Learning a new language

What to Do After Duolingo: The Definitive Guide

Nov 29, 2017 | Link

You’ve finished the entire Duolingo tree — congratulations! But now you’re faced with the inevitable question — what to do after Duolingo?

If you want to keep improving after Duolingo and get the best return on your time, you’ll need to get a little creative and customize your learning experience to match your goals and needs.

This article will give you some actionable ideas to help you build your own post-Duolingo strategy that will propel you towards fluency.

Where you stand after finishing a Duolingo course

An average Duolingo tree teaches you about 2,000 words. It should be more than enough to get a good sense of how the language works and hold most everyday conversations. Not bad for a free online course.

However, vocabulary is just one competency you need to navigate the language with ease.

If you only rely on Duolingo, you won’t have the chance to read long-form content, participate in actual conversations in the target language, or even write utterances of more than one sentence.

Getting to fluency without mastering all these valuable skills (and several more) is just plain impossible.

Even the two competencies most emphasized on Duolingo — vocabulary and grammar — will still require a great deal of practice before you can become reasonably fluent. Remember all these times hover hints saved you from failing an exercise? They won’t be there to help you once you move on from Duolingo.

The key to effective learning is keeping an open mind. There are countless ways to learn a foreign language. Why stick to just one? The skills you’ve been building over your entire Duolingo career have prepared you for more immersive kinds of practice. The natural next step is to give some of them a try, see what works best for you and start developing a balanced language strategy.

It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. As long as you pick activities that are worthy of your time and do them regularly, you’re guaranteed to see progress. It’s also a good idea to change things up every once in a while to give your brain some extra novelty and stimulation.

I’m not saying you should turn your back on Duolingo the moment you complete the last skill in the tree. In my experience, the “Strengthen” option is one of the most underrated features on Duolingo. Try to use it to revisit specific skills that gave you a particularly hard time.

But the sooner you shift your focus to other activities, the sooner you’ll be able to reap the benefits of a varied “language diet”. This post will introduce you to some of the techniques, tools, and resources that will help you along the way.

Vocabulary: How to improve your vocabulary after Duolingo

Finishing a Duolingo tree should give you a solid foundation of essential words and expressions. However, if you’ve ever tried to read an article or listen to a podcast in your target language, you’ve probably noticed that there are still major gaps in your vocabulary.

If your goal is to be able to effortlessly interact with the language as it is used by native speakers, you’ll have to find a way to fill these gaps.

Before choosing the digital tools you’ll be using to expand your vocabulary, you need to make sure they will let you take advantage of a concept known as spaced repetition.

Apps like Duolingo, Memrise, Clozemaster, and Quizlet all use spaced repetition algorithms to choose the best moment to put a previously learned item in front of your eyes.

And if you prefer to build your own vocabulary decks, you should look for something that will do that as well — I’ll have a suggestion for you below.

Use Clozemaster

Clozemaster lets you gamify your learning experience and learn new vocabulary by filling in the blanks (clozes) in sentences. You can use it for free on the Web, Android and iOS. Here are some things that set it apart from other similar solutions:

My advice would be to finish Clozemaster’s Fluency Fast Track. It’s intended to help you get to fluency as fast as possible.

Use Memrise

Memrise is a great-looking app built around user-generated vocabulary courses. It’s available on the Web, Android and iOS. Here are some of its distinguishing features:

I recommend trying out the official courses built by people from Memrise. They have great audio recordings and a nice selection of useful expressions. Just look for the courses with names like “French 1”, “French 2”, etc. If they’re available for your target language, they should be displayed somewhere near the top of the list. Having finished a Duolingo course, you should probably start with something more advanced like “French 4” or “French 5”.

Build your own flashcard deck

Let’s be honest: if you’re serious about learning vocabulary, you should develop your own flashcard deck at some point.

Setting it up takes some time and effort, but once you sort it all out, you’ll actually start saving time.

With a custom deck, you’re no longer stuck with what someone else has decided to include in your lessons. You can focus on these vocabulary items which you have yourself chosen as worthy of your effort. This is especially important for someone who has finished a thematically-organized Duolingo course.

Here are some ideas to help you build your flashcard collection:

General vocabulary tips

Grammar: How to improve your grammar skills after Duolingo

While most Duolingo courses cover an impressive number of relevant grammar topics, they don’t really teach you grammar in any explicit way outside of the brief Tips & Notes sections.

