I have to say I discovered this by accident. I was planning to write a post about whether Duolingo was good for learning a language (I continue writing it) when instead of going to my page for learning German from Spanish, went to the page for learning German from English and so I discovered the new feature of Duolingo : the stories.

It was not the first time I have heard about something similar from Duolingo, because I am aware that have podcasts for the learners of Spanish at least and I am also know that this stories thing have been for a little time in Duolingo again for the Spanish learners but the news (at least for me) is that now you can do this stories in French, German and Portuguese (apart from Spanish as well) the only thing you have to do is to access to one of this courses from the version for the English speakers.

The second thing that surprised me is that, at least in German, there are lots of stories, way more than I had expected.

I am currently loving this feature of Duolingo and it has even become my favourite part of the whole page because it basically helps me with my main problem in German : the listening part.

How does Duolingo Stories work?

Duolingo Stories combine a narrator which will be telling the story through short sentences and the characters of the tale itself. During the narrative, there will be interactive exercises

• For improving you reading / listening :This kind of exercises check whether you understood the story or not

• Vocabulary exercises: Exercises like selecting a certain word in a sentences or matching the synonyms

• Listening exercises : Some of them will be about listening to a certain sentence and writing it down or about completing phrases.

How to access Duolingo Stories if you are not learning a language from English

First of all, remember that so far the stories are only available in Spanish, German, Portuguese and French.
In the sidebar of Duolingo's page just click in the flag of the language you are currently learning, and you'll see all the other courses you've joined. Just click in add a new course.


You'll get to a page where more courses can be added, if you go to the right part of the page you'll see the option "I speak ..." select English.

I conisder that DuoLingo is one of the best sites on the Internet for learning languages, first beacuase it's completely free and second due to provides you an excellent gramitical practice.
Recently, Duolingo has launched the "Test Center" where you can take a verified exam that costs 20$ and gives you a brief indicator of your english level.
Also, you can practice whith quick and free exams, that gives you an estimate puntuation of your level (similar to the verified ones)
The question here, is how these results relate to another testing methods like TOEFL?
Duolingo has carried out an investigation to determinate the correlation between with the results of TOEFL and the Duolingo test.

Please note that now the results are given in percentage, for example if you got a 63% score on the Duolingo Exam, your puntuation will be 6.3


Maybe some of you know the CEFR, which I consider a great tool for describing your knowledge of a language, so you can use the next table to converse the puntuation of TOEFL to the CEFR level.
Becuse there are different converstions of the TOEFL score, I've deciced to take it from the official page of TOEFL, which converts the score to the IELTS score. (Also I've decided to do this, because in the TOEFL official page the maximum level is C1)
Finally, the IELTS score to the CEFR scale.





Practical example.
As you have seen, it's pretty difficult to obtain accurate results, so I am going to use an example to explain how to obtain the CEFR score.

Imagine that I've obtained a 65% on the Duolingo exam, so first  I am converting it to 6.6, which results in a score of 95-98  on the TOEFL exam (first table), that means a 7 on the IELTS. Finally 7  equals to a C1 level.