From a New York Times column by John McWhorter headlined “Forget Nouns. Verbs Are Where the Action Is.”:

As a linguist, I’ve lost count of how many times I have been asked what I think of the various language-learning apps. The truth is that I don’t use them. But of late I have been watching my daughter, 11, use the platform Duolingo to learn Spanish. She has been engaging with it every day for two months now. It’s fun to watch; the app is seriously adorable, with a fun mix of brightly animated characters and singsong voices. But the idea was for her and me to be able to have little conversations in Spanish, and there’s one element of the program that’s leaving me impatient.