Once participants ran through the program, they were tested on their recall of the correct words. Since these Dutch speakers didn’t know Swahili, each selection was essentially a guess, and after each guess, the participant got feedback on whether they guessed correctly. To do so, the researchers taught Dutch speakers Swahili vocabulary in a method Duolingo users might recognize: A computer program would show a Dutch word and then provide either one, two, or four Swahili words for the user to select as the correct translation. (Again, think hedgehog instead of groom.) There’s plenty of evidence that surprise helps rats or primates passively learn things like how to get a treat, but Verguts and his colleagues wanted to see whether reward prediction errors could improve humans’ ability to learn something intentionally, like new vocabulary. Verguts’ paper studied what researchers in the field call “reward prediction errors”-the concept that learning happens when you encounter an unexpected outcome. He seemed pleased that his research had been of use, though, and he agreed that the “extrapolation” Blanco and her team were assuming could hold water. Tom Verguts, a Ghent psychology professor who heads up the lab where the research was conducted, told me he’d never heard of Duolingo, and wasn’t aware that researchers there were familiar with his work. Sam Dalsimer, Duolingo’s global head of communications, told me this approach is based in part on research conducted by a team of psychologists from Ghent University in Belgium, which was published in PLOS in 2018-so I got in touch with the paper’s authors. Voila, you have been forced to pay extra attention. “It forces you to attend more carefully to what you’re seeing.” For example, when you see a sentence like, “The bride is a woman and the groom is a …,” your brain has likely filled in the word man, so the actual word Duolingo uses- hedgehog-is a surprise. “When there’s a conflict between your expectation and the reality, that triggers responses in the brain,” said Blanco. I asked how, exactly, that would work, and Blanco explained that people often learn best when there’s a mismatch between what they expect and what they actually encounter. Some teams have always enjoyed sneaking in weird or funny sayings, but over time, course creators made an explicit decision to include them on the theory that weird sentences have the potential to boost learning. Lessons in Norwegian and Swedish, for instance, often include references to ’90s grunge music. Cindy Blanco, a learning scientist at Duolingo, explained that the company’s content is generated by language-specific teams, each of which has their own quirks. To find out, I went straight to the source. I could imagine very specific scenarios in which I’d need to know how to say “he drank three bottles of Baijiu and he is sleeping now” or “I have 1,500 cat photos on my phone,” but they hardly seemed like the kind of sentences I’d need to know how to write in the long term. There was “This year I cannot celebrate Chinese New Year with my family,” and this simple but terrifying question: “Are you happy?” Soon enough, though, my lessons veered into the absurd. My lessons started out simply enough with new vocabulary and phrases to practice grammar-and occasionally, there was a sentence that made me chuckle, like, “He is handsome but not a good person,” or “There are too many people here.” Then there were some that made me unexpectedly emotional in the context of the pandemic. Instead, it makes you jump right in and start matching words with their meanings or translating sentences. Whether you’ve already got some language proficiency under your belt or are starting out as a complete beginner, Duolingo doesn’t teach languages the way you might have learned them in school, with lists of vocabulary and verb conjugations. If you want to learn a language faster than ever, I highly recommend reading Benny Lewis’s book on how to learn a language in JUST 3 months. Want to learn a language quickly and never forget it? Check out this book on Amazon about how to stay fluent in a language over time without losing fluency! Every Duolingo Language Course For Arabic Speakers: RELATED: How Many Checkpoints Are in the Duolingo French Course?
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