If you're studying a language, no doubt you've heard of Duolingo, which is the best free program you'll find. The fantastic Web app comes with equally free mobile apps that let you practice your language on the go, and the iPhone app is, like the website, the best free language-learning app you can find. A new feature, which is exclusive to the iPhone app at the time of this writing, gives language learners a new way to practice their skills by having in-app chats with a bot. The conversations are tightly scripted, and you can't openly converse the way you might with a real human, but it's still refreshing to see something novel in a language app. The rest of the content, which mirrors what's on the Duolingo website, is still all there and remains very high quality. With excellent exercises and wonderful interface, the Duolingo iPhone app earns a rare five-star rating.
This review focuses on the Duolingo iPhone app and what it has to offer. For a deeper dive of the service at large, see our full review of Duolingo.
Supported Languages
If you speak English, the Duolingo iPhone app offers 19 languages for you to learn. They are Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Welsh. At the time of this writing, on the full Duolingo website, Hebrew, Hungarian, and Vietnamese were listed as still being in beta.
Additional language-learning programs are available for speakers of other languages, so if you have a Spanish speaking friend who is looking to practice English, Duolingo has a program for him or her, too.
Duolingo's list of supported languages has grown quickly over the years, but at least one in-demand language is still missing: Mandarin. Duolingo has a language incubator project, where you can see new languages on the roadmap for rollout. You can also see the full list of available languages and those in beta by going to Duolingo's Courses page.
If you're looking to learn a language now that isn't on Duolingo's list, I would recommend paying for a different program. I've tried many other free mobile language-learning apps, but none are as good as Duolingo. One option to try is Pimsleur Comprehensive, which offers around 50 languages, including many that are harder to find, such as Ojibwe, Twi, and Icelandic. Pimsleur is almost exclusively audio-based and not as interactive in the technological sense, but it's reasonably affordable and is excellent for learning on the go. You can install Pimsleur's MP3 files on your iPhone in the same way that you'd upload other kinds of music.
If you want more interactive language-learning software and don't mind paying for it, I'd encourage you to move to a full-sized computer or laptop and try Rosetta Stone, an Editors' Choice, or Fluenz, another very good program. Both Rosetta Stone and Fluenz have Mandarin programs. They also both have mobile apps where you can continue your learning. Once you have a subscription, you'll be able to log into the iPhone app for either one.
How Duolingo Works
From a user's perspective, Duolingo works like most other language-learning programs. You work through exercises or activities in order to complete lessons, which are part of larger units. The structure is clear and shown on a dashboard. Icons and short descriptions of the lessons, like "Gerunds" guide you along your language-learning journey. Fully completed sections turn gold, and they stay gold as long as the content is still likely to be fresh in your mind. Sections that you have passed, but are no longer gold appear in color with a progress bar beneath them. Sections that are currently locked to you because you don't have the skills yet to do them are gray.
The apps sync to keeps track of your progress across both on your iPhone and in the Web app. So you can practice conjugating verbs in German at home and pick up where you left off in the iPhone app during your commute.
A placement test lets new users who are familiar with a language jump ahead to a point in the program that's right for them. Equally helpful is an option to test out of a section, so if you know adverbs really well, you can skip them, so long as you pass the test.
One thing about Duolingo that's different from many other language-learning apps is that you must move through the material sequentially and unlock sections to progress. Other language-learning programs, including Rosetta Stone, Fluenz, and Transparent Language Online, let you bounce around at will.
The core learning is extremely clear to see and work through. The language-learning parts are solid and replicate some of the typical drills you'll find in more well-known language software. Duolingo works your reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills, though you can disable anything that requires your voice input in case you are in a place where talking aloud in a language you don't actually speak might be uncomfortable.
