Back in August I decided to complete every natural language on Duolingo to the first checkpoint. I accomplished that in March, so this post is a bit overdue, but here are my thoughts:
- The Arabic course spends way too much time on the alphabet. Granted it's a very difficult script but I should be able to do more complex sentences than "Omar has a garage" by the first checkpoint.
- Chinese is one of the two courses I'd already been working on, and am about halfway through. I feel like the quality has been starting to slip, though, as the later lessons are not as lenient with sentences with multiple possible translations.
- The Czech course seems more focused on the literary side of the language, and a lot of things made this course confusing. I ended up coming back to it after working on the other Slavic languages, and that did help, but completing the checkpoint was more of a slog for Czech.
- Danish was a breeze. Almost too easy.
- Didn't have much trouble with Dutch either, though I have no clue what stress is even though I aced that lesson.
- Finnish was fun and challenging, well put together and had lots of culture references, both traditional and popular. Ended up coming back to Finnish the course, which I wound up completing. I will say the second half of the course is not as well done, however, with more rigid answers and more confusing tips (Kangaroo words? huh??)
- French seemed like it was made by a professional.
- German was very well-made too. I had less trouble with the cases than I did in college.
- I enjoyed Greek for the most part, but kept getting the conjugations for "is" confused with the pronouns. On my second pass though, I found the tips pretty thin.
- Hawaiian was interesting. Not too hard, not too easy.
- Why does the Hebrew course not include vowels? I know they aren't normally used but they ARE used for teaching. I ended up not doing this course.
- I was enjoying Hindi until I got to the pronouns. That lesson might be one of, if not the, hardest out of all the lessons I did on this project. When I came back to it, I found myself feeling I need to start over. If I ever decide to seriously study Hindi, I probably won't use Duolingo.
- Hungarian is a mess! Between inconsistent word order- to the point I was always second-guessing which word was the object or subject- and only accepting one correct answer, I eventually gave up.
- Indonesian was a breath of fresh air, which makes sense as it's meant to be easy to learn.
- Didn't have much trouble with Italian as I studied Spanish in school, but there are a lot of false cognates between them. Siete, for example.
- Lentition was really the only part of Irish that I really struggled with.
- I struggled a lot with Japanese kanji, but I don't know how much of that was on me or on Duolingo.
- The last lesson before the first Korean checkpoint was on politeness, which I struggle with in English. I decided to skip it and come back once I've completed the others... and by the time I did, the course was rearranged so that I only had the checkpoint itself left. Not sure how I feel about that.
- Latin felt overly focused on Christianity and all the place names were in the United States.
- Navajo should never have been released. It's way too short, has no tips or sound, and is rote vocabulary memorization with very little grammar.
- Norwegian seemed little different from Danish. Since it's apparently the most popular course, this was a bit of a letdown.
- I was worried about Polish due to my experiences with Czech, but this course is a lot better. Of course, I was also more prepared, as I did the course with a noun declension site on another tab...
- Didn't have much trouble with Portuguese as I studied Spanish in school, but for whatever reason I could only type ê on the VIETNAMESE keyboard. Similar to French, I can't figure out how to type macrons despite them being legitimate parts of the language. Just... why?
- If English is German pretending to be French, then Romanian is Latin pretending to be Slavic.
- Russian was another fun challenge, grammar-wise it's just Polish with a different alphabet. All the unwritten y-sounds were the tricky part. I will say however that switching between Cyrillic and Latin keyboards made Microsoft Word act very strange.
- Scots Gaelic is pretty much Irish without the arcane spelling system. I also found the word order very disorienting.
- Me encanta español.
- I did fine on the Swahili course itself, but all the comments are complaints from three years ago. Not sure what to make of that.
- Swedish is pretty much Danish or Norwegian with German spelling. That said, the sj sound is tricky since it can appear as other sounds. I call it the Loki sound.
- The Turkish course brought back memories of a family trip to Istanbul and using Rosetta Stone to prepare. I feel like Duolingo would've been more helpful.
- The comments on the Ukrainian course were mostly complaints about the vocabulary being "too Russian." On a sidenote, the week I started this course was the week Russia invaded Ukraine, so... yeah...
- Vietnamese was a lot of fun. Knowing how Chinese grammar worked was a big help, since Vietnamese also uses classifiers and compound words are made similarly.
- Welsh is in dire need of quality control.
- Yiddish was underwhelming, as outside of the script it just felt like a recap of German. Then again it is in beta...
- Haitian Creole was released while I was working on Vietnamese, but the very first lesson had no hints. I think I could have struggled through, but my experiences with the other beta courses led me to decide it's not worth it.
The biggest takeaway from this project is that one week is really not long enough to get the feel of a language. I've also found myself using the word hints as a crutch, especially with the non-Latin languages, despite taking extensive notes the whole time, and I can read Greek and Cyrillic just fine (Hangul and Devanagari as well, but less confidently). I'm shooting for a 365-day streak, and am less than a month away now, but in all honesty I'm starting to feel I'd get more out of another site.
Edit- Skipped Swedish in the original post and also expanded on a couple things
Edit 2- Updated a couple entries after returning to those languages
Edit 3- More updates, and added some general thoughts
N 
C1 
B2 
B1 
B1 
A1 
A1
~ B1: 
Lower A1: 
Dabbling: 
