Learn to Read - Duolingo ABC

We absolutely love the app for our 3.5 year old. Using this app in addition to our other letter and language studies - and with adult supervision and conversation throughout - has been an excellent tool that she’s excited about. The only complaint I have is that there is a ton of content about sugar, snacks, and cookies. We don’t talk about these things or use these words in our home; so now for our daughter to be demanding cookies and lollipops every time we leave the house is a bit disheartening. I would also love an option to choose how many sounds/celebrations there are for correct answers. I use the DuoLingo app as an adult for learning a language, and have turned off the sounds for correct answers. I would love this option for my toddler….. we’re living in a time when it’s already so difficult to combat the overwhelming advertising and misinformation about what is healthy food for our bodies, and also combating social media addiction and dopamine addiction and overload. I do love the app and and our child does too, but I worry about the constant snack and sugar references and too many dopamine hits along the way. It’s all quite addictive.

I rarely write reviews, but I just had to give my testimony for this one Lol. After teaching my 4 year old twins all of the letters and letter sounds, I was unfortunately really struggling to teach them how to read actual words. I tried three paid subscriptions, “teach my monster to read,” “hooked on phonics,” and “abc mouse,” and although each app was useful in it’s own way, I had to spend so much time sitting down with them to go through all of those lessons and games with them. And in our family, we have story time, and every day the boys color, draw, and practice writing. So, when we were going through the paid apps, it was always quite a hassle and time consuming to skip the stories and coloring portion of them. It was nearly impossible for me to do this with EACH of them, take care of my baby girl, and maintain the rest of my household responsibilities. But, THIS APP is just incredible. The lessons on Duo are straightforward with clear instructions, and it’s nothing like other apps I’ve tried that had too many game components and were very much overstimulating for my children. My boys insist on completing their reading lessons without my help, but they always say “look mommy, I’m getting another star!” once they finish one. My boys started off with 1 lesson a day, but they love earning stars (and my praise and rewards once they complete a star) so much that they are completing 5-10 lessons a day. They actually come to me and say “mommy can I do my school please?!” I can’t give this app enough praise. It keeps their attention, each lesson is the perfect length. I honestly don’t know how I would be teaching both of them to read without it, so, I just wanted to say a big thank you to all of the creators of this app.

I am a Senior at Graceland University (GU) and am close to graduating in the school of Education there. I greatly approve of what you have created. Repetition of letter names and speaking to the child who’s playing the “games” lines up perfectly with what I have learned at GU. As does the fact there is close to no distractions from the learning even between the game stages. That said, what I would change in the app is create a way to control the settings to a greater extent, such as see the statistics and get progress monitoring by accessing the app in some way. I would say this to better keep parents, and maybe even teachers, better informed. If you were to do so, maybe also add a way to specify which as well so that it could better integrate into classroom use. The other change I would make would be to allow for different languages to speak the instruction and for the verbal components when learning English. This would also be a means of introducing English to ESL, ELL and maybe even bilingual children.