Is Duolingo real communication?

DuoLingo owl

Okay.  I'll admit it.  I am a Duolingo addict.  I suppose my dream life would be sitting around and playing with foreign languages.   So far, I have ventured into Portuguese and Spanish, both with the goal of keeping up skills in those languages. Surely I can find a "So Many Languages, So Little Time" T-shirt to wear as I am hunched over my laptop, iPad or iPhone, typing in responses.

Each of the electronic devices I use for Duolingo offers slightly different activities.  Recently I discovered two new activities that make me feel like I am truly communicating with someone.  And that someone is not human at all.  It is the DuoLingo program.

First I selected an option for Portuguese called "Play a Bot," available on both the iPad and the iPhone. 

 

Duobot

Duolingo asked me, "Tired of playing your own kind?  Duobot is your new best friend."   I certainly need all the friends I can get, so I clicked on that option. I was given a number of challenges to see if I could beat Duobot in speed and accuracy.

I really am not a fan of doing anything very fast.  "Slow and steady wins the race" is my motto for life.  But as Duobot kept beating me in Portuguese, and I saw a line coming across the page measuring the time I had left to respond, I tried to speed up but kept making errors.  Duobot was the consistent winner.  Not very nice treatment from a new best friend,  I reflected.  Fortunately I decided to take on Duobot  in Spanish, which I can do a bit faster and with less thinking involved. Ha!  I  beat the bot!  

Another option I found on the laptop only (and just for Spanish, not for Portuguese yet) was to speak into the microphone.  Sometimes the task was repeating what I heard, and other times it was translating from English to Spanish. I felt really nervous that my accent wasn't going to be understandable.  Even though language acquisition experts remind us that a perfect spoken accent is not the goal of communication and that few adults can acquire a native speaker accent, I still felt tongue-tied and very worried about rolling my 'r's'.

The first time I tried to record, a message came back for me to speak more slowly.  The next time, I spoke very slowly and tried to enunciate clearly.  As I spoke, each word appeared on the screen. I noticed that I was having to move my mouth a lot more to speak Spanish than I do to speak English.  This time Duolingo understood me!  I was pleased and thought the program was very forgiving. 

The thought occurred to me that the Duolingo speaking task mimics real life, in that once the words leave my mouth, I have no chance to go back and correct them.  

Previously, I had been feeling very comfortable with written Duolingo activities.   I could take as long as I wanted to do them and check every little detail.  Now with the speaking option, I felt some pressure, just as I do when I speak to someone in a foreign language in real life. I did notice that I had the option of not using the microphone and typing the responses instead, but I thought that was the coward's way out.

Technology still can't trump having a real conversation with a real person in another language, especially if that conversation is taking place in an exotic vacation spot.  But with these two new activities, I have the illusion that what I am doing is true communication. 

 I hope I didn't hurt Duobot's feelings when I beat him!