There was a time in my life where I was spending hours every day on Duolingo. I was about to move to Sweden, a country I’d never even visited, and t

The Promise of Duolingo

submited by
Style Pass
2024-11-26 14:30:07

There was a time in my life where I was spending hours every day on Duolingo. I was about to move to Sweden, a country I’d never even visited, and those hours on the app learning Swedish were a means of convincing myself that I had some degree of control over what would happen when I began my new life abroad. If I could understand what was going on at the post office, that was at least one thing I wouldn’t have to worry about.

Swedish was the fourth language I learned on Duolingo. First was French, because I felt guilty about letting what I had learned at school lapse, then a bit of German out of curiosity, then Irish, for love. I had a boyfriend who spoke the language, and we thought it would be fun if we could talk about strangers in public in Irish, which is a particularly great secret code because it’s almost impossible for speakers of anything other than Celtic languages to guess what the words mean. I have always been interested in where words come from and how languages work. But there was something about Duolingo that made it compulsive: the friendly, bright green owl, the promise of learning a language almost by osmosis, without really working at it. You complete short lessons on a colorful, user-friendly platform on your phone and progress gradually up through levels, encountering more complex grammar and vocabulary, and gaining experience points and gems as you go. If you make too many mistakes in a lesson, you lose all your “lives” and have to stop playing, unless you use your gems to buy more.

When I arrived in Sweden, all fired up to put my new language skills to use, I had a rude awakening. I could not speak Swedish. I could sit at dinner and listen to people speaking in Swedish, and then contribute in English to the conversation, but if I had been called upon to do so in Swedish, I would have been lost. I could read an article in a magazine, but then would lose my nerve trying to order a coffee. All those hours on Duolingo had given me a huge vocabulary but left me more or less mute.

Leave a Comment