Quick answer: exercises where the answer is already on screen, such as multiple choice and matching, test whether you can recognize a language. Speaking asks you to produce it. U.S. research on study techniques gives specific reasons to add production to an app routine: quizzing yourself from memory beat rereading, and spreading practice over time helped too. Trying to say something also shows you the words you are missing, which is the idea behind the drill below (my design). This guide turns those findings into a daily speaking habit you can add to whatever app you already use.
Recognition vs Production
In a multiple-choice exercise the right answer is one of the options in front of you. In conversation there are no options. You have to pull a word or a sentence out of memory and say it. These are two different tasks, which is why it makes sense to practice both on purpose.
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Why Saying Words Beats Seeing Them
A 2013 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest by John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson of Kent State, with Elizabeth Marsh, Mitchell Nathan and Daniel Willingham, rated ten common study techniques. According to Kent State University’s account of the 2013 review, practice testing, such as quizzing yourself with flash cards, and distributed practice, meaning study sessions spread over time, earned the top ratings. Summarization, highlighting and underlining, and rereading received low ratings, and Dunlosky said students would benefit by replacing rereading with delayed retrieval practice.
For an app user, the connection is simple. A multiple-choice exercise shows you the answer, much like rereading a list. Saying a word out loud from nothing is a practice test. My suggestion is to treat every moment you cannot find a word while speaking as a quiz result: it tells you exactly what to study next.
A Gap-Finding Drill for Your Next Session
This drill is my own design, built on the practice-testing finding above. It is not a published protocol.
- Pick one small scene: your breakfast, your commute, or the objects on your desk.
- Describe it out loud in the language you are learning, with no notes and no app open.
- Every time you stall, say the missing word in your own language and keep going. Write each one down.
- When you finish, look the words up, or ask an AI voice assistant for them.
- Describe the same scene again and try to use the words you just collected.
Steps 3 to 5 are my sequence: find the missing word first, then look it up, then use it. The second description is where the new words get used.
Pull Words From Memory Instead of Re-reading Them
Retrieval, bringing a word back from memory, matters for how long it lasts. In a study by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke published in Science in 2008, participants learned foreign-word translations and were then split by whether they kept studying or kept being tested. As reported by Washington University in St. Louis, repeated retrieval after that first success was the critical factor for later retention, and additional study after recall made no measurable difference.
For your routine, that points to a simple rule: after you collect words in the gap-finding drill, test yourself on them the next day by covering the translation and saying the word, rather than rereading your list.
The Numbers Behind Testing Yourself
The details of that experiment show how large the effect was. Purdue’s account of Karpicke and Roediger’s 2008 study in Science says the materials were Swahili-English word pairs presented as computerized flashcards on day one, with a final test one week later. Forty college students took part, ten per group, in four conditions.
- Study all, test all. Words were studied and repeatedly tested even after they were recalled correctly. About 80% were recalled on the final test.
- Drop from study, keep testing. Once a word was recalled it was dropped from studying but still repeatedly tested. About 80% were recalled.
- Drop from testing. Once a word could be recalled it was dropped from repeated testing. Recall was 36% in one group and 33% in the other; the article does not say which condition produced which figure.
The pattern is clear. Repeated testing made what the article calls a “dramatic difference,” and further study of material already recalled easily produced no measurable additional learning. The gap is about 44 percentage points (80 minus 36) or 47 points (80 minus 33), and 80 ÷ 36 is about 2.2 times as much recalled. The researchers also found that students predicted their own recall poorly, and Karpicke’s advice was to keep practicing recall of flashcards even after you can recall an item, rather than dropping it.
What that could look like for you. Suppose you collect 10 new words this week. If your results matched the study’s proportions, which the study does not promise for other words or learners, 80% would be about 8 words remembered after a week, against roughly 3 to 4 words if you stopped testing a word as soon as you got it right. The 10-word list is invented; the percentages come from the experiment.
