Duolingo Review: Italian Lessons

Duolingo is a free language-learning platform that uses game-like lessons to teach a variety of languages, including Italian. It's designed to be engaging and fun, with rewards, competitions, and a progression system.

Units based on themes like "Describe your family"

Duolingo's home screen works like a pathway you can follow step by step, with each circle representing a level. When you press a level, you start a lesson, with about 5 lessons in each level. Your progress through the lessons is shown on the ring around the circle. The pathway is divided into units that introduce new ideas, like using the present tense or talking about your family. At the start of each unit, you'll find a guidebook full of helpful tips and phrases. A trophy awaits you once you complete all levels in a unit. You'll see chests along your pathway, which give you gems when you open them. These gems can be earned through completing levels, earning experience points (XP), and other achievements. Your streak, or the number of days you've completed a lesson without a break, will increase by one each day.

Learn with Stories

Duolingo's stories and recurring characters will also be part of your learning path. Duolingo Stories are a cool way for you to earn points while practicing your reading and listening skills. As you go through each story, you'll face challenges that keep learning interesting.

You have to test into lessons

One minor gripe we have with Duolingo is that it doesn't allow you to jump to topics that interest you. You can take a test to move up to a certain level, but this is an extra step that other Italian language courses don't require. It's less straightforward than other options, and you might miss a few vocabulary words that will pop up elsewhere in your later learning.

Compete against other users

At Duolingo, you can also join a fun competition called Leaderboards, where you compete with other players in a league. You earn points, called XP, by doing lessons, practice, stories, and more. Every week, the top players win a promotion to a higher league. The leagues, from lowest to highest, are Bronze, Silver, Gold, Sapphire, Ruby, Emerald, Amethyst, Pearl, Obsidian, and Diamond. If you're one of the top three in the Diamond league, you stay there. Just remember, you need to do a lesson to join a league, and the competition starts every Sunday based on your device's time zone.

Start from scratch or by taking an assessment test

If you know a bit about Romance languages, you might find the Italian assessment test on Duolingo easy. Why? Because the test only requires you to match words from a given list, not type anything. This makes it easier to guess the correct answers. However, this raises questions about Duolingo's effectiveness. If you can score well on a placement test for a language you don't speak, what does that say about what you'll actually learn in the Italian course? You might get answers right and progress quite far into the course, but would you be able to use those phrases in real life without a word bank? In our experience with Duolingo, the answer is no. Some exercises may prompt you to fill in the words on your own, but the vast majority have you choosing words from the ones provided (and they're really not that hard to guess).

Italian course doesn't get much attention from the team

Because Italian is not as popular as other Romance languages, the Duolingo team doesn't devote as much attention to it. Users have reported several problems, like increasing mistakes as you move further along the course. For example, you may find sentences that an Italian speaker would never use in real life. Second, there are issues with grading. Sometimes, the course marks correct answers as wrong, and vice-versa. It's also inconsistent in requiring the use of personal pronouns in sentences where they're not typically necessary. Sometimes, it only accepts one gender in sentences where the gender isn't even specified, or it can require an answer in the "voi" form for a "you" sentence without indicating this requirement.

Not enough on its own

You might find Duolingo useful, but it's not enough by itself. It doesn't explain grammar well and only offers small bits of information (found in unit Guidebooks) that aren't built into the lessons. You might struggle with basic grammar until you use other resources - like the "Easy Italian" videos on YouTube by Joy of Languages.

Duolingo's popularity is disproportionate to its effectiveness

So why is Duolingo so popular? It's designed to keep you playing, much like games like Candy Crush. Duolingo runs on a freemium model, so they make money by showing you ads or getting you to upgrade. Many people use it to pass the time, to feel like they're doing something productive. Because of this, Duolingo tries to keep the difficulty level low. If it's too challenging, people might stop playing, which would cause them to lose money. Duolingo also keeps you hooked by giving you daily goals and rewards that make you want to keep playing. It even ranks you on a leaderboard to stir up your competitive spirit. While these features can keep you engaged, they may not help you learn as much as you think. For instance, people on the Duolingo subreddit often stress about losing their "streak" when they miss a day, but remember, missing a day doesn't erase what you've learned.

A good starting point, but don't get addicted

Duolingo is a great free resource for acquiring some basic vocabulary and establishing a habit of daily language study, but we wouldn't recommend using it beyond the first few units to learn Italian. Instead, take a more advanced course, listen to Italian music, watch Italian videos, or try reading a book in Italian to continue your learning.

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On the Duolingo website