Bots May Finally Teach Me French

I’ve been using Duolingo for over two years to learn Spanish and, more recently, French, and this app’s capabilities are almost magical. But Duolingo is getting even better with the introduction of bots. And this changes everything.

I don’t normally talk up self-up topics, but one of the things I’m really passionate about is learning. And while my focus has shifted over time, I make a point to set time aside each day to learn … something. Part of this effort has been directed at maintaining my software development skills, and I’ve spent much time over the past several years learning the basics of iOS programming and, more recently, trying to complete an Android Basics Nanodegree at Udacity. (I’m 44 percent done as I write this.)

But in a less industry-focused sense, I’ve also spent a lot of time on language learning over the years. My wife and I travel internationally each year and have vague goals to spend more time outside the U.S. after the kids are out of the house. And we understand that at least a basic understanding of the local language is key to having a great experience in certain places. Especially France, which is almost certainly our favorite.

I took Spanish in high school, poorly, as it turns out, as I had to do so for all four years. My wife took French and, not surprisingly if you know both of us, was the better student. She also took French a bit in college, while I was happy at the time to walk away from any language learning.

I wish I could do this over again, obviously. But you don’t know where life is going to take you, and whatever immaturity drove my disdain for language learning in high school was arguably not my fault either. Anyway, it happened.

On our first trip to Paris in 1993, we relied on my wife’s rusty college-level French, and it didn’t go well. She knew basic words—like cow, or meat—but not useful terms you’d see in restaurants. It is perhaps an indictment of how language learning was taught in U.S. public schools and in higher education in the 1980’s, but whatever: She wasn’t as prepared for France as she had hoped.

For my part, I didn’t know a word of French. I recall walking out of a cafe on our first morning in Paris, nervously doing the math on the bill—France was still on the franc at the time—which amounted to an incredible $85, about half of the money we had for the trip. “We just paid $5 per cup of coffee,” I told her, fresh off the boat from America, where refills are free. That was my first experience with espresso, and to be clear, it’s been a whirlwind romance ever since.

Anyway. We didn’t travel internationally again for ten years. Like many, we started a family, bought a home, and just sort of settled into life. But by the early 2000s, we were bit by the international travel bug again after I turned a Germany work trip into an extended vacation with my wife and two friends. My wife and I visited Paris twice on incredibly cheap tickets in late 2005 and then early 2006. And in August 2006, we headed off to Paris with our kids on our first three-week home swap. We’ve done something similar each summer, often in France, and almost exclusively in Europe.

Being in France, especially outside the safe touristy confines of central Paris, is a not-so-gentle reminder that not knowing the language can be problematic. I recall asking parlez-vous anglais to the harried-looking woman behind a ticket booth cage in the L’Hay Les Roses train station and getting a very stern NON in return: She wasn’t even going to entertain the notion of speaking English, even though it was quite clear her English was better than our French. So we just laughed and muffed our way through some broken French, and got the tickets we needed. I’m sure we ruined ruined that woman’s day in the process as well.C’est la vie.

These early experiences in France triggered a desire to learn the language. My wife took the lead, and we eventually started attending twice-weekly classes at the French Cultural Center in Boston, an excellent resource we are lucky to have. That said, it’s hard to get to, and involves over an hour of car and train travel in both directions. And while I actually did OK in my beginner classes over a year or so, work, business travel, and other excuses eventually got in the way. What I was left with is what I call “restaurant French,” the ability to mostly understand a French menu and order without worrying that a lamb brain or whatever is going to come out on a plate.

My wife continued taking classes a bit longer than I did, and she was able to turn her college-level French into something truly useful: She could, and still can, converse with the French in their language. This opens doors, in some cases literally. The French love it when you speak French, even if you do so poorly. It’s all about the effort.

I am always busy, but I really wanted to jumpstart my language learning. With smartphones and tablets taking off, I started examining mobile apps, and in mid-2014, my wife started talking about “the little owl” in a language-learning app she was using, and how she would practice every day because she didn’t want to make him sad. It was clearly some form of gamification, which I found interesting, but I eventually gave it a shot. The app, of course, is Duolingo.

I wrote about Duolingo previously in Better Language Learning Through Technology, in early 2015. At that time, I was using the app to learn Spanish, since I at least had some background in it, and I felt that Spanish would be easier than French. (Which it is, as it turns out.)

I continued learning Spanish with Duolingo through August or September 2015, when I finished the learning tree in the app and tired of just refreshing old skills. So at that point, I switched to French and have spent the past year learning this language again. A week or two ago, I also finished the learning tree for French, having learned about 36 percent of the language, at least according to the app.

Duolingo is without a doubt the single best language learning app there is, but you can only learn so much with this kind of solution. Nothing beats immersion, actually interacting with people in that language. And while Duolingo does offer some ways in which you speak back a typed phrase, it’s not accurate at all. You could easily fake your way past these tests.

My wife finished the French learning tree in Duolingo long ago and has expanded into other apps, mostly for vocabulary building. But a few weeks back, Duolingo made an interesting update to its app—currently on iOS only—that adds a new interactive element and makes it even better.

Yes, they’ve added bots.

If that sounds silly, or like Duolingo is just giving into a recent tech fad, then you’re not getting it. These bots take this app past the limitations of its previous design and let you engage in actual conversations in which you are rewarded for more complex answers and responses. These conversations cannot substitute for true immersion—they’re very much context-based, which helps set your mind for the possible interactions that can occur—but they do take a step in that direction.

So for the past 10 days, I’ve been keeping up with the learning tree, of course. But rather than get bored by that, as I did with Spanish, I also have a quick conversation with a bot each day. And so far, at least, that has kept things fresh. Mostly because these conversations have introduced new terms, and are more complex interactions that anything I’ve seen in the app to date.

Consider, for example, today’s conversation, called “To Catch a Thief.” Here, we meet Inspector Boulot, are told that we will be his assistant today, and off we go.

The first question is simple enough: Ca va bien? Are you doing well?

You can answer this with one word, Oui. But you’re rewarded for more complex answers. For example, you might want to say, yes, thanks, I am doing well. How are you? So something like, Oui, ca va bien. Et toi?

As it turns out, that is a great answer, so you’re rewarded with 2 additional points. A simple Oui would have gotten nothing, and something like Ca va bien probably would have been worth 1 point.

On it goes. There are new words which never came up before in the app, like cambrioleur, which means burglar, or indice, which means clue.

The bots often use pictures so you can write a reply based on what you see. Here, we’re shown the cartoon crime scene and asked if we see a clue. That black glove—un gant noir—is clearly the clue, and that answer is worth 2 points.

What I like about the bot learning in Duolingo is that it hits the right difficulty level, is a step up from the interactions that the app previously provided. And this is a feature that will get better over time, Duolingo says, because it is monitoring what users type, seeing how people respond in different situations. And in those cases where the response was OK but not accepted by the app, changes will be made. So while some answers I think are fine are not accepted, maybe they will be over time.

This is exciting to me, and while these first Duolingo bots will never take the place of true person-to-person communication and immersion, they are a step in the right direction. And a fascinating peek at the future of both computing and language learning.