[精听口译素材] 09.Duolingo 多邻国

Earlier this year, I decided that I was going to learn Irish. I am from Ireland, but I have never actually learned the language. I didn't learn it growing up, but I decided that this year was the year that I was going to do it. 

There's one small problem though, and that is that I live in Switzerland, and as I'm sure you can imagine the amount of native speakers of Irish in Switzerland is, well, around about zero, the amount of native speakers of Irish even in Ireland is still very low. But you're not going to have an awful lot of luck in Switzerland. 

So I had to resort to alternative means, and one method that I'm particularly enjoying at the moment is an application called Duolingo. I don't know if you've had the opportunity to try it, but it gives you the opportunity to learn a wide range of languages, or at least if you're going into English, there are (is) a wide range of languages available. There are at least 36 languages available into English, some of them are quite obvious, for example, French and Spanish and German and Portuguese, but you also have somewhat more unusual languages, including Irish, but also Klingon and Navajo. 

And I think it's great because it gives you access to languages that you wouldn't normally be able to learn or certainly depending on where you live, you might not have the opportunity to learn them. The app itself is very fun to use, I think so. And it makes use of a very common strategy nowadays called gamification, which basically means that if you get the answers right, then you'll get points. And that allows you to compete, you can compete against your friends, or you can compete on a public leaderboard and see if you get into the next league. 

And I think that makes it a very enjoyable thing to do. And I have to admit that after approximately three weeks of using Duolingo, I definitely understand bits of Irish and the concepts of Irish and an awful lot better than I did before I started. 

The problem is that I can see, even at this stage, that there is a limit to how far you can go with this application. And that became apparent to me when I was doing the lesson on the verbs. And they gave me a sentence which in English translated into: I am not a duck. Yes, you heard that correctly, I am not a duck. I only heard this phrase I thought, well, that's not very useful, is it? There are certain things that maybe make sense, maybe duck was a good word to use because of the grammar, maybe they're just trying to teach me new vocabulary. But practically, if your aim is to not seem stark raving mad, you aren't going to be running around saying I am not a duck to people on a daily basis. 

So I decided I would compare what they do in Irish with what they do in languages I already know. So I changed my account and I tried French and Spanish and I tried their higher level test, and I was right. There are limits involved, because, for example, one of the main problems is that when you get more advanced, they only can accept the responses they have programmed into the system. And if you give an alternative answer that is all the same right, they might well mark it wrong, which can get quite frustrating.

That said, Duolingo has been extremely successful, and whilst I might be criticizing its ability to make you completely fluent in the language. The founder, it has to be said, never intended for that to be its purpose. The founder is a man called Luis von Ahn and he was born in Guatemala, where he noticed that it was very difficult for people to learn English, very expensive. However, he decided it will, all the same, be useful for people to have those skills. So he thought that he would develop a way that would be free and easy, and that would give people the basics of English. It has since then been an astronomical success, and it now has over 200 employees, and according to one source, more than 27.5 million active users every month. And what they aim to do is to be as addictive as possible. 

If you've ever used it, you will know that the app has a little bird, an avatar, which pops up every single day to remind you to use the application, and it can become quite irritating. It really is quite insistent on you to log in and complete a lesson or just to top up the points on this section. And then what that does do is it maintains a very high interest which as we all know is a key factor in learning a language. However, it's not necessarily very useful for improving your level, which is limited by the very nature of the application. Once the learning language through Duolingo is probably not going to be very useful whenever you go to open a bank account. It might be helpful when you're trying to navigate a situation on holiday, such as reading a menu, or if the worst should come to the worst, to repeat, rather insistently that I am not a duck. Thank you.

注：第6段only加粗因为我不确定，听了好多遍，我已经麻木了233