Duolingo, really the best way to learn a new language

Duolingo, an interactive language learning platform

Duolingo is a website designed to help a learn a foreign language and I believe it's brilliant at it.

The experience is similar to a game including a friendly and nice-looking UI, rewards/coins received after completing exercises and a roadmap displaying your overall progress.

The Basics 1 Lessons

The Roadmap and other status information

The learning is very simple and interactive. It gradually introduces new words and grammar concepts and also requires you to translate phrases, listen to and write sentences and even translate articles from the web. It also keeps learning statistics and allows you to work on your weak spots.

A simple translation exercise

Currently only a few languages are supported

• Spanish
• English
• French
• German
• Portuguese
• Italian

and as for the mobile platform, only iOS is blessed with an app, but an Android promise exists towards the end of 2013.

Enjoy

Android Music Players that keep progress

If you're someone like me than you enjoy a good audiobook on your Android phone during your daily commute once in a while. And let me tell you, not all audiobooks are finely grained to about 3 minute files. Some entire books span 2 mp3 files. 

Now imagine that while listening to chapter X from the first gigantic file, you run into a situation where you have to pause the book, perform your daily activities (world-wise and android-wise) and it just so happens that the music player (you are using) is kicked out of the Android's RAM.

Then, unless your player app knows how to save your progress, you're pretty much doomed to haunt the file's progress bar (which at several hundred MBs per file does not do you any good) to find that one part you were listening to.

In conclusion, these are tested apps that keep listening progress even if the app is forced out of memory

• Google Play Music
• Winamp

While there may be other apps (in that case, please throw me a comment below) that work, I can tell you this, the default (Froyo on i5800 in my case) music player does not solve our problem.

So, enjoy your listening,
Bye

Google Tasks, the Chrome Extension

It, has recently come to my attention. The extension looks pretty nice, especially as a Chrome app.

The Google Tasks Chrome Extension in action

The app also enjoys nice and quick authentication method from Google. So, set it up and nice tasking!