I don't know about you, but I've always loved learning new languages. I love, travelling, discovering new cultures, new foods, new landscapes, and languages are a part of all that. I'm French, my wife is Brazilian-Dutch, and so we're fortunate enough to have family and friends in many countries across the globe.
In school, I learned English, Spanish and Japanese. As I traveled more and more and met more people, I picked up some very basic words in German, Polish, Irish, Romanian, Italian, Norwegian, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Greek...
Nowadays, I'm full-on learning Portuguese, and keeping on eye on Dutch, for my family in-law. And I do this mainly thanks to Duolingo.
Every day for about a year now, I've been taking some classes with the green owl of Duolingo and I can very clearly feel the difference.
So, how does it work exactly?
You create an account, select which language you can speak and which languages you want to learn, and voila!
Here is everything you can learn if you choose English as your base language:
Yep, even High Valyrian is there! Valar morghūlis...
And keep in mind that you can learn as many languages as you wish at the same time!
The lessons are very well organized, by category, and getting harder and more specific as you go. You unlock new lessons as you learn.
Each lesson is made of about 15/20 exercices like this one
They involve a lot of repetition, which makes you learn faster in my opinion. Sometimes you have to translate from your language to the one you're learning, sometimes it's the opposite, sometimes you have to listen to a sentence and transcribe it, sometimes you have to speak. For each category, you have 5 levels of difficulty, but the lessons keep the same format throughout the whole thing.
And the best part in all of this? It's entirely free! There is a premium version, Duolingo Plus, which removes ads and gives you access to some more features, but I've only been using the free version and never felt limited in its use and the ads are rare and non invasive.
So there you have it, this was a brief introduction to one of my favorite tools on the internet, and definitely the best language learning platform I've seen, especially considering it's free, so what are you waiting for? If you're under lockdown, it's the perfect time to expand your mind and learn new languages :). Duolingo is available on desktop on their website, and on both the App Store and the Play Store.
Let me know in the comments what languages you can speak and which ones you would want to learn, maybe we can learn from each other and create a Publish0x Language Learning community!
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