i heart language learning: Duolingo - is it for lazy teachers?

I have heard a lot of mixed reviews on Duolingo for a few years. I decided I would give it a try for my own polyglot endeavors. I wondered if it would fit what I have been learning about comprehensible input or if it would be just another drill and skill activity that teaches words in isolation, i.e. no context.

I was pleasantly surprised! I tried my hand at Spanish and quickly started to pick it up. I decided to start a Spanish Language Journal (more on this to come) using what I learned from Duolingo. After going through a few lessons, which FLEW by because it is so engaging, I began writing the sentences in my journal. Then I starting moving the "chunks" around and adding nouns from other sentences to create my own. After all, this is how we learn our first language. We know what chunks tend to show up together and we add or take away or move around as needed.

Then one day I went to Spotify and typed "Spanish music" in the search bar. The song "Ropa Cara" come up pretty quickly. I recognized ropa and had seen the word caro. I knew caro meant expensive (it reminds of me of "car"...which is always expensive!) I learned that an "a" is usually a cue for feminine words and that "o" is usually a cue for masculine words. This led me to ascertain that cara was just the feminine form of caro. I had also learned that ropa is feminine. The logical meaning of the song title is "Expensive Clothes."

The crazy thing about this process of figuring out the title is that it happened within seconds, much quicker than it took me to type it out to explain it to you!

So, I listened to the song with just a tiny bit of information. I didn't learn a lot the first time I listened but I did hear several words I had learned from Duolingo. Context clues were also very helpful (particularly brand names like Gucci and Prada). I decided to Google the lyrics. There was an option to "Translate to English." This was perfect because the English line was right below the Spanish line. Listening to the song while following along with the lyrics a couple of times increased my understanding. It wasn't long before I could even pick up on the subjunctive! (Ok, so being a fluent French speaker played a role there.)

It is sooooo exciting to listen to music meant for native speakers and begin to pick up on the meaning on my own.

Lesson - Duolingo gets the approval of this veteran of 20 years of language instruction.

And no....I don't think it is for lazy teachers. It provides automatic feedback, repetition, engagement, and revisiting structures that individual students missed much better than I can in the classroom. I would love to be able to create these things online but I will leave that to the experts.

If you've tried it and have an opinion, let me know!

♥♥♥

I will be adding some resources into my TPT shop to get with both French and Spanish lessons. I have already added a few so feel free to check them out!

Here's a sneak peak...

Pssst....These are free!!