Duolingo language learning

[AgaPanthers]

DS is in bottom set (of two) for French at school, he is in Y7, and has done French since Y1 at school, but I wasn't really happy with his attainment - he seemed to confuse things like je suis and j'ai, and I thought he should be doing much better.

Anyway, I signed him up to Duolingo www.duolingo.com at the start of November, and he's been doing it since then. Now he does it every day without fail, and has done for the last 40 days consecutively. He does it on my ipad, and I have it set to 'serious', which means 20 minutes every day, after which he gets another tick on the graph.

Just had parents evening, the French teacher was astonished at his progress. She said they had been set a task to find words beginning with 'C' in a picture, and he had come out with not only the obvious ones like chien (dog) and chat, but also chienne (bitch), and even 'cou' (neck (of the dog)). I think she thought we had helped him with it, but nope, he did it all by himself.

Really excellent piece of educational software. He is on Level 10 of 25 at the moment, he seems to find the software effective and motivating, so I guess he will do a second modern language for GCSE, which I hadn't anticipated, and is very pleasing.

Much better than Rosetta Stone by the way, which is expensive commercial software and not half as good.

[JeanSeberg]

This sounds great, will have a look at the German for my son.

Also annoys me that the grammar seems to be taught in a slapdash way these days.