The day Duolingo expects me to have

I arrive in Italy and head straight to a farm. After two weeks of Italian lessons on Duolingo, that is one of the few places where I am able to speak with any real authority.

On this farm, I hope there is a horse and a cow. Ideally, they will both be drinking milk or looking at birds. Otherwise, I’m not sure what I’d say about them. Perhaps I can pray for the presence of ducks or a girl with a mouse. Worst case scenario, I can comment on bugs, which I am led to believe will be everywhere: on the animals, by the water, in a pair boots. Duolingo believes not only that I will see these things while I’m in Italy, but when I do, I will be compelled to remark upon them like some demented narrator.

Where is the turkey? the app makes me shout into my iPhone while riding a cross town bus. Right here, I mutter. The turkey is here, reporting for duty.

After the farm, Duolingo takes me to lunch. This sounds promising, but turns out poorly, like most online dates do. The app teaches me nothing about placing an order or even recognizing when I am being asked to do so. Instead, it wants me to look around, see what’s going on, perhaps hand a single plate to the waiter. My need to eat is secondary to being able to observe who else is in the restaurant and what they’re up to. 

The waiter is wearing a red shirt. 

The men talk to the cook.

The cook has a knife.

The men are leaving the restaurant.

I get the feeling that Duolingo believes every cafe is a crime scene waiting to happen. They are preparing me to be the only witness. 

Other common topics of conversation available to me courtesy of Duolingo: horse ownership; things on sharks; lemon candy. When that gets boring, the app has presented me with a deep well of “I statements,” such as: I do not eat candy at the zoo; I don’t know the bear; I eat a lot of fish. According to Duolingo, it is customary to do each of these while wearing red socks, a point that should be noted whenever possible. 

Another thing, while I’m at it: Sugar. My lessons indicate that this word should come up at least once a day, if not more. If it doesn’t, I am encourage to work it into every conversation myself. It’s easy enough to do, once you understand the full range of possibilities. One can put sugar in coffee, tea or lemonade, sure. But it can also be used as a playground for ants. It can be fed to a turkey and poured on a table. For some reason, Duolingo keeps insisting that a group of men can write in it. I try to imagine that: A bunch of dudes etching messages in all-natural sweetener. Save me, I see them scrawl in the powder of my mind. Send better words.

I pass these lessons, one after the other, but Duolingo serves them up again and again. To keep myself engaged, I start piecing together random phrases. Suddenly there is a bee in a bathing suit or a shark riding a moped. Here comes that horse again. He is wearing boots and talking to an onion. It seems absurd, but is it really? Is a shark on a motorcycle any more ridiculous than, say, men writing in sugar? Is it weirder than a grown woman traveling to Rome in search of a zoo?

Perhaps the most annoying part about Duolingo is that it’s working. It’s only been a week or two, but still I can conjure up the word for bean and strawberry as I walk through the supermarket. Sitting at a coffee shop, I can skip from table to table, conjugating the verb “to drink.” Impressive? Maybe. Useful? Not exactly. Much as I love to rattle off all the beverages to which I can add sugar and the animals that can be forced to drink them, I cannot yet order one myself. I cannot ask to pay in cash or request the WiFi password while I wait. I wonder why Duolingo is going on and on about that milk-drinking horse while I sit here at a café, thirsty, handing the waiter a lemon.

The real complaint that I have with Duolingo doesn’t have anything to do with functionality, but practicality. The app may teach people a thing or two, but if the things are useless then what’s the point? Why teach me how to say I am handing the banane to the boy when I am far more likely to give a suitcase to the flight attendant? I’m never going to buy green pants but I will definitely, at some point, need to purchase a Metro ticket. Tell me something: Who is this person who is more concerned about getting to and from the zoo, as opposed to the airport? Why isn’t Duolingo teaching things that people will actually say? 

Don’t tell me “This is how you learn.” I studied enough languages over the years to know how it’s done. I understand that you have to start somewhere humble. Even still, I think we can all agree that a farm is not the ideal place. We don’t have to learn the verb “to go” within the context of animals on four legs. The bus can go to the city just as easily as The cow goes to the water. I can look at a painting just as well as a horse. The lesson plan can stop sending me on a trip to the zoo when it knows full well that I’m going to Italy to visit a museum. You want to be helpful, Duolingo? Teach me how to say, How late is the train running? and No, sir I don’t want to dance with you. Drill me on the phrase, You can’t wear shorts in the cathedral. Now we’re working on more than one level. Now we’re talking!

So why am I studying Italian? The short answer is: Un ragazzo. I’ll give you the full story later, when I have more sugar to write in.

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[cincopa A4CAmaeVQ5RU]

28 comments to “The day Duolingo expects me to have”
    • I know! And I’m sure someone will point out that museum is “museo” so it shouldn’t be that hard and I should just shut up about the vocabulary choices… but let me tell you this: zoo is zoo and restaurant is restaurante. So, like, no, I’m not buying that excuse. Anyway, thanks for reading. xx

      • Restaurant is spelled “ristorante” actually haha but I noted the same with Spanish and Chinese! This is very true and very well written, congrats!
        Hope you’ll be fine here!
        Ciao ciao, from Naples!

        • Thank you! I’m very much looking forward to my time in Italy… still not going to the zoo though, no matter how many times it is suggested.

