Personally I believe both these programs have their ups and downs. I found that Duolingo was much more accessible and easier to use then OLI. I found the colors and site layout on Duolingo much more appealing in comparison to OLI. OLI did however have real conversations with real people and had interactive videos to use. I found OLI was also much more forgiving with mistakes and would let you retry questions without penalization, whereas Duolingo would give you four strikes until you lost them and had to redo you’re whole set of questions regardless of your place or question you’re on, it was strangely addictive in this way but also extremely frustrating when you’re on the last question of a set and it makes you redo it again for the seventh time you have a moderate want to drive your fist through the screen and burn the room to the ground. The one thing about Duolingo that I did like though was that it showed you clearly what your mistake was whereas OLI would star out the letters you were getting wrong in a word and you would have to figure it out from there which was not very helpful at all. I found that both programs got very repetietive with their questions after a while and eventually got very boring. The content of the questions would change and get more difficult as it went, but the structure would remain the same which eventually made it rather repetitive. All in all both programs were very good, and both could use improvements. Out of the two I would have to say I enjoyed duolingo more because it was very engaging to the user and really made you work at it to get to next set of vocabulary which made it very addictive, whereas with OLI you could easily skip to the next question if stuck which made it very easy to leave behind vital vocab out of pure frustration of not understanding the question. Personally I believe both these programs do not compare to the help that an actual French teacher can provide. Having a person who actually speaks the language and can explain in depth is much better then these sites could ever be, unless of course they explained every detail of what you did right or wrong, which they don’t.
Heart system on duolingo
Videos on OLI
Sample of a picture question on Duolingo
Listening related questions on OLI
Getting a question wrong on Duolingo will make you lose a heart and give you the right answer in the bottom box.
Losing all hearts will result in having to redo you’re whole set of 20 questions on Duolingo
Getting a question wrong on OLI
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