Has anyone used Duolingo for primary aged children learning French?

[Panamanian]

Has anyone used Duolingo for children’s French? My two primary aged boys currently do French once a week as an extra activity at school, but it takes up their lunch break so they really resent it, and to be honest I also think it’s important that they get out for a runaround during the day. I’m keen however for them to continue learning French and wondered about doing Duolingo. It says you can do 5 minutes a day and get a family plan so they’d each have a profile. It works out cheaper than the French lessons too. I’d be very interested to hear from others who have used it and whether you’d recommend it. Thank you!

It's not a replacement for actual teaching. It's somewhat useful at building vocabulary but they won't come out of it being able to construct their own sentences or say anything very useful in French.

With things like that, i kinda think ‘it wouldn’t hurt’.
Kids are little sponges for that sort of information.

I use Duolingo for maths, which has been well worth it for me.
I did the Spanish module and it was a useful learning experience, as a novice.

It's not good at the why. DS has used it to learn some basic German (7) , the kind of thing that might be almost useful on holiday, but it didn't teach the grammatical building blocks other than for regular words/formations. I speak German so I'm able to help. It's fun for him and his I think to get his brain used to another language at a young age as his school don't offer any languages, but I wouldn't scrap french lessons and replace with Duolingo. The owl is also really annoying.

Yes did for some weeks but they didn’t have a phone so we didn’t really keep the habit up.
It’s a little extra practice/vocab but not like learning French.

My nephew aged 7 uses my stepdads one.

It's also sometimes wrong with translation as it is based on American English. For example it will tell you you're wrong to say the dining car is at the back of the train rather than in the back of the train

Thank you, some really helpful viewpoints. I should say that the school lessons seem pretty basic to me - they learn songs and vocabulary but a lot of the homework seems to be “colour in the picture” or “match the word to the picture” but I take the point about an app not supplementing actual lessons. It’s a hard one - I don’t like the idea of just giving up, but also don’t really want them to feel forced into something they don’t enjoy, so I was trying to find a compromise!

My children use DuoLingo for Spanish. They are learning Spanish at primary but is very basic eg counting, months. I know it won’t make them fluent Spanish speakers but they enjoy it and will hopefully give them a bit of confidence for secondary school. They also love chess on Duolingo - we have a family plan and get a lot of use from it

I use it for German, just as a personal challenge rather than for any real purpose. It’s not teaching me particularly useful German, unless I’d like to strike up a conversation about my piano-playing cat

I'm still salty after " jardin" meant yard and not garden. 🤣
DS uses it for supplementary Spanish, but says it's nothing like they're learning at school.

I did Duolingo Dutch for 800 and something days, and gave up because it was teaching me some vocab, but no grammar or any real understanding of how to put a sentence together. I realised I was never going go to be able to converse with my Dutch colleagues in their own language, particularly since they all speak excellent English.

I’m now learning some German vocab in prep for an upcoming holiday.

The DC use Duolingo to reinforce what they are learning in language lessons at school - so far Spanish, French, German and Japanese for a bit when DS went to Japanese Club for enrichment.

I

My kids use it for Spanish. They asked to do it off their own back. They already have lessons in school. I think it’s quite good for total beginners.

There’s an old BBC language DVD called Muzzy that might be worth hunting out if it’s online anywhere. My two enjoyed it years ago (but alongside being taught French at school not instead of).

My son has been using duolingo for French since year 4 (now year 7) and is top of his class (and even got an award as 'subject expert' out of his whole year) in languages. He's moved onto spanish now too and is excelling- he's done 5 minutes daily for 3 years so i would say yes!

at beginner level I’d almost say it’s better than a face to face lesson. It’s very repetitive and my dd picked up many more words than she ever did in a taught class.

It has sort of radio program type podcast things to listen to which my dd doesn’t seem keen on but I think something like that where the language flows and is more natural needs to be part of learning a language. Can’t remember the name but she got on better with a French animated kids tv show than the audio resources.

I don’t know if lessons get better as other than the beginner lessons my dd had at school I’m only experienced was my own French at school and she’s better than I ever was in senior school. She is age 10 using Duolingo. But it’s all statements and questions and answers she cannot converse naturally

My DD is now in Yr10, doing Spanish, and their teacher encouraged Duolingo alongside their lessons for the daily exposure. Thry have a streak competition going on.

We just have the free version, no need to pay.

(Id like to point out though.. they will likely be able to order a beer before they knkw their colours with the language order. I also had a lesson of phrases such as "I dont have clothes on" when learning clothing items.

I think it works best alongside language lessons.

Duolingo isn’t good at explaining grammar or how a language constructs sentences

Plus it uses American English, so when DC1 was doing French on Duolingo there were times when Duolingo’s English was causing some confusion.

Au contraire. 😉

I learned how to say ‘Maria bought a white dress for her wedding’.
And if that’s not useful in Madrid, i don’t know what is!

Ah but can you say "head like a fucking orange?" 😄

😂 Not yet!

No one ever notices my name.

I bought the family plan but was then a bit blindsided that all the kids needed separate email addresses - they are primary school aged and don’t have these. Did anyone find a way round this?

@CeciliaMars I set up a gmail account for my son which I have access to/control of for this sort of thing. It will become privately his once he’s old enough to care. 😁 (ie I won’t have knowledge of / access to the password.)
@Panamanian you might want to check out One Third Stories, not the cheapest but they build languages in a really nice way.

Ds used it for a while for a few different languages, none of which he learned. As it is gameified, he just learned how to play the game. I just got annoyed with it as it never tells me why, just rote learning, which I don't get on with.

Yup. Year 6 DC has a 1000 day streak. We supplemented with tutoring when it was clear she has an appetite for languages which focussed more on grammar.

Her tutor wants to put her in for a GCSE in Year 7/8.

All started with Duolingo. She's covered Mandarin / Japanese / French and Spanish. We have a family plan.