DUOLINGO: REVIEWS AND GUIDES

Duolingo is one of the most popular, and most downloaded, language learning apps in the world. It offers free and fun learning for all ages, with even more content with its Plus version at only £6.49 a month!

Duolingo (Free version):

Units:

Duolingo structures its lessons following the science of how the brain learns a language, which is learning, consolidation, and practice. There are over 100 units for every language course on Duolingo, each respecting the language learning science while slowly drip feeding you new vocab and structures, as well as making the experience enjoyable. Each unit will have three to five lessons, with two fun stories which are unique bite sized comprehensions, as well as two to three personalised practice sessions, which use algorithms to target weak areas. At the end of the unit, there will be a small test which then wraps up the unit.

XP, Gems, and Leagues: Through lessons, reviews, and practice, you will gain XP (experience points) which will be recorded. The point of XP? At the start of every week, you will be put into a league of 30 Duolingo users who will compete with the amount of XP they earn. The person with the most XP recorded in that week, will win the league and gain ‘gems’. Gems are used in the Duolingo gem hub to buy XP boosters, streak freezes, and additional units. XP and gem rewards is a great motive to use Duolingo consistently! Winners in the top ten of the leagues will advance to the next harder league to gain more rewards. However, the bottom ten of the leagues will be demoted to an easier league. Promotion and demotion will also keep you working on Duolingo.

Hearts and Practice:

Duolingo grants free access to all content, even without its subscription. However, you are not given a free leash to its abundant courses! You will start the day with five hearts and for every wrong answer made, you lose one of your five hearts…

There are various ways to regain hearts, like a practice session that is on average three minutes long and regains one heart, or you can wait for them to refill across a four-hour basis during the day. Once all your hearts have been depleted, then access to lessons will be cut off and you will have to resort to the only ways of refilling them, which are practice or patience. Although all content is free, the heart tax can be quite disruptive and annoying.

Duolingo Plus (Super):

Super Duolingo is a £6.49 subscription which will offer you more content and take out the free versions’ irritating features, like hearts. With Super Duolingo, you have unlimited hearts and it removes ads when doing lessons.

With Super Duolingo you will have an unlimited number of hearts, which will mean that your lessons will not be so pressured and forced practice will be completely optional! There will be a practice hub where you can review mistakes, review a story, or do an algorithm made from personalised practice. You will be given timed challenges which will give you large amounts of XP. Disruptive and recurring ads will be removed as well.

After finishing a unit, you will be given a chance to redo the unit on a ‘legendary status’ which will significantly increase the difficulty of the unit’s content and will not offer word guidance. Upon completion of this trial, you will gain twice the amount of XP that you earned upon ordinary unit completion. On free Duolingo, this option had to be paid for with gems but, on Super, you will have unconditional access to this feature.

With Super, you will also be given access to additional speed reviews, which will give you a lot of XP.

Conclusion:

Duolingo is an amazing language educating app which follows the science of language learning, while making it an enjoyable experience.

Duolingo is constantly updating and improving their app.

After three years of use, I would definitely recommend it for keen language learners from any age. It is completely free and the ‘Super version’ acts as an expansion to their app which I also recommend, unless you can tolerate the hearts and ads. It contains months, if not years, of reviewable content with over 100 languages to learn.

In my opinion, this is one of the best language educating apps that I have used.

Stepan K, Year 13 writes...

In the autumn of 1940, hundreds of cargo ships travel across the Atlantic. It’s a desperate attempt to keep Britain supplied in its war effort against Germany, but they’re being decimated by enemy ships and submarines. In 1940 alone, Germany sank over 1,000 allied ships, and Britain was at risk of being starved of supplies.

The Allies’ response is brutally simple - find a way to build thousands of cargo ships and build them faster than Germany can ever hope to sink them. In just four years, America will construct over 2,700 liberty class cargo ships, and each will be built not inweeks, some in a matter of days. These ugly and hastily built ships will be loaded to the brim and sent overseas, and they will help the Allies win the war.

