I love the memes about Duolingo and the whole “scary owl” thing. But I wasn’t really a fan of the platform itself, until I started using it regularly. The reason for this is simple: I don’t like drills, grammar translation and all those other foreign language bread and butter staples. In my own teaching I tend to focus on communicative methods and authentic situations and language. However, as a learner and a teacher, I am having to begrudgingly accept that these more traditional approaches have more than just a minor role to play in language learning. It’s an established fact that repetition is key to memorising new vocabulary, and you need to build up hours of grammar and vocabulary usage in the world before you can really master a foreign language. Plus, Duolingo is  actually really fun, and funny!

Recently, Duolingo introduced a new learning feature: chess! Having had my Knight (if my knight was a donkey) handed to me rather a few too many times by intelligent tactical friends, and even my own mother, several time in chess, I was happy to earn XP for learning some strategies for REVENGE. However, how much sweeter those chess lessons (and the subsequent revenge!) would be if I was learning to play chess in German! That’s the language I am progressing most with in Duolingo right now (though I love that you can choose to study from 40 different languages, I even tried Arabic). Studying German weirdly levelled up my confidence in Japanese (my actual second language). Anyway, I digress.

My German isn’t all that advanced, but I have learned the word for Chess (Schach) and I think I could handle a bit of specialised vocabular plus the basics of movement. However, the real beauty of this would mean that I was using Schach for CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). This is another proven and well-researched approach to improving your foreign language abilities (caveat: if done right!) and to boost authenticity of purpose.

So come on, Duolinguo! Give me the option to switch Chess Master Oskar’s language of instruction to German so I can get my language lessons and my chess lessons rolled into one! Then my revenge (or Rache) would be even sweeter.