Distraction disguised as learning: Duolingo, Codeacademy and why you should get back to basics
I moved to Greece this past fall after quitting my job in banking. The first thing I wanted to focus on before I got around to all of the project ideas I had in my head was to learn Greek.
On the first day I arrived in Athens, I enrolled in a language school close to my apartment and started going to class every day, Monday to Friday. Classes are 4 hours per day, with another 3–4 hours of homework on top of that.
In case you’re wondering, yes that’s a lot of Greek to absorb.
A few months later and I am getting up to a level where I feel comfortable speaking and can understand most of what is going around me —but learning new words is a big challenge, it really takes time and repetition to absorb an entire vocabulary.
So a little while back, I thought, why not add Duolingo into the mix to help with the vocab and to keep things fresh. I was familiar with Duolingo as I had experimented with it on and off over the years to try to keep from forgetting Spanish, but I had never really tried it for a language I was actually going to use every day.
But what I found was really surprising: as my Duolingo streaks and lingots added up, my confidence in my classes and speaking Greek while out and…
