Is Duolingo a sound educational tool for homeschoolers? It is currently available for free, although you can choose to purchase a paid upgrade that eliminates ads and provides offline access to the app. Just one year later, Apple named it its iPhone “ App of the Year” and since then, it’s grown to over 30 million users worldwide-including many homeschooling families. What is Duolingo?ĭuolingo was developed by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University as a gamified foreign language program, and it was released to the public in 2012. I mean that so sincerely that I wrote an entire blog post explaining why.Īs you read this blog post, keep that fact in mind-because my evaluation of Duolingo assumes that you understand that it is a practice tool, not a curricula. The absolute, number one most important thing that I need you to know about Duolingo is this:ĭuolingo is NOT a homeschool foreign language curriculum. This review is simply a resource that I wanted to provide to the Language Learning At Home community, since I know that so many of you are interested in using this app. After spending a good amount of time with the app, I'm ready to share my full opinion: what I like and what I don't like about Duolingo, along with my recommendations for how homeschooling families can use this app to learn foreign languages.īy the way, I’m not associated with or compensated in any way by Duolingo. I'm writing as both a homeschooling mom and a foreign language educator with advanced training in language pedagogy (and a PhD in Spanish). Today, I'm here to offer my honest assessment of Duolingo for homeschool foreign language learning. But are they really all that they're cracked up to be? They're both free, convenient, and make impressive claims about how well they teach foreign languages. Welcome to my series on homeschool language learning apps!ĭuolingo and Mango Languages are two of the most popular language learning apps in the homeschooling community-and for good reason.

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