Finishing a lesson was a full-out digital celebration featuring treasure chests with flapping lids. But without a prompt, I was speechless.ĭuolingo praised me constantly: for responding correctly several times in a row, for completing a chunk of the day’s lesson, for learning from my sloppy mistakes. The app had made me a master of multiple-choice Italian. No tedious grammar or vocabulary drills-that stuff, apparently, would seep into my consciousness via exposure to increasingly varied, complex, and interesting sentences. But more often it asked me to translate Italian phrases and sentences into English, or vice versa, providing multiple-choice responses. Sometimes it demanded that I speak an Italian phrase or sentence (which I always did correctly, to hear Duolingo tell it). It pulled me right in, helping me set daily goals and then launching into simple phrases. I was planning a trip to Rome in the late spring, and I’ve always been of the mind that to properly visit a country, you’ve got to give the language a shot.īut I had another reason for sticking with it: Duolingo is addictive. I used it on trains, while walking across town, during previews at the movie theater.

No way was a camping trip going to make me miss my Italian lesson.įor most of the preceding year, I had religiously attended to my 15-minute-or-so daily encounters with the language-learning app Duolingo. Late one chilly evening last September, I excused myself from a small group huddled around a campfire to peck at and mumble into my phone.

Is duolingo actually good