Duolingo

[alwaysonadiet1]

Is duolingo useful for modern language GCSEs or are there better/more targeted resources? Thanks.

BBC Bitesize?

My daughter (13) uses it to learn a language herself, not through school. She loves it and says the little challenges and quizzes etc. keep her motivated.

Duolingo is good, but there are better ways to do well in MFL GCSE. The key ways to do well are learn your vocab and learn your verbs. It's not very exciting sadly but it will make a massive difference.

Ways to learn vocab - 5 new words a day - get someone to test you; post-its all over the house; record the vocab and listen on your phone on the way to school; make up songs; learn it by topic; make mood boards that relate to topics; write it in different colours - adjectives in blue, nouns in pink etc.

I like Duolingo for sure but if you have a year 10 student trying to get a better MFL GCSE they need to focus.

Dd1 uses Blooket.

BBC Bitesize is definitely better than Duolingo imho.

Have you tried asking the school to see what you can do to support the learning?

I think they use Active Learn at dd1's school.

Duolingo is good for practice but doesn’t cover grammar in any detail. Bitesize is probably better.

Thank you all

I will say though that I learned way more in 200 days of Duolingo than I did in 5 years of secondary school. It probably doesn't have the exact vocab on the GCSE tests but it's a good supplement.

Its all helps. There is also Memrise.

Duolingo keeps you motivated and is good for ticking off daily small chunks. It mixes writing, speaking and listening. The sounds are really useful - ie they say a sound (eg 'eee') and you work out which verb assembly it is (eg ei, ie, ee) - I would have loved something like that at school.

However it doesn't teach the grammar, and there are quite a few errors in the German one (I did German at uni and am rusty: language can change, but based on the discussion threads (just individuals), I'd be more inclined to say they are errors) (yesterday it scored me wrong for not translating 'ok' as 'ok', and refusing to use 'super').

I found belatedly (ie well after school and uni) that taking a list of words on a walk etc is really good for learning them (I wish I'd done that every day on the way to school!). Tomorrow I shall take a small list of Italian and a small list of German to the garage!