Hello, it's Alex. It's been quite some time since I recorded a video and one of the reasons is that my old camera broke. So this is a new camera so hopefully it'll have a better video quality. Today I want to talk more about Duolingo. Duolingo is a website and app for learning languages. I made a video before in which I said that for me, Duolingo was more effective for learning languages than traditional classroom learning and I gave some explanations why and I'd concurred you to watch that if you haven't. In this video though, I want to go into a little bit more depth and I want to talk about how you can use Duolingo effectively. I've watched a lot of different people use Duolingo. Like I've sat next to them while they are using the app on their phone or the app on their desktop computer through the web app and I've noticed that people don't necessarily use Duolingo the same way and I think that there are some more and less effective ways of using it. The first thing I want to emphasize, I think the web app is way better than the phone app. I strongly recommend not using the phone app at all. I really like the web interface. There are tons of features that are only available in the Duolingo web interface. When you use the web app, for example, and it has you translate sentences, you're piecing together sentences using like a choice of words that it gives you. Whereas on the web app, you're actually typing in the words yourself. It's much more open-ended and you will find that you learn things like you learn how to spell for one in the language, which is immensely valuable. I find that learning the spelling, typing things out also improves my pronunciation. And more importantly, you're having to recall things in a more open-ended fashion. Like you have to actually recall the words more often instead of just picking them from a set of choices that it displays to you. And I think that that skill is much more useful if you want to actually speak the language because when you're in a conversation, you don't have like a multiple choice list that pops up in your head. You have to come up with the word yourself. This is just one of many examples. Another reason though that I think that it's better to do Duolingo on a computer in a web browser rather than on a smartphone using the app is that you can have all these other browser tabs open or windows open on your computer where you have supplemental resources. So like one example of a resource that I use all the time when I'm learning new words in Duolingo is Google Image Search. Like when you learn words in a foreign language, it can be tempting to just take the recommended translation or the dictionary definition as the end of the story. But like languages don't correspond in a one-to-one manner. And even if there's a word that literally translates the same way in another language, it might have different connotations from what you're used to. So like you might translate it one way but maybe the word is a little bit more formal or a little bit more casual than the word that it's typically translated as in English. You can have differences in connotations of like the context in which you might use the word. When you're learning another language, it's easy to miss those sorts of connotations. If you go into Google Image Search and you type the word in in the language that you're learning, you see pictures and there's that like pictures or worth a thousand words saying I think there's some truth in that. Like when you start seeing pictures, you get a mental picture of what the word means and you realize that these words have different connotations and you start to get like a feeling, a sense of that connotation. I think that's really powerful. You can't really do that if you're using the Duolingo Phone app. It's really cumbersome to be switching back and forth between different windows on a phone. Whereas on your computer it's really easy because you have the full keyboard, you have a mouse, you can switch tabs with keyboard shortcuts. You can also use sites to get supplemental information on pronunciation. And this feeds into one of the things I think is super critical and it's something that I notice a lot of people don't seem to focus on as much when they're doing Duolingo and that's pronunciation. When I started doing Duolingo, one of the things I really liked about it, it has this computerized voice which it's not super perfect sounding. Like it's not totally natural but it's pretty good in most languages and there's something about it being very standardized that I think is useful. Like it allows you to pay attention to the pronunciation in a way where you can keep monitoring how you're speaking out loud and how your own speech is not quite matching what the voice is pronouncing the word as. And I found that that was really helpful. Like when I was in a classroom I surrounded by people who were just speaking with a heavy American accent and that was pretty bad for pushing me to the next level. Obviously the best thing to do is immersion with native speakers but I do think that Duolingo offers a unique ability to pay attention to pronunciation more closely. So I'd say when you're doing Duolingo focus a lot on listening to the nuances of pronunciation and speak things out loud not just in the speaking exercises. Like it'll give you speaking exercises to do but you can pronounce anything out loud and especially when I'm starting to learn a new language and my pronunciation isn't great. I try to read everything out loud that I see especially the stuff that it speaks to me. I like to speak it back but then I like to try to read words out loud on my own and see if I get it correctly. I find that when I put a lot more energy into learning the pronunciation it pays off a lot in the long one. Like it it's a lot of work up front but then things start getting easier later on. So that's another way that I would recommend for you to approach Duolingo. Like focus more on pronunciation and consider using external resources. There's this site forvo where you can type in a specific word in a specific language and it'll tell you like it'll have different people pronouncing the word and I'll tell you where each of those people is from. So you can be like okay I want someone in Spain pronouncing this word in Spanish. I want someone in Mexico pronouncing it and you can hear how they pronounce the word differently and in some cases that can be really useful. Like if you're wanting to travel to a region where there's a specific dialect and you want to be familiar with that dialect that's really important. Other things about using Duolingo effectively? I think that it's really important to let the AI, the artificial intelligence of Duolingo do its job. Duolingo has an AI and it measures like what it keeps track of what things you get right and wrong. It even keeps track of like if you put your mouse over the word to use the hover over hints. It then re-eyes is oh you might not know this word as well as a word that you don't ever hover over to get the hint. And appropriately it gives you those words more often especially if you get a word wrong. It gives you those more often and exercises. And I find that like the best way to get the most out of that AI is to use the strength and skills feature. So it's like a practice feature that automatically tells you what you need to work on and then it gives you that exercise to do. I find that this is not just useful for like using that AI. It also kind of helps me manage my time. Because like when I'm studying a foreign language it takes a great deal of initiative and self-discipline. And a lot of that initiative is taken up by me deciding what I want to work on next. And I think one of the great values of Duolingo is that it does a lot of work for you. It tells you what to work on next based on its assessment of what you've been getting wrong and what skills are solid and it gives you the stuff that you haven't practiced in a while or that it knows you've been getting wrong. And I find it does a pretty good job of that. I also find like when I do that when I use that strength and skills feature it really it helps me to relax. It makes it seem like it takes less mental energy and freeing up that mental energy of like time management and choosing what to work on gives me more energy to focus on learning a language, learning the words, learning the grammar, and doing those supplemental things that I told you before about like typing things into Google search and learning the connotations of words. So like when I see some people practicing Duolingo they like rush ahead and they learn all these new lessons and they don't keep the tree as it's called. They don't keep the tree fully practiced. I recommend keeping everything fully practiced to get that whole tree completely gold before moving on and learning new lessons. I found that that's a really effective way for me to do it. So I'm sure I can come up with more things to stay but this video is already long enough. I hope you found this helpful. I'd love to hear from you. Do you agree with this? Do you disagree maybe? Are there any other tips that you can think of of ways that you think you can get the most out of Duolingo? I'd love to hear from you. Yeah thank you.