learning italian through duolingo

Last week during a visit to my mom’s on Long Island, I excused myself so that I could peek at and mumble into my phone.

There was no way I was going to let a visit to my mom’s make me miss my Italian lesson.

For most of the past year (353 days and counting!),  I have been religiously attending to my 15-minute-or-so daily encounters with the language-learning app Duolingo. I used it on the subway, while walking across town, during previews at the movies. It’s safe to say that I’ve become addicted to the app.

My journey with the Italian language began in 2013 when I studied abroad in Florence for a semester. For those five months, I was fortunate enough to live in one of my favorite Italian cities, attend classes taught by Italian professors (including an Italian language course), and live with an Italian woman. Given those three things, you would think that I would have picked up a lot about the language, but I was studying with other American students, my classes (other than Italian) were taught in English, and although I lived with an Italian woman, she spoke wonderful English and was more interested in continuing to improve that than she was in teaching me Italian. I ended up spending only about 30% of the semester speaking Italian. There was however one notable weekend near the end of my time in Italy, when I went to Friuli, the region where my Nonna was from and spent the weekend with distant family members who for the most part spoke little to no English. In that immersive experience, my use of the language improved significantly, but it certainly wasn’t enough to make a long lasting impact on my capabilities. And then, when I returned to the States a few weeks later, I no longer had a reason to speak Italian and just stopped doing so.

Fast forward to 2017, at which point I hadn’t uttered a word of Italian for four years other than when describing food, I learned that I had to travel to London for work and decided to tack on a week long trip to Italy. About a month before I left, I decided to purchase Rosetta Stone and attempt to brush up on my Italian skills, but I was, um, rusty, and one month proved not to be nearly enough time to make me into an Italian speaker. During my week in Venice, Florence and Rome, on the infrequent occasions someone spoke to me in Italian, I almost never understood it. The dialects, the speed of talking, the accents, they were all so… foreign. I returned home disappointed.

After that trip, I tried on and off to learn the language, but languages do not come naturally to me, so I would get bored and frustrated and give up. Then another day I’d feel motivated to learn Italian so I’d restart, and the futile cycle continued. That is until I started Duolingo late last year.

Duolingo has made learning Italian addicting. The app pulled me right in, helping me set daily goals and then launching into simple phrases. Sometimes it demands that I speak an Italian phrase or sentence and other times it asks me to translate Italian phrases and sentences into English, or vice versa, providing multiple-choice responses.

Duolingo praises me constantly: for responding correctly several times in a row, for completing a chunk of the day’s lesson, for learning from my sloppy mistakes. The app keeps me apprised of my progress via various point schemes, and used email and phone notifications to nudge me to keep my routine going, even betting me points that I wouldn’t keep my streak up for another week. It has gamified the experience of learning a language.

Well, where has all of this gotten me? After 353 days, I am certainly no where close to being a decent Italian speaker, but I’m excited about the capability to even engage in simple, fractured semi-conversations. I acknowledge that even once I complete the course on Duolingo, I won’t be able to read long-form content, participate in actual conversations in Italian, or even write utterances of more than one sentence if I use the app as my only method of learning. That being said, I will walk away with considerable vocabulary and phrases, and hope that after gaining some confidence in the language, I will be able to keep up the momentum through other avenues.

So would I recommend Duolingo? Absolutely. My story about struggling to stay committed to learning a new language is not uncommon, and although, Duolingo won’t turn me into a fluent speaker, I’m excited to finally be making progress toward one of my goals.