No, Duolingo won’t provide the same quality of teaching you’d get with a good tutor, and the app alone won’t get you anywhere close to fluency. It’s an app (and website) that has succeeded in upending an entire market sector, replacing all the elements that once seemed essential to language learning – the heavy textbooks, the CDs, the human interaction – with one intuitive, thoughtfully designed digital platform. To fall back on an exhausted trope, Duolingo is to languages as Tinder is to dating. Why that app? The real question is why on earth you’d use anything else. First things first: download Duolingo and make an account. So you’ve decided that your next trip to a non-English speaking country will be different – you’re going to give learning the language a crack. No matter where you go, people appreciate the effort. Less altruistically, you’ll often find you get a friendlier reception from locals if you speak a few words of the language before switching to English.
But starting every interaction with “Do you speak English?” or worse, speaking English without even asking first, is ultimately disrespectful of the culture you’re travelling in. Still, chances are that given the choice, most of us would like to be able to ask simple questions, to read signs without Google Translate, and to enjoy the small satisfaction of knowing we at least tried to speak something other than English.Īnd that’s the point: Yes, English is the world’s lingua franca, and in most tourist-friendly destinations you’ll probably find someone who can speak it. In which case, congratulations – I sincerely wish I could be more like you. While for me mild embarrassment is a chronic condition, you might not give two shits about sounding like an idiot while buying a train ticket.
Maybe I’m making assumptions about other travellers. Or the hot shame of trying to order a meal or ask for directions without the first idea how to do it, and kicking yourself for not learning a few simple sentences before you got on the plane. Just think back to the last time you stepped out into the arrivals hall and realised you still didn’t know how to say more than “hello”, “goodbye” and “thank you” in the local tongue. Why you might want to learn a foreign language in the first place is obvious enough. What the French course looks like a few months in Not only do you probably have a bit more free time than usual, but with international travel a far-off prospect, you actually have the months you need to learn the basics of a language at a realistic pace.
But if you’ve always wanted to speak another language, now’s the perfect time to give it a go. It’s totally fine if you emerge from lockdown brandishing a grand total of zero new skills and exactly the same number of abs you went in with. To be clear, this isn’t one of those attempts to guilt you into using this time more productively.
0 kommentar(er)
