I started learning Hindi and Arabic casually on Duolingo, and I mean very Coincidentally, almost a year ago. 316 days ago, to be exact, if you get off my Duolingo streak. As I was learning, I got a little bored with the repetitive lessons and was actually only doing one lesson a day for a while just to keep up my streak, hoping it would get a little more interesting as I went along. I almost abandoned the entire app, until Duolingo Music was announced.
Late last year, Duolingo launched its music learning program, initially geared toward piano. Lessons focus on basic music theory, learning how to place notes on a keyboard, and developing and improving your ability to sight-read musical notes. This was incredibly lucky for me, because I had started taking piano lessons just a few months earlier!
It has been a dream of mine to learn to play the piano, and although I was a little intimidated by the idea of learning to play an instrument as an adult, I was really enjoying it. However, I had been struggling with the theoretical side of things for a while, so I was hoping Duolingo Music could help.
A great start!
The lessons start basic: Here is an image of three piano keys, the CD and E keys.. The first two are labeled, as the course begins with learning from middle C onwards, helpfully mirroring the start of my in-person piano lessons. At the time, I felt almost insulted that Duo threw this at me, but of course it's aimed at absolute beginners.
But as I progressed through the module, I realized that we were covering the basics quickly because the app was planning to start adding more information in addition to the fundamental notes, so that when you are done with the first module, you will have about five notes to his credit.
Three lessons in the first module, the app lets you play short pieces of music on a virtual keyboard so you can recognize notes and improve your timing, adding more notes and faster timing to keep you on your toes.
I found this much more engaging than language courses, not only because it was fun, but also because I was instantly able to put what I was learning into practice, within the Duolingo lessons, but also in my real-life lessons with my tutor. . A few weeks after using the app's new music features, my piano tutor noticed how much I was getting better at sight-reading the new pieces we covered.
Can we have real lessons please?
Around this time, I completely switched from learning languages on Duolingo to the music course, and within a month or two I was able to skip an entire beginner's course my tutor and I were taking and move on to more challenging pieces.
I was on top of this achievement for quite a while, but after a while I became frustrated with my progress stagnating on the app. I started the process by learning three notes, and now, four full months later, I'm at…seven notes. Considering I'm doing the lessons every day, often multiple times a day, that's not a lot of progress to show for the time invested.
On top of this, once you get out of the introductory phase, the lessons start to feel more like a simple rhythm game, with no music theory content in sight so far other than “identify these notes”. There have been no lessons on chords or scales, octaves and accidentals. Even when you start playing the more difficult pieces, the only significant thing that changes from piece to piece is the speed at which you're supposed to play, but even then it's nowhere near what those songs sound like when played. a real piano.
The foundation blocks at the beginning of the course can be really helpful, especially if you've spent little or no time on formal music lessons. But once I had a few more sessions with my piano tutor, the app quickly fell behind everything we were tackling together.
Even now, although I still use it to keep my streak going (out of sheer stubbornness more than anything else), I no longer find it useful in my weekly lessons. Instead, I opted to purchase actual music theory textbooks, which have worked wonders compared to anything on the app; In fact, everything I learned over four months on the app was covered in just two pages of my textbook.
I recommend?
If you had asked me at the beginning of my Duolingo music journey if I would recommend the app, I would have grabbed your phone and downloaded it myself. However, being able to compare the app's learning experience to my hands-on music learning has given me a good idea of how mediocre the app really is.
Even if you go further into the app's lesson plans, you'll find the same type of boring and repetitive exercises. For the sake of this article, I skipped four modules earlier this week and barely remembered that I had done so until Thursday, when he asked me to “review” what I had previously learned. I didn't need to review what Duolingo taught me, since I had already learned it myself a long time ago.
I browsed the Duolingo subreddit to see how other Duolingo enthusiasts felt about the new music lessons and found that most people are as lukewarm about them as I am. Many users complained about the lack of actual music theory learning beyond identifying notes on a keyboard, and the fact that you can't play a connected electronic instrument instead of simply tapping the screen, a feature that some apps dedicated to music teaching does include. .
As for what could be done to improve it, I'm not entirely sure what to suggest. Perhaps if Duolingo approached music teaching from a broader theoretical position rather than trying to make it a piano-specific experience, more people would find it interesting and useful.
It would also mean that the lessons would be more intuitive and have much more variety; Furthermore, they would not be restricted only to people looking to play the piano or keyboard. Some people in the Reddit threads I examined who play other instruments wrote about the disappointment they felt when they realized they wouldn't be able to participate in a meaningful way.
Overall, I can't really put my finger on what keeps me on the Duolingo music course. It's probably just because I like the achievement of having a pretty decent streak, but at this point, it's nothing more than that. Now, when I sit down to give a lesson, I do so with the television on, barely looking at the screen for more than a few seconds. I used Duolingo music for four months and quickly outgrew it.
