Parent reviews for Duolingo

My husband (formerly studied Spanish in high school and a little in college) has been using Duolingo to brush up on his skills alongside our teen daughter who is taking Spanish class for the first time. Today he was in Set #36 called "Quiero ser como tú," when an adult asks a child, "Why do you think I'm a lion tamer?" The child responds that he/she has found some lion tamer tools in the adult's closet. These items will be universally understood by adults as accessories for S&M. A young child probably wouldn't think much about that statement, but it is completely inappropriate for their target audience, teens. Teens are already bombarded by so much inappropriate content in media. How is it that Duolingo - a language app- with its cute owl logo, is promoting normalcy of carnal dominance scenarios? Innuendo in an app promoted for and most commonly used by young teens is not funny. It is irresponsible.

Why 13+ ? This has a good Privacy Policy and really helps in learning that is good for kids !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Duolingo is great for those who want to learn a new language and will have fun doing so. This would also be a great app for teachers to assign to their students. It allows for students to learn another language by earning points and moving to higher levels by writing, reading and speaking . Students learn based on their level and move their way up. This is a great substitute, instead of just writing notes on paper they can type the words. They can also hear the words and respond. You can even invite your friends. This would also be great for ESL students, who need to improve their English.

Duolingo is a nice recoure for languages learning. It is the fun way to learning by playing games. This helps me with the memorization. Howevwe, some sentence they taught us are weird e.g. I am a cat, when will I say this sentence? Just this point that I don't like, but the rest is great!

The age group that I would suggest for this app would be 10+. It is a little bit too difficult for younger kids to navigate. It would also be too much for them to fully comprehend the games and the instructions that are being asked of them, as well as the system to keep track of points and consistent engagement. This app is designed to work on your ability to learn a foreign language, by learning the grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and conversational practice. The usability is fairly easy seeing as it is designed in the form of a game and makes the learning more fun. The app doesn’t really have levels but there is a pretest that you take at the beginning that will test your knowledge and your level of readiness so that the program kows where to place you. Based on how you do for that pre-test will determine what you start with and the level of difficulty those activities will be. According to Duolingo “ Duolingo is the best new way to learn a language. According to the study that they ran, “The study estimated that a person with no knowledge of Spanish would need between 26 and 49 hours (or 34 hours on average) to cover the material for the first college semester of Spanish. This result is based on the language test’s cut-off point for the second college semester and the 95% Confidence Interval of the effectiveness measure. The main factor for higher effectiveness was the motivation of the participants, with people studying for travel gaining the most and people studying for personal interest gaining the least. Another factor for higher effectiveness was the initial level of knowledge of Spanish with beginners gaining the most and more advanced learners gaining the least.” Basically this research is saying that the main reason why people learned faster with Duolingo was because they had more motivation to learn a language faster than normal, mostly because they wanted to travel to a new place soon. Duolingo is great for teachers to use in the classroom to reinforce the language that they may be teaching in the classroom. By teaching lessons along with the app this could be great for reconsolidation of information learned earlier in the day in class. A way that informal educators could use this app would be to expose their kids to a language in a fun way before they actually start taking the language. As far as privacy goes, they try to make it seem like they aren’t going to share your information with other parties. But after reading through their privacy policy they clearly state, “Duolingo shares your personally-identifiable information only when it is reasonably necessary to offer the Service, legally required, or permitted by you.” To me this seems like they will release your information whenever they see fit, rather than protecting your information from third parties. With that being said, I think Duolingo is a very good app if you are careful with your information. And for that I would be very careful for using with kids because of the dilemma of privacy for children.

It has great learning, in general, but we do not use it much for class because it cannot be specific on exactly with what you are learning in class. I suggest it for ages 12+ because you can comment on it & profile photos.