Beyond the Duolingo Dilemma: Unlocking Fluency through Context
Duolingo gets you started, but true fluency requires a contextual leap.
There is a considerable gap between the ‘value proposition’ Duolingo offers its users and how the users actually perceive, experience, and benefit from it. Critics as well as dedicated users of the platform agree that Duolingo falls short when it comes to acquiring genuine language fluency. Despite this, there is also consensus that it is a good platform to start engaging with a secondary or foreign language, acquire vocabulary, and gain familiarity. My own experience with the app supports this notion. While learning French and Russian, I accumulated an impressive vocabulary of around 2000 words in each language. However, this did not translate into fluidity in thought composition or spontaneous articulation. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that this issue is not just unique to Duolingo. Many traditional language courses also cannot promise to deliver fluency by the programme's conclusion. To gain mastery, learners inevitably and necessarily must continue to engage with the language through multiple means, such as content consumption and discussions, over an extended period of time. Capitalising on this gap by designing a software solution to bridge it could be a complimentary value proposition of immense potential, particularly considering the market and user base Duolingo has already explored and captured.
Understanding the 'Gap'
This gap is fascinating when we consider how children acquire their native language. With a limited vocabulary of perhaps as few as 150–200 words, they begin to form sentences and are able to express themselves. Remarkably, they achieve this without memorising any grammar rules or syntax charts. Upon closer inspection, it will be evident that children are continuously immersed in contextual environments, and their vocabulary accumulation happens through the gradual internalisation of the relationships between objects and their functions. The context provided by the surrounding environment serves as an anchor for vocabulary accumulation and is one of the major factors that facilitates articulation and achieving fluency. Yet conventional language learning courses in general and Duolingo in particular often overlook this aspect or skip context completely. Instead, they focus heavily on memorising rules and structures using spaced repetition of decontextualized exercises. They value function over a deeper understanding of language in context. This is also, coincidentally, the most frequently claimed reason language learners give for their lack of fluency after completing a Duolingo course. While vocabulary building is important, fluency requires learners to go beyond isolated words and sentences and practice language in a meaningful way, replicating the contextual environment children experience. The importance of context is also highlighted by the fact that even training large language models (LLMs) in languages is extensively based on ‘context’ provided to them through the use of the mathematical value ‘cosine similarity’. However, the challenge lies in modelling software that can effectively replicate these contextual environments to facilitate seamless language learning.
What exactly are Articulation and Fluency? A Programming Analogy
Coincidentally, and funnily enough, software design and articulation are very similar. In the object-oriented programming world, software design involves organising various classes of interacting entities as objects to simulate the state and changes occurring in a dynamic system. Language, too, supplies various classes of words—parts of speech—for describing and communicating situations and events in the external environment. Nouns designate objects, adjectives describe their properties, verbs and adverbs indicate their states, and other parts of speech like prepositions, articles, and conjunctions position these objects within a hierarchical structure relative to one another. Thus, a sentence is, in essence, like a function or a method that captures an event or a change in state resulting from interactions between these linguistic objects. Vocabulary.com defines articulation as
“the act of expressing something in a coherent verbal form"
But viewed from the perspective of this analogy, articulation is essentially the simulation or modelling of interactions among objects in the virtual reality of imagination. The faster this modelling, the more fluid the articulation. Conversational fluency is achieved when one is articulate enough to instantly model an event or describe a state. Conventional language learning, especially Duolingo, however, focuses on the functional aspects of language, which is why, after a certain point, the learner reaches a plateau and accumulates vocabulary without making any further gains in articulation ability. A course modelled using the object-oriented paradigm can thus be extremely beneficial to the learner because of the contextual environment it provides. The context not only anchors the accumulated vocabulary, but it also serves as an implicit reference point, highlighting the role each word plays in the sentence structure. It is also significantly more efficient in terms of design, as it is now possible to construct a single knowledge graph (language learning data) that can be used to teach any language from any other language.
The Implementation - Easier Said Than Done:
The primary purpose of language, as is widely acknowledged, is to facilitate communication, and all languages use the exact same classes of words—parts of speech—to achieve this in their own way. However, ironically, Duolingo, which is a software solution to teach languages, has different courses to teach different languages in the way they are modelled. There is no single model. This is ironic because, in software development, repetition is generally considered undesirable and inefficient. But Duolingo cannot avoid this inefficiency due to the fact that it takes a functional approach while designing its courses. But curating a language learning course from an object-oriented paradigm may not be as easy as it sounds. An upper intermediate level of proficiency in any language requires familiarity with about 4000 odd words, and creating a context for every word, each with several forms of its own, is a humanly impossible task. But with the emergence of LLMs and the processing power they can boast of, the task is no longer impossible. Neither is it difficult; it is just a bit tricky and needs a little bit of conviction.
note: this is a three part essay on traditional language learning methodology. to follow:
part 2: What Ails Duolingo: A Comprehensive Analysis of its Value Proposition Canvas
part 3: Maya: The AI based Contextual Leap to Bridge the Gap