This is usually enough to get an intuitive grasp of the most basic concepts and a quick taste of the more advanced ones. However, if you want to really understand the grammar, you’ll probably have to do your own research.

Here are a few ideas for activities that will help you elevate your grammar skills after completing the Duolingo tree:

Keep a grammar journal

Grammar is a tricky beast, but it has one major weakness: with proper research, it can be reduced to a manageable number of clear-cut topics. You can use this to your advantage and create your very own grammar journal — a place where you’ll be taking apart all kinds of grammar topics and trying to make sense of them.

Study grammar books

I know it’s the most boring piece of advice ever, but hey, it works. Sure, you can learn good grammar through immersion, but it takes a lot of precious time and resources. Structuring and scheduling practice with grammar books is much easier, and often equally effective.

Your Duolingo course has already taught you to intuitively distinguish some of the fundamental grammar patterns. Now it’s time to take a look at the big picture.

General grammar tips

Reading: How to improve your reading skills after Duolingo

Reading is a great way to immerse yourself in the language, get used to how it’s used in writing, learn new vocabulary in context, and strengthen common grammar patterns.

Finishing a Duolingo course might teach you how to process the written language on some basic level, but going through thousands of short and unrelated sentences doesn’t really have much in common with actual reading.

This is why you should develop your own reading practice. Many learners find it surprisingly difficult. The problem is not so much the reading process itself, but rather deciding what to read.

Here’s how you can tackle it coming from Duolingo:

Use Readlang

Readlang gives you instant translations of words and phrases you don’t know so that you don’t have to distract yourself from the reading to search in a dictionary. It’s a bit like adding Duolingo’s hover hints to your reading material. And it’s free!

I’ve been doing most of my foreign language reading on Readlang, and it’s amazing how much time this simple service can save you.

You can upload any text from the Web or your computer and jump right into reading in your web browser. There are no mobile apps, but the web version works perfectly fine on mobile devices.

Here are a few tips to make the most of Readlang:

Choose the right reading material… and read!

Obviously, I can’t direct you to any specific content. Your choice will depend on your current skills, interests, and the language itself. I can, however, give you some hints that will help you find your perfect reading material:

General reading tips

Listening: How to improve your listening skills after Duolingo

If you try reading a random text after finishing a Duolingo course, you shouldn’t have much trouble understanding some basic structures, and perhaps even entire sentences. However, if you try listening to native speakers speaking the language at a normal pace, you’ll be lucky to distinguish a single word.

Why is it so much more difficult to understand the spoken language?

Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. Listening is always tricky, especially when you’re just starting out and not living in a country where the language is spoken.

Having completed a Duolingo tree, you’ve only had the chance to listen to single sentences pronounced by a text-to-speech system. Understanding everyday speech is a much more complex task.

Here’s how you can ease yourself into listening to the spoken language — and then move on to the real stuff:

Get used to really processing the spoken language

If you’ve only practiced listening on Duolingo, you’re definitely not at a level where you could just listen to anything and expect to get better through mere exposure. My advice for you is to take it slow and start by practicing deliberately. Once you become more comfortable with authentic spoken language, you will be able to benefit from a more aggressive, immersion-based approach.

Find the right content and listen attentively

When it comes to extensive learning, not all types of content are created equal. However, before I point you to several genres that you might want to use in your learning, let me address a belief that leads many people to rely on ineffective learning methods.

Passive listening will hardly do anything for you. If you’re not focusing on what is being said and actively processing it, you’re not really learning. Sure, it might help you get used to the flow of the language, but that’s pretty pointless without real understanding.

At your level, 30 minutes of focused listening will teach you more than 10 hours of passive listening (or rather hearing). The numbers are made-up, but they still convey the point.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about things you can actively listen to when working on your listening skills:

General listening tips

Speaking: How to improve your speaking skills after Duolingo

Speaking in a foreign language can be extremely hard, especially if you’re self-taught. Even with an extensive vocabulary and excellent command of grammar, you can still have trouble holding basic conversations with native speakers.

The only effective way to develop good speaking skills is… well, speaking. Duolingo offers simple speaking exercises that are supposed to get you started with that. However, there are two major problems with them.

First, Duolingo only requires you to pronounce individual sentences, which is only one of several sub-skills necessary to hold a real, two-sided conversation. Second, many users completely disable speaking exercises. Perhaps they’re too embarrassed to do them on the subway, or their PC simply doesn’t have a microphone.

