Duolingo, Learning Chinese, Free website. Simplified Chinese for English speakers

[Marcos Rico]

https://www.duolingo.com/

This is a Free site to Learn Mandarin Chinese for English speakers. Great for my students.

Students have the option of how much time they want to spend per day learning Chinese, 5, 10,15,or 20 min. It can be used without an account, or opening an account, another option is using Facebook or Google accounts. It was easy to use for a student who is new to Mandarin.

Students have the option of taking a Placement Test if they already know some Chinese or starting with the basics if they are New to Chinese like myself. I took the 10 minute lesson,the first lesson focuses on Greetings. It showed the simbol for Hao (later, nihao ) , and how to pronounce it, I had to find the phonemic sound and click on it. you press the "check" button  and right away it indicated if the answer was right or not. Other lesson where about numbers, name, greetings 2, food, ocupation, after these lessons there was a test of skills. There where several more lessons some including phreases in Chinese. Followed by more assessments.

If you sign in to it, you get an email everyday to remind you to visit the site for your next lesson. It has a couple of other features that everyone can access such as Discussion and Labs( not yet available for Chinese) has stories in the target language, events and podcasts.

I could use it for basic introduction to Chinese for my students. In the past we have use it to increase their vocabulary in French which is our Target Language. 

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[Kim Leng]

Duolingo https://www.duolingo.com/ offers 33 free language courses for English speakers that includes popular Asian languages such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese with over three million active learners each. An account is not required to access the content, but I highly recommend logging in through Facebook or Google in order to track one’s progress.  Teachers interested in tracking student progress may create a Duolingo for School account here: https://schools.duolingo.com/.  

Learners may enroll in more than one course and set personal daily learning goals in five levels: Basic, Casual, Regular, Serious, and Insane.  I set my personal learning goal for Chinese to Casual which will learn 10 XP points that translates to just 5 minutes per day.

Duolingo is easy to use and fun.  The homepage displays a colorful learning tree with basic language skills in various categories.  These categories create mini lessons that are very manageable.  The first category for Chinese is “Greetings.”  In order to advance to the next skill, one is required to complete three lessons to achieve a level 1 success.  Having set my learning goal to just 10 XP points, I can just complete one lesson to achieve the goal. The lessons include character recognition, sound recognition, and translation.

I am very impressed with Duolingo.  The page is not cluttered and the graphics are fun and colorful.  The site offers learning badges and tracks progress in a visual way.  I think students will enjoy Duolingo because it feels like a game towards unlocking new skills for advancement to the next level.

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