People flocked to language apps during the pandemic ? but how much can they actually teach you? | Shelley Hepworth

In March 2020, as the Covid pandemic took hold, the language learning app Duolingo reported double its usual number of sign-ups. Stuck inside under lockdown orders, people had time on their hands and were looking for ways to occupy it.

It wasn't long before I joined its 500 million users in an attempt to recapture the feeling of learning Portuguese during three months spent in Brazil several years ago: that heady thrill of realising I had conveyed the meaning I meant to, the strange alchemy of suddenly understanding what people around me were saying. Could an app give me that?

Ninety days, hundreds of new words and plenty of lessons, "crowns" and "streaks" later, it didn't feel like it. Was the app teaching me anything at all?

Entering 2022 with renewed enthusiasm to learn the language, I decided to see what the experts say. Ingrid Piller, a linguistics expert at Macquarie University, says the process of picking up a new language can feel mysterious because there are several elements going on at the same time.

These can be divided into the linguistic and the social. On the linguistic side, you must learn new words, grammatical structures and pronunciation. If you are taking up a language as an intellectual exercise, or so you know how to order a meal on a trip to Paris, apps are really useful.

But if you want to converse and impart meaning, then that's where things get difficult. "Language is about interacting with other people, it's not something we do alone," Piller says.

"The really big challenge of language learning is actually for our minds to bring all these elements together creatively and make decisions [in the moment]: how do I pronounce this? What kind of words do I choose? And how do I put these together in a grammatically correct sentence, or in larger chunks that produce conversations?"