Duolingo made me do it

Article Tools

Contact The Editor Articles By This Author

One of the goals on my bucket list is to become bilingual. There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, yet English remains the only one in which I can comfortably hold a conversation, read a book, exchange emails — or write a newsletter.

Don't misunderstand: English is a magnificent language, and I am endlessly grateful that my mother tongue is the one with the world's richest and most flexible vocabulary. If you're going to go through life fluent in only one language, English is certainly the one to choose. It is the closest thing in our time to a universal language — the dominant idiom of science, aviation, business, diplomacy, finance, and the internet.

Still, I wish it weren't the only language in which I'm proficient.

I have always envied people who grew up speaking multiple languages, and I am in awe of those who find it easy to learn new ones. Bernard Lewis, the preeminent historian of the Middle East, had that rare gift. I remember reading "Notes on a Century," the memoir he wrote when he was 96, and being astonished by his ability to pick up languages — not just at the tourist level, but at a depth that let him work in libraries and archives around the world. When he grew interested in the history of the Ottoman Empire, he decided to master Turkish. A romantic interest in a woman from Denmark led him to become fluent in Danish.

By the time he was my age, Lewis had as many as 15 languages at his command. I'm still working on my second.

The first foreign language I studied was Hebrew, which was part of the curriculum at the K-12 Jewish day school I attended as a child. I came away with a reasonable grasp of prayerbook, Bible, and ritual Hebrew, but I never achieved the ability to conduct more than a rudimentary conversation in fluent modern Hebrew.

In college, I decided to try again. My major was political science, so I took a lot of courses in government and diplomatic history. But I really wanted to add a foreign language to my intellectual toolkit. So I took French every semester. My grades weren't awful — mostly B's — but the finer points of French grammar and syntax always eluded me. On the bright side, I did acquire a decent grasp of French pronunciation. (You won't catch me saying "kruh-SAHNT" for "croissant" or pronouncing "chaise longue" as though it's "Shay's Lounge.")

After graduating, I tried for a while to keep up with French on my own. I watched "French in Action," the long-running French-language program on WGBH. I memorized the lyrics of favorite French songs, replaying them endlessly until every line made sense. (Pierre Bachelet's "Vingt Ans" became a minor obsession.) I even went to one or two French movies and gamely tried to follow the plot without reading the subtitles.

But without the opportunity for regular conversation en français, whatever I had learned slowly faded. My bilingual aspiration made no progress.

French wasn't the only language I studied in college. For a couple of semesters I signed up for Russian, too. It was hopeless. I did achieve a rough familiarity with the Cyrillic alphabet, and I can still sound out Russian words, assuming no one's in a hurry. But against Russian's complicated declensions, its six cases, three genders, and fearsome array of verb prefixes? Bozhe moi! I didn't stand a chance. Still, the desire to learn another language never really went away — it just went dormant, waiting for a better way in.

For years I've been telling people that when I retire, one of my goals is to learn Italian — not for any practical reason, but simply because I find the language beautiful and have always wished I understood it.

About 10 months ago, it occurred to me that I don't have to wait for retirement. The inspiration came from one of my sisters, who returned from a Nordic cruise enchanted by the sound of Norwegian. She downloaded Duolingo, began using it to study the language, and encouraged family members to try it for themselves.

Eventually I did. I signed up for Duolingo's Italian course in January, becoming one of the 50 million people who use the app daily. Somehow I have kept it up every day since, recently cresting the 300-day mark. I have learned something like 1,000 words in Italian. Bit by tiny bit, the rudiments of Italian grammar are becoming familiar. For the first time in my life, I'm studying a language for the simple pleasure of doing so — not for grades, not for a credential, not for work, not even for its supposed cognitive benefits.

Believe me, I am well aware of the app's limitations. Duolingo doesn't explain grammatical rules. It offers little real-world context for the words and phrases it teaches. It's built around translating prompted sentences rather than composing original sentences. It provides no opportunity to practice speaking, still less to engage in conversation. As countless critics have pointed out, it is virtually impossible to achieve fluency in any language through Duolingo alone.

For anyone hoping to attain linguistic mastery, Duolingo is no more than a starting line. But a low-pressure starting line, repeated often enough, actually does start to lead somewhere.

In my French and Russian classes, I studied for exams and academic credit. Now I study for fun, which is a lot more gratifying.

Duolingo is less a curriculum than a habit-forming machine. It doesn't aim for depth, but instead does something that for this beginner is even more useful: It keeps me engaged, amused, and returning for more. Which is how I've ended up with goofy sentences like these in my Italian portfolio: