Free Duolingo “Read Then Speak”

Sample High-Scoring Response (spoken register, ~240 words)

“One memory that comes to mind immediately is from when I was around eight years old. My grandmother used to take me to a small market near her house every Saturday morning, and I remember how she would stop to talk to every single vendor — the woman who sold vegetables, the old man who fixed shoes, everyone. At the time I thought it was just something she liked to do. I didn’t really understand why.

What I understand now is that she was teaching me something without making it a lesson. She genuinely knew these people, and they knew her. I remember feeling proud to be with her, even as a child who didn’t fully understand what was happening.

That memory has stayed with me because it shaped how I think about community. I grew up believing that the people you interact with every day deserve your real attention, not just a transaction. It sounds simple, but I think a lot of people don’t actually live that way.

In terms of how it’s influenced me — I try to remember people’s names, ask follow-up questions, slow down in conversations. I don’t always succeed at that, especially when I’m busy or stressed. But the impulse comes from somewhere, and I genuinely think it comes from those Saturday mornings watching my grandmother talk to a shoe repairman like he was the most interesting person in the world.”

Sample High-Scoring Response (spoken register, ~220 words)

“My mornings are honestly pretty chaotic most of the time. I wake up later than I plan to, which means the first thing I do is already rushing — checking my phone, trying to decide whether I have time for breakfast, that kind of thing. It’s not the best system, I’ll be honest.

In terms of how it affects the rest of the day — I’ve noticed that when I start rushed, I stay in a slightly anxious mode for most of the morning. I make small mistakes. I forget things. It’s like the tone gets set before I’ve even left the house.

What I’d like to change is actually simple, though I haven’t managed to do it consistently. I’d like to wake up 30 minutes earlier and use that time before I look at my phone. Just have a coffee, sit somewhere quiet, and start the day at my own pace rather than at someone else’s. I’ve done it for stretches of a week or two and the difference is noticeable — I feel more like myself by 10am.

So the short answer is: my morning routine currently works against me, I know exactly what would fix it, and I’m still working on actually making the change. Which probably says something about habits in general.”

Sample High-Scoring Response (spoken register, ~260 words)

“My honest opinion is that people are less connected to their local communities than they were a generation ago — though I think the reasons are more complicated than just blaming technology, which is the easy answer.

Thirty years ago, a lot of the things people did naturally required them to interact with neighbors and local businesses. You went to the same shops, your kids went to the same schools, you ran into the same people at community events. Those interactions weren’t always deep, but they were consistent, and consistency builds a kind of informal social fabric.

What’s changed isn’t just that people are on their phones more. It’s that the infrastructure for local connection has quietly disappeared. Small shops closed. Community centers lost funding. People moved around more for work. Social media gave us the feeling of connection — you can know what 500 people had for breakfast — but it replaced something that was actually local and physical with something that is global and frictionless.

The cause I keep coming back to is economic, honestly. When people work longer hours, commute further, and feel financially stressed, community involvement feels like a luxury they can’t afford. It’s not that people don’t want connection — it’s that the conditions that used to produce it naturally have been dismantled.

So I’d say: less connected, but not because of moral failure. More because of structural changes that nobody individually chose but everyone is living with.”

Sample High-Scoring Response (spoken register, ~255 words)

“This is a question I find genuinely difficult to answer in a simple way, because I think the impact will be positive for some people and deeply disruptive for others — and the distribution of those outcomes matters more than the overall average.

My general view is that AI will eliminate a significant number of routine, predictable jobs over the next two decades. Not because companies want to harm workers, but because the economic incentive to automate is enormous and the technology is advancing faster than policy and education systems can respond.

The people most affected will be those in mid-level administrative and processing roles — data entry, basic customer service, certain types of legal and financial analysis. These are often stable, decent-paying jobs that people built careers around. The assumption was that complex professional work was safe from automation. That assumption is now being challenged.

What makes me cautious about pure pessimism, though, is that every previous wave of technological change created jobs that didn’t exist before. The question is whether the transition will be managed in a way that supports workers through it — through retraining, through policy, through some redistribution of the productivity gains. So far, historically, that transition has been painful and unevenly distributed.

So — net effect probably complicated, with significant disruption in the medium term, and the most vulnerable people being those without the resources to retrain quickly. Whether that ends up being net positive depends almost entirely on choices that haven’t been made yet.”

Sample High-Scoring Response (spoken register, ~270 words)

“When I was younger, success meant visible achievement — grades, titles, things you could put on a list and show people. I don’t think I was unusual in that. That’s roughly what the culture around me was measuring, so it made sense to measure myself the same way.

My definition has shifted pretty significantly since then. What I actually care about now is something more like — am I building something meaningful? Do I have good relationships? Am I moving toward work that feels honest to who I actually am? Those things are harder to measure and easier to dismiss, but they seem to be the ones that matter when I’m honest with myself.

Has it changed over time? Absolutely. There was a period in my mid-twenties where I achieved a lot of things I’d wanted and found them strangely hollow. Not dramatic, not a crisis — just a quiet realization that I’d been optimizing for the wrong variable. That was useful information.

As for the most important factor in achieving success — I’d say it’s having a clear enough sense of what you actually value that you can recognize when you’re moving toward it. A lot of people are successful by external standards and genuinely unhappy because they never stopped to check whether those standards matched what they wanted. The discipline, the skill, the effort — all of that matters. But it has to be pointed at the right thing or it just takes you further in the wrong direction very efficiently.”

Sample High-Scoring Response (spoken register, ~280 words)

“Fifty years is a long window, and I think the honest answer is that cities will look dramatically different in ways that are hard to predict precisely — but there are some directions that seem fairly clear.

On the improvement side, I’d expect significant changes to how cities handle transportation. The shift away from private car ownership toward shared electric mobility and better public transit seems like it’s already underway in many places, just unevenly distributed. If that accelerates, city centers could become genuinely more livable — less noise, less pollution, more physical space reclaimed from roads and parking. Green infrastructure — parks, urban forests, rooftop gardens — will probably expand both for quality of life and for climate resilience.

The challenges that worry me more are related to inequality and climate. Cities have always concentrated both wealth and poverty, but that gap seems to be widening rather than narrowing. Expensive cities are becoming unlivable for average-income residents, and I’m not sure the trend reverses without significant policy intervention.

Climate is the other major pressure. Many of the world’s most populated cities are coastal, and the combination of rising sea levels and more extreme weather events is not a distant hypothetical — it’s a present condition that’s already straining infrastructure in places like Jakarta, Miami, and Mumbai.

So my picture of cities in 50 years is something like: potentially much more pleasant for those who can afford them, significantly more stressful for those who can’t, and under enormous pressure from a climate that urban infrastructure was never designed to handle. Whether that resolves well depends on decisions being made right now.”