Exercises build on one another, so that you're introduced to words and concepts at the right point in the learning schedule. Typical lessons have multiple choice questions, listen-and-write exercises, and translation exercises. In some exercises, you listen to a sentence and write it in the new language. In others, you translate a written sentence from English to the new language, or vice versa. In the multiple choice questions, I really like that sometimes there can be more than one right answer—you tap checkmark boxes next to whichever correct answers you see.
The service does rely on crowd-sourced information to power its language learning, and occasionally, especially at the higher levels, you might find incorrect information. However, the errors are few and far between, and much less than any other crowd-sourced language learning program I've seen.
No matter how you start learning and practicing with Duolingo, you can do so with multiple languages. In other words, for the low, low price of nothing, you can start programs in Dutch, Swedish, and Portuguese if you like, whereas many language-learning programs lock you down to just one language. That's pretty incredible.
Duolingo Bots
Duolingo's iPhone app recently received a facelift, and to be honest, I'm not crazy about it. The biggest change is that people (or rather, flat images of cartoonish human figures) now appear in most of the exercises. These figures are meant to be speaking to you some of the time, but I find that they take up space unnecessarily.
As mentioned, a new Bots feature lets you hold in-app chats with robots. The Bots area appears to be the source of the new flat family of characters. When you start a chat, a little face appears as if you are messaging with the person. She or he typically asks you a question or tells you in the language you're learning to do something, like "Say hi to my friend, Roberto," and you have to take appropriate action. You can't type anything at will. Only certain answers will be accepted as correct. And you can't type an infinite number of characters either.
The Bots conversation remind me a little of middle school Spanish oral exams, where you are expected to answer a certain way, repeating back key information ("What does Robert eat?" "Robert eats pizza.") or further the conversation in a specific way ("How are you, Jill?" "I'm well, thank you. And you? How are you?").
You aren't required to use the Bots section, but you will earn points for conversations that go toward your daily and weekly goals. Honestly, I could take them or leave them, so I appreciate that they're optional.
Mobile Design
The exercises in the Duolingo mobile app are very similar to those on the website, but with a few adaptations that make them easier to complete on a tiny mobile phone. In one exercise, for example, the app shows you a sentence, and you must translate it and type it in the language you're learning. On the iPhone, instead of typing each word verbatim, sometimes you'll see a bank of words from which you choose the correct ones and put them into the correct order.
Duolingo is forgiving of minor typos, which is excellent, especially on an iPhone where the small screen makes it harder to type accurately. The iPhone also makes it easy to insert special characters by pressing and holding any key for options that use that letter as its base.
In the Duolingo iPhone app settings, you can disable sound effects, speaking exercises, and listening exercises, which again is tremendously helpful for a mobile app. You can also dismiss speaking exercises as they come up without visiting the settings. These kinds of design choices are what make Duolingo exceptional.
Practice and Learn With Duolingo
I've been a Duolingo user, off and on, since the very beginning, and the app has really grown quite a bit with solid content and language-building exercises effectively packaged in bite-size chunks.
I can easily say that Duolingo is the best free tool for learning a language. The iPhone app works well, handling special characters and some translations with greater ease than even the full Web version. It's an ideal way to practice another language anywhere you have a few minutes on your hands. Additionally, it doesn't have to be used exclusively on its own. Duolingo makes for a great companion app to other kinds of language study, whether it's in a classroom or with another piece of software.
To start a new chat, tap the button to the upper right. Doing so calls up a list of all the people in your contact list who have also installed Signal. Tap one to start a message, or tap the symbol in the upper right to start a group-messaging session. Group messaging works just like person-to-person, and anyone can add or leave the group at any time.
When I travel to the Black Hat security conference, I use the Signal app to stay in touch with home and my colleagues at the conference. When connected to Wi-Fi, calls sound excellent, slightly better than regular phone calls. There's minimal latency in the conversation, and only occasional, mild audio distortions. Without Wi-Fi, things can be a little touch and go. Most of the time, calls sound just as good over cellular connections as with Wi-Fi. But when LTE isn't available, or you can only pull down a few bars, calls sometimes drop or fail to connect.