By late 1940, much of Europe had fallen to Nazi Germany and the British now stood alone. The British supplies were quickly dwindling, due to their supply lines being cut off. German U-boats, warships and aircraft were inflicting heavy losses to incoming shipping traffic, sinking ships faster than Britain could replace them. The United States, although not yet at war, was playing a vital role in supplying Britain with its war effort, and its enormous industrial capacity was critical to helping Britain stay in the fight. With Germany sinking ships daily, Britain and America desperately needed a way to keep all that war material moving. The problem was that, in the entire decade prior, America had only built a couple of dozen ships. So, at the start of 1941, US president Franklin Roosevelt announced the emergency shipbuilding programme. It will be an enormous effort to produce ships on an unprecedented scale.

To do this, the Americans will need to build a special kind of ship, the dreadful-looking object President Roosevelt described as liberty ships when he first saw their design. Time magazine nicknamed them ugly ducklings. They’re not much to look at and, from a design standpoint, there’s also nothing remarkable about them. With 10,000 tonnes of cargo capacity, they are a large ship for the day, but they’re also obsolete - their design is 60 years old. If the Atlantic seas are rough enough and moving in the wrong direction, liberty ships might not be able to move forward.

Most liberty ships were given light defences, three-inch bow guns, four- or five-inch turn guns, and anti-aircraft weaponry. They were crewed by 45 volunteer merchant marines, plus one or two dozen Navy-armed guards. However, the heroic men who served aboard these ships were vulnerable and paid a heavy price. Liberty ships aren’t remarkable for their capabilities out at sea. The history they made wasn’t in how they were built. Their design is deliberately basic because that’s going to allow thousands to be built, with most being constructed in just a few weeks. They weren’t expected to last their engineered life span of only five years. Yet, if a liberty ship can make just one single trip across the ocean with cargo, that’s a success worth the $2 million price tag. That’s how desperate the situation was.

The task of constructing liberty ships will be assigned to 18 shipyards spread across the coastal United States, and they’ll soon be producing liberty ships at an incredible rate. By 1943, the shipyards launched a new ship on average every eight hours, and two revolutionary changes in shipbuilding made these enormous feet possible.

The first is welding. Until this point, almost all ships were built by riveting pieces together, a slow process requiring skill and physical strength.

The second revolutionary step will bring assembly line logic to the shipbuilding industry. Instead of building a ship from start to finish, thousands of components will be manufactured simultaneously at different locations and then brought to the shipyard for final assembly. It used to take six months to construct a liberty-sized ship. By 1944 it was taking, on average, only 42 days, and shipyards would compete to see how fast they could build them. One shipyard would finish a liberty ship in a month. Then another would break this record by doing it in just three weeks. In November of 1942, the Richmond shipyards in California managed to build a liberty ship in just four days and 15 hours and then it broke in two. Early liberties did break in half. They were notorious for developing serious structural cracks, as welding instead of riveting meant cracks could quickly spread throughout the hull.

At sea, liberty ships were vulnerable not because they lacked serious defensive weaponry but because they were slow. Convoys of liberty ships, numbering 50 or 60, would lumber along at just 10 mph at full emergency speed. A liberty ship could push 13 mph, but a German surface U-boat could do 20 mph, making liberties easy prey, especially at night. T o improve the odds, liberty ships were guarded by escorts and more vulnerable liberties (those loaded with munitions or fuel) travelled at the centre of the formation. Hundreds were sunk or critically damaged throughout the war, but by mid-1941, the sheer number of liberty ships out at sea, along with an increase in their armed escorts, overwhelmed German forces. Advances in anti-submarine technologies also started stamping out the U-boat threat.

After the war, many liberties were put into the reserve fleets or sold off to post-war merchant cargo fleets by the 1960s. Their ancient design made them far too expensive to operate, and most were sold for scrap. Today only three remaining liberties survive to remind us of their enormous contribution to winning the Second World War.