A Little Birdy That Taught me Chinese

In a previous long-form article I wrote extensively about my attempt to use my competitiveness to improve my Chinese (www.life-sparring.com/blog/2017/04/03/angry-cards).

I made it - the green owl looked pleased!

I still use the Pleco Flashcards, but recently got obsessed with another gamified Chinese trainer: Duolingo.

Duolingo is possibly the most downloaded language learning app and is long well established. However, it took them till the end of 2017 to support Mandarin learning. Apparently, it was not easy to transfer the playful Duolingo approach to character-based languages like Chinese and Japanese.

Those problems you can still feel a little bit. I don’t think you would be able to learn Chinese only by using Duolingo. However, as a companion for more traditional forms of learning or in combination with Pleco, it actually works quite while.

I am somewhat surprised that I really completed the entire course, mainly by doing one little lesson per day during the subway ride to work.

Try it out, it is for free and download Duolingo from the app store of your choice.