of learning German or Spanish and I decided to try German. They later added French which is what I have been working on the last couple of months. Although it will take a long time to actually learn it, I am starting to pick up on more and more sentences without thinking too hard and getting the general of idea of what it is trying to say. If my mic was higher quality, you can even speak back to your computer and it would tell you if you are saying it correctly as well.

I found it great to learn at your own pace since days that you are bored, you can spend a lot longer on it and other times I may not look at it for a month. If choosing French, it gets you to translate English to French and vice versa. When it gives you French to translate, there is a French voice pronouncing the sentence properly to get a better idea how it is actually said. Starting off you get very short and simple sentences but later on the sentences get more challenging and I found you are eased into it nicely.

Either way, I found it to be a great distraction as opposed to checking Facebook or other sites while procrastinating. Since each lesson is only about 10 mins, it is also a great time killer when having to wait a short time. Although it is not the most effective teacher, being free and putting as much or as little time into it as you want makes it very helpful at starting to learn another language.