Duolingo is a pretty good way to learn a language:
Jay Doubleyou: duolingo: free language-learning app
Jay Doubleyou: apps to learn english
Jay Doubleyou: how to learn a completely new language
And it works largely because it makes a game out of learning:
Duolingo has an appealing, playful design and a smooth Onboarding experience. Choose the language you want to learn, set a daily goal and immediately start completing guided exercises.
The exercises are short, only 10 questions long at first, and shouldn’t take more than 2-3 minutes to complete. Several embedded game mechanics add motivational boosts to make sure that new users reach their first win-states quickly:
A progress bar shows how close you are to completing the exercise. Each correct answer is rewarded with an encouraging sound effect. In between questions, Duo, the mascot owl, will comment on how great you are doing.
The company thinks its great:
“Motivating yourself to learn is very hard and learning a language is even harder, especially when you are doing that online on your own, so we realized early on that we needed to try to encourage people to form a daily learning habit. We found that the most effective techniques for this come from the gaming world,” explains associate product manager Zan Gilani.
Although not everyone's impressed:
Unfortunately, all Duolingo had borrowed from the contemporary gaming culture are some ubiquitous tropes like in-game currency, experience points, daily streaks, badges and leaderboards. These are the things that are not making Duolingo more game-like, but the things that are making the gaming experience more bureaucracy-like and ruining it. There is no intrinsic value in being compelled to log in every day and beat others to the top spot in some arbitrary group. I ignore all of that because I'm here to learn a language, not to beat others to it.
But it's also of interest to the world of business:
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