This is how, after finishing a Duolingo course, you can find yourself in a vicious circle. Your speaking skills are inadequate, so you’re too ashamed to use them, which means you’re not getting any practice, which in turn makes it impossible for you to improve.

Here’s how you can break this cycle and make speaking as natural as reading or writing:

Practice speaking alone

The kind of practice described below can be seen as a natural extension of Duolingo’s speaking exercises. It’s meant to help you build confidence by simulating actual conversation, but in the long term, it won’t be as effective as the real thing.

So if you don’t feel ready to hold conversations yet, that’s okay. Put some of the ideas below into action to build a strong foundation of speaking skills.

But if you can’t wait to start speaking with people, feel free to skip to the next section. Still, I think some basic preparation wouldn’t hurt.

Talk to speaking partners

Thanks to the Internet, finding speaking partners is now easier than ever before. If you know where to look, you can find people willing to exchange languages or just chat with you. But that doesn’t mean you should only look for native speakers. Talking to other learners in the language you’re both learning can be surprisingly instructive.

Here are a few suggestions to help you find speaking partners and get as much as possible out of the time spent talking to them:

General speaking tips

Writing: How to improve your writing skills after Duolingo

Writing isn’t just about using correct grammar and vocabulary. It’s an entire competency that is essential to communication in many diverse situations.

Connecting sentences into cohesive paragraphs, using natural expressions to make your point clear, choosing the correct forms of address in correspondence — these are all skills that you must develop to write well in a foreign language.

Unfortunately, completing a Duolingo tree will teach you none of these things. It’s just a limitation of the lesson structure — translating 15 unrelated sentences one-by-one is nothing like composing a 15-sentence paragraph.

To learn to communicate in writing effectively, you will have to take matters into your own hands. Here’s how you can build your own writing practice program:

Set writing assignments for yourself

My guess is that you don’t have a teacher who would regularly give you assignments to keep your writing skills sharp. Or an upcoming exam with a writing section which would add some motivating pressure to your learning process.

But that’s not really a problem. As an ambitious learner, you can set your own writing assignments and keep yourself accountable without any outside pressure.

Write down your thoughts

Putting your thoughts on paper (or screen) is a healthy way to clear your mind, so why not try to use it as part of your language learning strategy? Get a nice notebook or simply create a text file on your computer and start jotting down your thoughts in a foreign language.

General writing tips

Final words

The techniques gathered in this post are just a small sample of the many opportunities that have opened up for you after you have finished a Duolingo course. You really can’t go wrong with any of them — if you feel overwhelmed, pick a few things that feel most natural to you and start learning. You can always adjust your strategy as you go.

In the end, your progress on the way to language mastery will largely depend on how consistent you are in your practice. Once you develop a smart learning strategy, the most important thing you can do is ensure that you stay motivated and focused on your goal.

When feeling short on motivation, think about how you can make learning more fun. Don’t cling to activities that you dislike just because someone says they are “good for you”. There is no perfect formula that would work for everyone. Keep an open mind and try out some new things — you’ll find your own path in no time.

Clozemaster — the next step after Duolingo

If you’re looking for interactive language practice which would feel like a natural extension of a Duolingo course, Clozemaster is your best bet.

Clozemaster’s exercises are based on a deceptively simple premise. Your task is to fill in gaps in sentences sourced from an online database. Since the sentences come from native speakers of the language, they reflect how it is actually spoken and offer more realistic context.

Features such as Grammar Challenges, Cloze-Listening, and Cloze-Reading will help you complement your learning strategy by isolating individual competencies and practicing them in short intensive sessions. Get started practicing one of the dozens of available languages on Clozemaster!

