My main challenge, I realized, would be sticking to Italian when it was easier for everyone to speak English.
“E
xcuse me,” I said in Italian to a man standing near the bus stop in Vairano, Switzerland. “I need to go to San Nazzaro.”
He helpfully whipped out his phone, but then looked perplexed when his search pinned a town in Spain instead of a Swiss village that should have been just down the hill from where we were standing in Ticino, Switzerland’s Italian-speaking canton. Evidently, my pronunciation of San Nazzaro was “molto terribile.”
I showed him the town I meant on Google Maps, and understanding brightened his features. He started speaking rapid-fire Italian while gesturing down the road, and I picked out some words: “bus,” “30 minutes,” “walk.” I interpreted this to mean the bus wasn’t coming for half an hour, so it would be faster to walk. I thanked him with a cheerful, “Grazie mille! Ciao!” and started walking, heartened by my fledgling ability to communicate.
It was my first time trying to speak Italian in real life since I started practicing it on Duolingo almost three years ago. I fell in love with the expressive language on a trip to Bologna and the Cinque Terre, and I wanted to learn words beyond “please” and “thank you.” My husband had been doing Spanish on the free app for years, so I downloaded it and got started.
Continue Reading Article After Our Video
Recommended Fodor’s Video
What Exactly is Duolingo?
Duolingo is the planet’s most downloaded education app, with about 500 million registered users. Its gamified format rewards users for completing lessons with points and “XP Boosts” that help them advance faster. Each week, you see how you fared against other learners around the world, which motivates you to continue logging lessons.
I’m not much of a gamer, but Duolingo’s addictive universe quickly reeled me in. I was soon posting proof of a 100-day streak on my Instagram story, and ranting to my husband about grammar injustices when I ran out of “hearts” (Duolingo’s answer to video game lives). Like the app’s other 40 million active daily users, I had clearly drunk the Duo Kool-Aid.
“Duolingo, Babbel, and a number of language learning apps are really good at gamification—they’re good at engaging you with those elements they’ve added, like that icon on your screen that gets really sad when you don’t click on it,” says Jan L. Plass, a professor of education in communication technology and the Paulette Goddard Chair in Digital Media and Learning Sciences at New York University. “It’s a great example of the power of incentive structures to convince us to do things.”
My stint on Duo is proof of that. I also briefly tried Rosetta Stone, another language app available for free through my library membership, but I found it to be slow-paced and unmotivating. Plus, it was really judgmental about how I pronounced Italian words, making me repeat phrases perfectly 10 times in a row (in hindsight, there’s probably a good reason for that!).
Swiss Italian? Same, Same, But Different
I chose to visit Ticino rather than Italy because I was already traveling to Switzerland. Ticino bites a triangular chunk out of northern Italy—the canton’s capital, Lugano, is just an hour from Milan—and the Ticinese speak a similar dialect to the Lombardy region of Italy.
Of course, being in Europe, Switzerland, and specifically Ticino, most people speak several languages besides Italian, including English. As soon as I checked into Habitat, a boutique hotel in Piazzonga overlooking Lake Maggiore, owner Elia Frappoli switched to fluent English to tell me about the property. My main challenge, I realized, would be sticking to Italian when it was easier for everyone to speak English.
And so, armed with only Google Translate on my phone in case of linguistic emergencies, I set out to explore the region’s botanical gardens, beaches, hiking trails, and medieval villages.
Shutterstock/Vid Koren
Where Duolingo Steps Up
I quickly realized that I wasn’t horrible at reading Italian. One day, I hiked the well-marked Sentiero del Monte Gambarogno to Indemini, a medieval village on the border with Italy, and I was able to understand part of its history from interpretive signs in town.
I also aced restaurant menus, which usually only listed dishes in Italian and German. Thanks to multiple units on ordering food, I understood my options for drinks, appetizers, mains, and desserts, and could order formally by saying, “I’d like the tagliatelle alla bolognese, please.”
