Digitizing books and learning languages for free. Technology Rocks!

I recently discovered Duolingo after a friend offered invites and encouraged watching this video of Luis Von Ahn's TED talk.

First off, I did not know that we were helping to digitize books with reCaptcha. That's awesome. Second, I love the idea of leveling the playing field so that anybody can learn another language. Not only can anybody with access to the Internet learn another language, but in the process of learning, we're making the Internet available to more people. This is awesome. I had to do it.

I decided to start with German because I took two years of German in high school when I lived in Germany. Duolingo allows you to test out of levels, so if you do have previous exposure, you're not stuck going through all of the lessons. Herr Dowling would not be thrilled with how few I have manged to test out of, but I'm glad that I haven't lost it all. It has, after all, been 20 years or so.

The lessons are really straight forward, there's some explanation, an area for questions and insights, and then the exercises. They're made up of pictures and sentences that you translate back and forth from English to German and vice versa. There are multiple choice questions and free text. It even has audio so you can hear the language and practice speaking it. But you don't have to. I turned off the speaker and the mic because I have a hard enough time understanding what people say in English.
I'm able to start translating stuff from the web right away, which is really cool, because I'm able to use some of the conversational German that I remember, and the stuff that I don't.... well... You know those instruction manuals that sound like they were translated from Japanese to Swahili to English? Well I get to do that translation! It's kind of fun, and then I'll see the other translations and find out how it's really said. So I learn. Bonus.

Oh and it works great with my ADD. I don't have to pay attention- I can just kind of go through it while I'm talking with the fam in the evening or watching TV. In fact, I'm finding that's better. (I don't know if that's because I've already been exposed to the language I'm "learning"). I'm not trying to do a 1:1 translation, I'm just learning it through repetition. This is working for me. And since I can translate little pieces from the web not only am I helping out, but I'm learning the language and interesting tidbits as I go.
It's still in Beta and people with accounts only had 3 invites- mine are all gone. The first went to my 10 year old son, who is even doing great with it and mastering levels like crazy (he's doing Spanish).
If you know someone with invites, ask for one! If not, go to the site, sign up and wait, it will be worth it. Unless you'd rather pay $500 or more per language.

UPDATE: I got 3 more invites today, because the 3 I invited signed up, so I'm glad there's not a 3 invite limit!