  1. So basically no improvement since the phrase books of years ago were famous for things like “my postilion has been struck by lightning”. (I have just discovered that a postilion is a person who rides a post-horse – I’d always thought it was a euphemism for “arse”).

  2. I thought it was just me & the weird Duolingo app! At least I’ve learned the Korean alphabet & I can order a coffee but that’s more from friends than the app.

    • I’d say “Well what do you want it’s free?” but I’ve also used Rosetta Stone, which is nowhere near free and it is just as bad, plus slower. So worse, in other words.

  3. “I have studied enough languages over the past to know how it works”

    So why are you making these mistakes with Italian? What other languages have you learnt and how did you learn them?

    I recommend an app called Lingq (you import all the interesting content you WANT to learn) and the Youtube channel Italiano Automatico.

    • Hey- thanks for reading. That sentence doesn’t mean that that I keep trying Duolingo over and over… it means that I have studied a variety of languages through a variety of methods and understand that learning a language from scratch is tough. You start simply and build from there. My fault with Duolingo is that they’re laying the foundation in a zoo.
      To answer your question, I’ve studied German, Spanish and Latin formally in school. I’ve used Rosetta Stone for German and Spanish. (I live in Germany currently.) I’ve used Duolingo for Italian and French. I’ve used Mondly for Finnish. I’ve realised that you can get a whole bunch of shows dubbed in foreign languages on Netflix if you change your language settings… this, I think, is one of the best ways to improve comprehension.
      I’ve never heard of the app you suggested… sounds promising. I’ll give it a go!

  4. Duolingo is good when we talk about learning foreign languages in your regional language. I really like the experiment of learning English via my regional Hindi language and it helped a lot.

  5. Tried Duolingo with German and quit–rationalized that German was too hard and that I would probably survive Switzerland without it. Tried it again with Italian which was not as hard after years of Spanish in school and I still quit. This time because I really really didn’t need to know how to talk about horses and milk.
    The one time I could have used some Italian that I didn’t have? Ordering scampi crudo. Guarantee duolingo would not have prepared me for ordering raw shrimp.

    • Amen! The horses drive me mad, but I’m going to stick with it for now. Once I get to Venice, I think I’ll try to find an immersive language learning class. I really just need to get more confident in speaking because, as you said, it’s not so hard if you’ve studied Spanish.
      For what it’s worth, I would expect German to be exceptionally difficult to learn in Duolingo without the benefit of an overview on things like case and gender and sentence structure. I studied that in high school, which helped greatly. I thought Rosetta Stone was better than Duolingo for German, but it’s still lacking. Long story short, I don’t blame you for dropping out.

  6. I was trying to learn Portuguese – to speak with my (English-speaking) Portuguese partner- but the Duolingo version is Brazilian Portuguese, not European Portuguese, and there are significant differences in words and pronounciations.

  7. This made me laugh so much! I’ve got several languages on the go with Duolingo for no particular reason and they’re all a little bit ridiculous. My favourite has to be the Danish version which is obsessed with ‘anden læser avisen’, the ever useful phrase ‘the duck is reading the newspaper’.

  8. I loved this post!! Thanks for sharing. I was using Duolingo for Spanish, and got frustrated because I could build their sentences, but I didn’t understand the rules around gender or verb conjugation and no rules were ever explained. I ended up getting a textbook and am working through it. I wish you could pick words you needed and you could get drilled on those words instead of the random ones. I will need to know about food, the beach, and things like that, and not asking people if their brother has grey hair. Thanks for the laughs!

    • Thank you! Glad to hear it! Yes, I find with Duolingo, you have to look up basic conjugation and gender rules and memorise them. Otherwise, I feel like it’s just a guess. What I do like about it a lot, and I should have said it earlier, is that unlike books, you learn both orally and visually. Too often I have “learned” phrases and words in other languages from a page and found out I’m pronouncing them all wrong, or have the accent wrong. It’s so hard to “unlearn” in those cases. I, too, just wish the examples were more practical… ordering a drink vs. a horse drinking milk… going to the cathedral/museum vs. going to that damn zoo. but hey… it’s free. and I’ll take it. might not be perfect, but it’s 100% better than nothing.

      • So agree as have been studying Greek with Doulingo.. But my favorite useless phrase comes from a pocket size “Let’s Go” translation book: “Help, I need a tourniquet”.. can just see me spurting blood while frantically looking up that phrase..

  9. Duolingo Japanese was much more practical. I was able to use phrases and read train names when we arrived. It probably depends on who designs the particular language instruction. Portuguese was OK, too, but not quite as good as Japanese. Maybe it’s because I studied Japanese more.

  10. This is a brilliant funny post. I can relate completely to this. Please watch Eddie Izzard learning French sketch on YouTube. Just like what you’ve said.

  11. I love your post!! I am currently learning German and Russian on Duolingo, and I know what you are talking about. My first surprise was when I had to translate the following sentence: Your bear is wearing my dress!!? But I’m persistent, and hope that by the end of the Duolingo learning tree I would be able to make some meaningful conversation! Who knows, maybe…

  12. I really love this blog post, after reading this one I binged through reading the rest of your content on a long train ride. I just started my blog and work part-time as a freelance writer. I am super inspired by your writing style, lifestyle, and achievements. I am about to start a Duolingo experiment for my blog and landed on this post. You’ve gained a new follower!

    • hi! thanks so much for the comment. you made my day! good luck with your blog and writing – I’ll be sure to check you out!

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