7 tips to make learning a new language on Duolingo much easier

Woman in bed looking at her phone Duolingo is a simple and fun way to get started learning the basics of a new language.

I've been using the app for a little over a year now to teach myself French. I'm no master just yet, but I've learned a lot about the language, and the app itself

There are several ways to tweak the Duolingo app to make it more efficient for you — several of these tips really do make it easier to learn the language you're trying to understand.

Here are 7 simple ways to better learn a new language on Duolingo:

1. Set your daily goal to "casual" so you're responsible for only one lesson per day.

Setting your daily goal to casual makes it so you only need to do one lesson per day to keep maintain a streak, making it easier to keep a streak.

A streak in Duolingo is exactly what it sounds like: If you complete one lesson per day for consecutive days, you start a streak. If you maintain your streak for 10 days, 20 days, 30 days, or beyond, you'll get a prize.

Prizes usually in the form of "lingots," Duolingo's in-app currency used to purchase in-app power-ups, bonus skill levels, and fun little features related to the app's owl mascot, Duo. So it's beneficial to maintain your streak for as long as possible.

That's why it's smart to set your goals to just one lesson per day. It's a simple mental trick: The fewer lessons you're on the hook for, the less likely you are to shirk off your studies due to laziness. You can always do more than one lesson, but after one lesson, the app counts your daily goal as complete.

2. Beware of easy grammatical missteps such as plural versus singular, masculine versus feminine.

This is both a Duolingo tip and a language-learning tip in general. In learning a language, it's pretty easy to confuse singular and plural, and masculine and feminine terms, but Duolingo also tries to confuse you sometimes: It'll present you with multiple similar options.

This has tripped me up plenty of times, where I'll choose one option too quickly. In general, just be careful about reading all of the available options before making a decision.

Failing a lesson isn't the worst thing in the world — you'll just redo it until you get it right — but if you want to get better at learning a language, and do it efficiently, be careful about reading every question fully before responding.

3. Switching to other apps may reload your lesson on Duolingo, which can make you lose your progress.

There is a workaround, however, though it's not very convenient: If you're in the middle of a session but you switch to another app, simply access Duolingo from the "recents" section on your smartphone (or multi-tasking on an iPhone). If you attempt to return to the Duolingo app by pressing the app's icon, it may reload the lesson and you may lose your progress on that lesson.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider