Hey there, guys! How are you doing? I hope you are having an amazing Sunday wherever you are. No holiday for me today, cuz’ I have decided to start a new series called “App of the month”. I will review and share with you the app that I have used and loved the most in the past few weeks.

As I have mentioned in my first ever motivational post, people usually waste a lot of time on their phones. Which kind of makes sense from a certain point of view. There are many moments of inactivity during a person’s day. Whether you are waiting on a line, or you are on your commute, or you just want to take a break from work. Your phone is always on hand, ready to keep you busy.

It hurts me so much to think about how many people play Candy Crush or other pointless & time wasting games in their free time. Because they do not realize that they are just giving away their time, for nothing.

After I have posted the previously mentioned article on the blog, one of my readers asked me what language learning app I would recommend to her. The app that I have been using in the past two years is, as you might have guessed, Duolingo.

Duolingo

Duolingo is a free language learning mobile app, which runs on both Android and iOS. I have recently discovered that you can also use it on your computer, which makes it even cooler. Duolingo offers more than 40 different courses in 23 languages, having more than 200 million users all over the world. It uses gamification in order to motivate the users to progress and make the learning process more engaging. It uses a system of XP points, bonuses and rewards.

Duolingo makes language learning fun and easy. It has several types of exercises. Listening, speaking, selecting the missing word, translating a sentence or even having a conversation with a bot, where you can speak or type different answers to questions or other requests.

I recommend you use the app in parallel with a notebook, at least that is what I do. It helps a lot, because you can note everything and have all the unknown words written down. This way you can always come back and review them. The notebook has proven to be especially useful for Japanese in my case. There are all sorts of new characters and complicated expressions ( for a beginner ). It really helps to have all of them written somewhere in case you forget the meaning or pronunciation.

My progress

As you can see in the pictures below, which are screenshots from my phone, the languages that I am currently learning are French, Spanish, German and Japanese.

I have gotten to a 125 day streak for each of these languages. But I recently stopped because it started feeling like a chore. I would do all four languages every single day for 4 months, but it started to really make me feel uncomfortable. So I had to take a break. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the app, it is brilliantly made and it really helped me a lot. But I have been super busy lately and I was not able to focus on it anymore. So the wisest decision was for me to stop using it for a while. But I am planning to start again as soon as possible. And maybe even beat my 125 days streak. 🙂

Conclusions

I sincerely recommend Duolingo to absolutely everybody, it is a fun and easy way to learn a new language or practice one that you already know. If you download the mobile app, make sure to add me, my username is AlexandraBulac. We can compete with each other and see each other’s progress, and we can even help each other to learn and stay motivated!

I am wishing you guys an amazing Sunday night, and see you tomorrow at 8:00 PM with the Fashion article!

Alex