That is good news for an app user: an app is built around getting an item right and moving on, so a few minutes of saying older words from memory each day is a direct way to keep them.
What the Duolingo Research Does and Does Not Say
Independent research on Duolingo is limited. One study, Loewen and colleagues in ReCALL (2019), followed nine learners studying Turkish on Duolingo for a semester. Participants improved on second-language measures by the end, and time spent on the app had a positive, moderate correlation with learning gains. They also valued its flexibility and gamification, though motivation varied and some were frustrated with the instructional materials.
That is encouraging for using an app as a daily anchor, and the abstract does not break results down by skill, so it does not tell us how much the app helps with speaking. That gap is the reason to pair the app with the speaking habit below. The study is small, with nine learners in one language, so treat it as a good sign rather than a final answer.
Building the Daily Speaking Habit
- Attach it to your lesson. Speak right after your normal app session, using the vocabulary you just saw.
- Choose a length you can repeat every day. Consistency matters more than a long session you skip.
- Let mistakes happen. A stalled sentence is part of the exercise, because it shows you which word to study next.
- Ask for correction as you go. Tell an AI voice partner to correct you and explain briefly why.
- Add a human when you can. A tutor or conversation partner can add cultural context an AI may not.
These steps are my suggestions, not tested protocols.
A Prompt for an AI Voice Partner
Paste this at the start of a voice conversation:
I am learning [language] and my level is [beginner / intermediate / advanced]. Talk with me about [topic].
During the conversation:
- Speak slowly and keep your sentences short.
- When I make a mistake, finish my turn first, then give me the corrected sentence and one short reason.
- When I stall, wait, then offer the word I was missing.
At the end, please:
1. List every word I was missing, each with its translation.
2. List my corrected sentences.
3. Turn the word list into a self-test: the translations in one column, so I can say each word out loud before checking.The last line gives you the word list for the next day’s retrieval check.
An invented session. Say a beginner describes their breakfast in Spanish and stalls twice, on the words for “toaster” and “spread.” The end-of-conversation list gives those two words with translations, plus the corrected sentences. The next day, the self-test shows only the English meanings, and the learner says each word aloud before checking, which is the retrieval step described above. The session and the words are made up to show the format.
A Ten-Minute Daily Session Built From the Research
You can combine the findings into one short daily session. The layout below is my suggestion, built from the ideas above: practice testing, practice spread over days, and the gap-finding drill. It adds up to 10 minutes (3 + 2 + 3 + 2).
| Minutes | Step |
|---|---|
| 3 | Describe a scene aloud |
| 2 | Collect the words you missed |
| 3 | Say yesterday’s words from memory |
| 2 | Describe the scene again |
Run it right after your normal app lesson, as the checklist above suggests. On day one, the retrieval step has nothing to review yet, so use that time to describe a second scene. From day two on, the words you collected the day before give the retrieval step its material. The Kent State review also gave distributed practice a high rating, so my suggestion is to add a few words from earlier in the week to the retrieval step, not only yesterday’s. Keep going even on days when you remember every word, because Karpicke’s advice, described above, is that success is the cue to keep testing, not to stop.
If you are ready for more, you can stretch each step by the same amount; that choice is up to you, and the research cited here does not set a session length.
My View on AI Language Apps
This closing part is my opinion. I think speaking imperfectly and often is the engine of fluency, and a voice conversation with an AI removes common excuses: no scheduling and no one to be embarrassed in front of. I would rather you try the gap-finding drill for a couple of weeks and see how it feels than trust any claim about timelines, including mine.
AI Language Apps: Sources
- Kent State University: All Study Strategies Not Created Equal, According to Kent State Researchers (Dunlosky et al., 2013)
- Washington University in St. Louis: Practicing information retrieval is key to memory retention
- Loewen et al. (2019): Mobile-assisted language learning: A Duolingo case study
- Purdue University: Karpicke & Roediger (2008) on the importance of retrieval
Another guide built on practice over recognition: learning to code with AI, using hints instead of answers.
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