Online translation a new way to learn a language fast?

This week’s New Scientist reports (online link below- it’s a short piece in the physical edition on p. 19) that Duolingo – a free online service designed to help people learn a new language by translating web content is working very well.

To probe the site’s effectiveness, Roumen Vesselinov at the City University of New York used standard tests of language ability… he found that students needed an average of 34 hours to learn the equivalent of … the first semester of a university Spanish course.

I have just been over to Duolingo’s site myself – refreshing some French – and it is certainly easy to use. The site’s blog shows that this project has some strong values and has set itself some big targets – it looks well worth exploring.

Related articles

• Learning a New Language is Fun and Easy with Duolingo (iphone.appstorm.net)
• Use Duolingo to Learn a New Langauge in the New Year (freetech4teachers.com)
• Study: Learning Spanish With Duolingo Can Be More Effective Than College Classes Or Rosetta Stone (techcrunch.com)
• Duolingo gives language learning a jump start (newscientist.com)
• Duolingo: Learn a Language and Translate the Web (englishblog.com)