Duolingo is a fantastic free service designed to help students learn Spanish, English, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese. The service can be used in your web browser, as an iOS app, or as an Android app. Earlier today Larry Ferlazzo made me aware of some new course options in Duolingo. Duolingo now offers courses for speakers of Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, and Hindi to learn to speak English. The courses are not yet featured on the Duolingo homepage. To find the new courses you need to go to the Duolingo Incubator page which is where all new courses are beta tested.

After looking at the new course offerings on the Duolingo Incubator page I spent some time looking at the Duolingo blog to see if there were other updates that I’ve missed. Since the last time that I looked at Duolingo a new “language coach” and virtual shop had been added to the Duolingo iOS app. The Duolingo Language Coach is a feature that will tell you how many points you need in order to move to the next level in your lesson. The points that you earn not only move you along to the next level, they can also be redeemed for prizes in the virtual shop. The prizes are costumes and accessories for your Duolingo avatar.

If you haven’t see Duolingo before, watch the video below for a short overview.