Can you learn a language with just an app? (My 400 days with Duolingo)
It was October 2019. The day started like any other, regular day. I was minding my own business. Lying on the couch. Messing around with a language learning app I’d finally decided to give a try. My wife turns to me and says something that would change the course of the next year of my life.
She says, “You can’t learn a language with just an app”.
From the moment those earth shaking words left her beautiful mouth the room went black and my eyes turned into those strange cartoon hypnosis circles.
“What was that?”
She says it again, without remorse. Even louder (that feisty fox). “You can’t learn a language with just an app!”
Ok, so before she had even said it a second time, everything else in my life was less important than before. I had already known she would stick with that statement and even moreso, I knew that it was my civic, marital and personal duty to prove to her that I would be able to speak absolutely perfect french using only Duolingo.
Thinking back on it now, it’s not unreasonable to believe that she knew that this was the response she would get from me. Perhaps it was a carefully calculated plot designed to get me to really commit to learning French so that I could one day whisper sweet French-everythings to her as we sailed down the Seine. I, the Gabriel to her Emily in Paris.
Well played, Mrs Wright.
So off I went, app in hand and dream in heart.
There are very many variables that come into play when trying to learn a language with an app. Firstly, there’s how good you are at learning languages. A polyglot undoubtedly stands a higher chance at succeeding than me. Other factors also play a role, such as how much time you dedicate daily or weekly; how focused or unfocused you are when completing your practice; how much time you spend on recapping old lessons versus learning new ones and a hundred other variables across an unsampled (by me) but well envisioned (by me) population of language app users.
That being said, I felt it would be at least mildly useful for me to share my own experience and perhaps somewhat formulate my own personal answer to the question, can you learn a language using only an app.
As with many lifestyle experiments the difficulty is that you can’t ab test your life. Which is to say that I don’t know comparatively how much French I would know had I chosen instead to do a semester of French at a language institute or spent my summer at Rochefort-en-Terre (which I would choose long before the language institute, for clarity). Comparative shortcomings aside, there are some definite conclusions I’ve come to.
I believe that you can learn a language using Duolingo but not only Duolingo.
Here are a few things that may make or break the experience for you:
1. The reason you’re doing it
Kidding about my wife’s challenges aside, my desire to learn French culminated at the intersection between my lifelong dream of learning French and a recent ponderence about the power of ‘micro-habits’.
The idea of a micro Habit, or mHoH for short, is to build a new habit by starting with a step that is so small that failure is almost impossible. — Habits of Health
Late last year I had reflected on the fact that there were so many of my life’s goals that I had never ‘gotten around to’. I began to see that whether I was at school, varsity or work the time I needed to achieve my bigger goals in life wouldn’t self materialise. I wondered whether we might not achieve a greater percentage of our biggest dreams and goals in life if we committed tiny fragments of our days, every single day, rather than look for when we might take that sabbatical to write that book or take a day off to clean the house.
Learning French on Duolingo was, for that reason, more than just about sounding cool at the dinner table when luck delivered me a French waiter in Cape Town or when placing my wife’s coffee down for her with a suave “un cafe pour toi”. It was about discovering whether the secret to achieving my life’s dreams outside of career lay in making one billion tiny sacrifices rather than ten thousand huge ones.
The importance of finding the answer to that question was critical to me and it meant that I would be able to sustain the discipline needed to find something of an answer. If you don’t have a good reason for doing something, chances are you’re going to struggle getting it done on day 360.
What I did learn however was that the practice of micro habits by definition makes it a lot easier to sustain an activity because it’s asking so very little of you (for me, 5 minutes) every day. Therein lies the power of the idea of micro habits.
2. How much time you have (long term) to commit to the project
One of the biggest things I’ve learned about micro habits during this experiment is that progress is slow. Painfully slow. After about 100 days of diligently chipping away at the French curriculum I realised that I had committed over three months but only eight cumulative hours (average five minutes a day) to French. The equivalent of perhaps one committed day.
As you can imagine, that hurt.