But though I know vocabulary and rote phrases, I struggled in spontaneous, unscripted situations. Upon arrival at that first restaurant, I wasn’t sure who to speak with about my reservation, so I panicked and introduced myself to a group of people on the patio.
“Mi chiamo Lisa!” I exclaimed awkwardly, as if they were expecting me. They chuckled in embarrassment (for me), and gestured inside the restaurant, where the owner’s dad kindly showed me to my table. I recovered and explained to the diners, in Italian, that I was learning their language. They actually cheered.
There were more verbal exchanges that evening—I rehearsed sentences in my head before opening my mouth—but they lacked depth. I felt like a toddler attempting the verbal SAT.
Similarly, Robin Meckleborg has been doing German on Duolingo for three years to keep her skills sharp after completing four semesters of German at university. Since starting the app, she has traveled to visit family in Zwiebrücken three times.
“It’s been really useful for adding new vocabulary, and it’s taught me to spell better in German,” says Meckelborg. “But it sucks for me to improve my grammar.”
How Duolingo Falls Short
Textbooks and language instructors thoroughly explain grammar concepts. Duolingo throws you in blind. You just have to figure things out as you go along by trial and error, like prepositions, verb conjugations, or masculine vs. feminine nouns and their corresponding articles—or search up online explainers. And even if you know the words and understand the rules, putting it all together is another matter, as I repeatedly discovered.
“You have to think of languages as more than a collection of nouns and verbs and adjectives and pronouns. It becomes something that’s culturally embedded, where context matters,” says Plass. “And that’s where these apps fall completely short.”
Duolingo also teaches a lot of head-scratching content. Though I know how to say, “I saw the ghost of a witch,” “I went skiing with a famous influencer,” and “The attacks started before dawn,” I didn’t exactly drop these bombs into conversations with people I met on the ferry to the Brissago Islands. Additional lessons and phrases specific to travel would be more useful.
Italian-speaking Swiss talk a lot faster than the voices on the app, too, so I often had to ask people to repeat things more slowly. And I’m certain my bad pronunciation confused everyone I interacted with.
It’s not just me. Lisa Watson has been learning French on Duolingo for seven years and still has all kinds of language hiccups during her annual trips to Aramits, France, to visit her French-speaking partner Lio’s family.
“When I first went, if I tried to say something in French, they wouldn’t understand me and Lio would have to repeat it back to them,” says Watson.
She also finds the real French accents to be much thicker than those in the app, and at times doesn’t understand things that should be obvious.
“A sales clerk told me the price of a bottle of water, and I had no idea what she said, so I just handed her six euros,” says Watson. “Even something as basic as that I still don’t get right.”
A More Immersive Language Learning Experience
Regardless, Watson’s French skills have greatly improved, and she has a 1,900-day streak on Duolingo to show for it. She feels that immersion is the key to speaking and understanding a new language, something she has been able to do on those yearly holidays, and when Lio’s family visits their home in British Columbia.
“If you’re not practicing it in real life, you’re not going to learn it,” says Watson
Plass agrees wholeheartedly.
“Duolingo gives you a good basis,” says Plass. “So now you need to go into situations where you either hear those words applied in real life situations, or you can speak it yourself.”
He recommends listening to language learning podcasts or watching foreign movies with subtitles to train your ears. For speaking, you could hire a tutor to practice conversing, like he did before spending a summer in Paris years ago. And there’s also AI—Duolingo recently launched Max, an AI-powered subscription tier with a feature called Roleplay that lets users engage in personalized conversations with the app’s characters.
In fact, Plass recently applied for a grant to look at using AI for language learning. He wants to create an avatar capable of conversing with language learners about specific topics, in various situations—just like you do when traveling.
“Eventually we’re going to get technology solutions,” says Plass. “But it’s still best to communicate with other people. Or, you know, spend as many summers in Italy as possible.”