Hallo! It’s been just about a month since I began my daily, ten-minute study of the language Dutch on Duolingo! I have to disappointingly start by saying that I was not successful in completing the ten minutes every single day, despite my best efforts to take that time out of my schedule. However, I did manage to complete 25 days out of my goal of all thirty, which I think is a very good accomplishment, given the busy schedule of a high school senior. But, with all that put aside, I want to share with you how Duolingo is set up, what I like, what I do not like, and my thoughts on the vowel-filled, Germanic language of Dutch after one month of study!

Duolingo is set up in a very easy-to-follow format that makes you go in order from basic concepts such as greetings, helpful phrases, food, and animals all the way down to advanced verb tenses and vocabulary. When you log on to your Duolingo account, you will see little circles (I call those topics) that contain a certain amount of individual lessons. Some will be colored and others are gray. You can only work on the topics that are colored in order to unlock the gray ones, and because I had no experience with Dutch, I started at the beginning, but if you are thinking of using Duolingo to brush up on a language that you studied in high school or college, you can test out of individual topics or a group of topics by clicking on the topic and hitting the “test out” option or scrolling down until you see a yellow bar that says “test out of # topics” and take that 30-questions test! Other than that, you follow through the lessons, making sure to have all listening, speaking, reading, and writing exercises on to maximize your language learning experience!

I love that Duolingo is FREE and ACCESSIBLE! You just go to the App Store or online at Duolingo.com, download the app, make an account, pick your language, and go! Everything is open to you! There are no in-app purchases, adds, agreements that say you must sign up for a membership after a certain amount of time, or a limit on how many languages you can study at once. I also enjoy that Duolingo doesn’t make you translate sentence after sentence, but rather, there are pictures, funny phrases, different activities, and speaking exercises where you listen to a native speak and you repeat! You can even slow the speed at which they speak as well! This is one of the best qualities of Duolingo because speaking is where most people get caught up in their language learning journeys because there may be a new alphabet or the mouth may be forced to make new sounds and move in ways that we don’t do as English speakers. And if you are ever in a place where you can’t speak aloud, you can easily turn this feature off when the exercise comes on by clicking, “I can’t speak right now” button, and it will not give you any more speaking exercises for another hour!

I find that Duolingo does a good job at putting into practice the method of repetition, as you will see the same sentences over and over again. It is not to the point that you get bored with the lesson or you translate the same sentence five times during the lesson, but I do sometimes wish for a little more creativity. Granted, I’ve only just begun, so I imagine that the sentences will get more diverse as my vocabulary expands. I also find that individual lessons are too short. It takes me about three to five minutes to get through one lesson in a topic, and after I finish that lesson, I feel like I don’t have the information mastered like it tells me that I do. So, many days I found myself finishing a topic in two days, and then reviewing that topic for another two days so I could really set a good foundation for the future.

Dutch is part of the Germanic language family, having ties with the German and English languages. Given that I am an English speaker, many of the sounds are familiar, but the spellings are very different. For example, “Good Morning” is “Goedemorgen (hoo-duh-morgan)” and “I speak English” is “Ik spreek Engels (Ik spreck Ahn-gulls)”. It is an interesting language filled with an eclectic mix of consonants and vowels. Some words are especially tricky such as, “alsjeblieft” (please), “welterusten” (good night), and “sinaasappel” (orange). Dutch follows the Subject+Verb+Object pattern used in English and other romance languages, but it has four different ways of saying “you” (Je, Jij, U, and Jullie). I still don’t know why there are so many or when to exactly use which one because I have been sticking strictly to follow the lessons and only the lessons.

I very much enjoy Dutch as it is my first Germanic language of study, although I don’t know exactly where or how I am ever going to use my knowledge of it. But, I am always up for a challenge and trying something new. I find that the more languages I learn, the more I become aware of that culture and gain a new-found respect for the language, the country, and the people!