When we look back on the total lifespan of an exercise we naturally equate it to effort. In truth I had given the tiniest slither of my days to French and (after a few quiet sobs) I slowly realised that the probability of me ever having committed one full day or even half a day to French was close to zero. I would have needed to have been very bored, with no internet, alone, on a day’s subway journey. And if those conditions were met I’m certain I would be in the scene of a horror film, and would likely not be feeling very studious in any event.
So while micro habits don’t lead to quick progress they unlock time and sustainable commitment. You just have to be very realistic about the progress you’ll be able to make as well as appreciate that progress is, perhaps for the first time in your life, being made on a key goal or dream of yours.
3. The quality of the time you give
Unfortunately when it comes to commitments that aren’t at the centre of our universe we can easily begin to behave a little bit like electricity and take the path of least resistance. Personally, I found that there were many, many days where I would rush a quick recap lesson (they are the easiest and fastest to complete) right before jumping into bed.
Whilst this is better than doing no lesson at all, naturally if even 25% of the time you do commit over the course of the project is suboptimal then you’re going to be 3 months down the road and only have allocated 6 good quality hours to the pursuit.
I think the lesson here is that when you’re only committing 5 minutes a day to something it is critically important to make sure those 5 minutes are strong. The best way to do this is to find 5 minutes in your day where you consistently have the space to really focus on learning/making progress on your goal or project.
4. Supplementation
Alright, alright. This is where my wife was indeed correct in her statement and where I felt the dream of speaking quiet french to the individual flakes of the croissant I would feed her atop the Eiffel drift from me.
This experience taught me that it is very difficult to learn a language in isolation. Truth be told I gave puppy-dog eyes to every French person I came across, hoping to form a bond that would allow us to get to the point where we could become good enough friends for me to ask them to just speak very slow French to me. Alas, I made none.
The moment did arrive though. One summer’s evening at the beautiful home of the Swiss consulate I happened upon a strong-jawed, well spoken man from the South of France. I quickly worked into the conversation that I loved France and had been learning French for over six months at the time. He warmed to me like a flower in the sun. Then he launched into a two minute, horrifically beautiful, fast paced monologue filled with questions, giggles and wide eyed wonder at the words coming out of his own mouth. My eyes mirrored his, but for very different reasons. I understood absolutely nothing of what he said, to which I had to admit with an embarrassed smile.
I found the transition from the way the words sounded on the app to the speed and pronunciation of a French person after a glass of champagne simply too big a hurdle to overcome.
More French people laughed at me during this journey than I care to note here, but it was a difficult leap from having spent the time learning French but never actually speaking it to anyone (go figure).
I did try the Duolingo Podcast, which I think is an excellent idea, but the episodes seem to begin at an intermediate level which means that while you feel as cool as an indie New York art major listening to a French podcast during your commute, I struggled to follow what was actually happening.
I do believe that Duolingo would be exceptionally powerful if I were living in a country where I could complete my daily lessons and then practice, speak and hear the language at least a few times a day.
5. Discipline
This links up with all but the previous point. If you’re not disciplined, consistent and intentional with learning a language, or doing anything for that matter, you won’t achieve what you set out to.
I once heard someone say that motivation is a finite resource. That every one additional unit of effort requires greater than one additional unit of motivation. Discipline on the other hand eventually turns into habit and habit eventually becomes near-effortless.
So, after 400 days of trying to learn French with just an app I sat down and took an online competency test. I scored an A2 Level. That is literally just one step above the very first level of competency.
Can understand isolated phrases and common expressions that relate to areas of high personal relevance (like personal or family information, shopping, immediate environment, work). Can communicate during easy or habitual tasks requiring a basic and direct information exchange on familiar subjects. Using simple words, can describe his or her surroundings and communicate immediate needs.
Not quite starring in the next Netflix French period piece but what I did learn from the experience was that committing tiny chunks of your day, every day, can help you do things you’ve always wanted to do but never really felt you had the time to do before. Which is incredibly powerful in a world and a time so full of attention seeking items, pursuits and devices.
In a way, realising that I do have the time to write that book, learn that instrument, learn that language or clean that cupboard made me feel as though, maybe I have found the antidote to looking back at the last decade or worse, lifetime, and wondering, “Où est passé le temps?”.
