Addicted to Duolingo: Why learning a foreign language can improve Our Best Life

CLEVELAND, Ohio — So far, my favorite sentence in Dutch is “Ik fiets vaak:” I bike often.

I’m also a big fan of “heel veel,” which means very much.

I learned both from Duolingo, the addictive language app I take lessons with daily. So does my 12-year-old daughter, my husband, my mom and my niece.

I’m learning a language mostly because it’s a fun exercise to stretch my brain. I’m learning Dutch because of my family and heritage.

While my maternal grandparents emigrated from the southern Netherlands to Canada after World War II, I know only “een beetje Nederlands,” limited to the few words my Oma and Opa used around us growing up.

I studied German for years, beginning in eighth grade. My dad worked for a German company; maybe it would come in handy someday?

It did, but only because I chose to spend a semester of my junior year at Miami University’s Luxembourg campus. My host parents spoke German, and I traveled to a few German cities on the weekends. Still, even though I minored in German, I was far from fluent. It was pretty much my hardest class every semester.

Once I graduated, I promptly forgot most of what I learned.

Until my family traveled to Montreal in summer 2023. It was so delightful to see French signs everywhere, to shuffle through the files of my brain to remember from my Luxembourg months that “gare” meant train station and “jambon” meant ham.

Figuring out a foreign language felt like doing the New York Times Wordle puzzle.

When I returned home, I started Duolingo, just in time to prep for my first trip to Europe in 20 years.

Related: Dozens of cousins, lots of history on a mom-daughter-granddaughter trip to Holland

In the kitchen of my mom’s cousin’s house in a small village in southern Netherlands, I marveled when I spotted the few words I knew: “boterham” for sandwich or “ontbijt” for breakfast. Words my mom didn’t even know because her parents had used the English words instead.

A year and hundreds of Duolingo lessons later, I’m still not fluent. But I can decipher Christmas cards my family sent from the Netherlands and the Instagram posts of their town’s Karneval festival.

Duolingo is a free app with ads, though you can pay for an ad-free super version. The app feels like a game, allowing you to befriend other users, earn rewards and compete in quests. Animated characters offer encouragement, and daily lessons take a few minutes, grouped by topics like jobs or body parts. I usually do a few each morning while walking the dog. My daughter and her friends are linked on the app, offering each other high fives and competing in quests.

I have a 500-day streak.

Duolingo was founded in 2011 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. By May 2024, 97.6 million people globally were using Duolingo each month, making it the biggest language learning company in the world.

The app offers 43 languages, with English the most popular to study, in large part for economic reasons. Spanish is the most popular language to study in all 50 United States.

I’ve tried to get my son to take up Spanish on Duolingo, but since he’s taking the language in school, it feels like extra homework.

People learn languages for all sorts of reasons. Babel, an older language learning company, offers the following motivations:

– Communicate while traveling

– Communicate with a friend or family member

– Refresh old skills

– Engage in interest

– Help their career

– Improve mental fitness

– Understand their heritage better

Language courses can boost cognitive skills and multitasking abilities, according to the National Education Association. And apps like Duolingo and Google Translate have made it easier than ever to communicate across languages.

I’m not sure if my daily Duolingo lessons have made me mentally sharper, but I do sometimes find myself thinking in Dutch. And I smile when I learn a delightful new word.

I feel connected to my heritage. To me that’s worth it enough.

Cleveland.com content director Laura Johnston writes weekly about life in her 40s in the column, Our Best Life. Subscribe to the newsletter to get the column delivered to your inbox Friday mornings. Find her on Instagram @ourbestlifecle.