Kaspain

I taught myself German using:

  1. Memrise - I started with the raw beginner courses, such as Basic German, Hacking German, and Minimal Viable German. Then I started the course for Comprehensive German Duolingo Vocabulary. Once I’d planted 2-4 lessons, I started using Duolingo. There are similar Spanish courses: Basic Spanish, Hacking Spanish, and Minimum Viable Spanish. One advantage to these old courses is that they’ve been around for years, so they have a lot of good mems, have had typos corrected, and have had confusing clues clarified. Edit: here’s the link to Spanish Duolingo.
  2. Duolingo - Learning the words in Memrise made using Duolingo a lot more useful and fun, since I could use it to focus grammar and sentences.
  3. Podcasts - I found 2-3 podcasts aimed at complete beginners. GermanPod101.com is one. There is a Spanish version— SpanishPod101.com. There’s also Coffee Break German and Coffee Break Spanish. Both SpanishPod101 and Coffee Break Spanish give you several episodes for free, and offer more options if you pay. I aimed to spend 10-30 minutes listening 3-5 times per week.
  4. Deutsch Interaktiv - This German course by the radio company DeutscheWelle aims to be a fairly comprehensive beginner language course. I’m not aware of a parallel in Spanish, but http://studyspanish.com/grammar4 is quite useful. When I was focused on improving my Spanish, it was my go-to resource for grammar questions. You might also try the Spanish courses by the Göthe Institute and the Spanish courses by the BBC4. (Disclaimer: I have not tried either of these…)

No longer beginner… moving up to intermediate:

  1. More Memrise - After completing some beginner courses, I added more Memrise courses. In my case, that was Deutsch für Euch, 1000 Words of Elementary German, German A1, German A2, and 5000 Words sorted by frequency. You might like Comprehensive Spanish Vocab, 501 Spanish Verbs, and First 5000 Words of Spanish (I have completed all three of these courses).
  2. Classroom - After studying German on the internet for 9-10 months, I spent a month in Berlin in a German course for 3 hours per day, 5 days per week.
  3. More Memrise & more Duolingo.
  4. Clozemaster is great for seeing vocabulary in context. It presents you with sentences that are missing one word. You fill in the blank, either multiple choice or typing (you choose).
  5. Speaking - The biggest gap in my self-taught German is speaking. The classroom experience helped, but what really made the difference was spending time this summer with Germans that don’t speak English! I visited friends whose parents only speak German, and my ability to speak skyrocketed. If I were to do it all over again, I might use iTalki or some other language exchange website to practice speaking much sooner.

Resource Review by Rayxi

I’ve been trying a few of these lately. I passed French DELF A2 late last year and going for B1 in a week. My chronological progression of picking up French via apps/courses (lots of trial-and-error):

  1. Duolingo
  2. Michel Thomas audio course - this has its critics but it gave me a much more solid, if limited, foundation on grammar.
  3. Lingvist - I was lucky to find this early. Added around 2000 words to my vocabulary (yes they claimed ~5000 - that was inaccurate; conjugations and plurals are counted separately). Today you need to pay $23 / month to get the same number of words.
  4. Clozemaster - it offers a lot more words, so I got a paid subscription. Got disappointed really fast though because its automated method to offer mass sentences really shows its flaws quickly: there are many errors and nonsensical cloze placement. I got tired of flagging.
  5. Assimil - seems good, but without any gamification or anything I can play on my phone while waiting, commuting, etc., this soon dropped off the radar.
  6. Speechling - this one should not have the problem of Clozemaster or Duolingo, because they have a human teacher correcting your speech. I imagine their sentences are more carefully curated as well. I started the trial, but dropped after a while because I found I just couldn’t allocate the time to sit in a quiet place and record myself for an extended amount of time. Yes, it’s a genuine “it’s not you, it’s me” thing. I really like their recent features and will probably try this again during a less hectic life period. Hongyu (the CEO) is super responsive too, which is great.
  7. Glossika - this is what I’m currently on. It’s not perfect; their main thing is you hear someone saying X in English and a moment later the equivalent in French. They offer mass repetitions as well, with the same class of problems: occasional inaccurate translations. The reason I picked this one instead of Speechling is not quality: it allows me to listen to mass sentences while doing mindless boring stuff that I have to do anyway (e.g.: doing the dishes, walking to/from the subway station, etc.). This allows me to get French exposure every day, even if not perfect, which ends up meaning more exposure than what Speechling can give me.
  8. I’m a subscriber of one more app, I can’t believe I forgot to add this one the first time: Kwiziq. They have a very specific target: teach you grammar from A0 (i.e.: the level below A1) to C1. My main problem is that they don’t have an “aging” feature. Something I learned fully in A1 9 months ago will be forever marked as “mastered”, despite my having forgotten it completely. Nevertheless I continue to be a happy subscriber. It’s fun to finish a quick grammar quiz here and there as you’re waiting for food, queueing for stuff, etc.