You’re never asked to write out the pinyin, which is crucial to typing in the language, or to try vocalizing the tones yourself, which is one of the most bedeviling stumbling blocks for people learning the language.
The app also won’t help much beyond listening and reading comprehension. And I’m also skeptical that users will be able to intuit the grammar without explicit direction about the various structures. But it could make it difficult to develop a solid grasp on the language without fully memorizing these individual building blocks. There are slight discrepancies like this throughout the exercises, and it may sound like nit-picking to point them out. “再见” does broadly mean “good bye,” but I think it’s also useful to know that “再” means “again” and “见” means “to see.” So it literally means “see you again.” The individual definitions, at least initially, get lost in the app. Yet Duolingo claims that by the end of the course, which requires just five minutes a day, you’ll “be able to introduce yourself, discuss topics related to your daily life (work and school, family, weather, feelings, etc.), get by while traveling in Chinese-speaking countries, order at a restaurant, haggle for a cheaper price while shopping, and much more.” The insurmountable number of characters, mercurial tones, and perplexing use of portmanteaus all weighed down on my GPA in college. The dialect is notoriously vexing to learn for people, such as myself, whose native tongue is a Romance or Germanic language. What’s more likely is that Chinese is ridiculously hard to teach. With everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Amy Adams trying to learn Mandarin, the delay isn’t due to a shortage of demand. The app has been around since 2011 and offers courses in dozens of languages, but it’s only now getting to Chinese. Duolingo, the immensely popular app for people looking to begin learning a new language, released a Mandarin module this week.
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