Forget losing weight, not losing your temper, and exercising like crazy. Here's a New Year Resolution as good as any: learn a language. It's supposed to keep your brain exercised and the grey cells young. And app Duolingo is a good way to start. It's available free on Android and iOS.

On Duolingo, you choose your language and set a daily goal for practice. Then, enjoy the ride.

Lessons are divided into categories. Basic stuff like greetings and phrases, adjectives, nouns, general vocabulary. The difficulty level mounts as you move on and you end with sentences on topics you pick up in general conversation such as sports, culture, religion etc.

In each lesson, Duolingo throws sentences at you and you have to either speak them out loud and be assessed or translate from your chosen language into English or vice versa. It's not as easy as it sounds! There are some exercises that look really easy, such as selecting pairs of equivalent words in two languages or picking from available words to make a sentence. But if you're not alert, you can make mistakes with those too.

Back when I first used Duolingo, it had more of a gaming feel. You had to do each lesson without losing the three hearts displayed. But now, that's sadly been omitted. Now you just have a percentage-completed bar. Each category has a different bunch of lessons. If you are remiss with your practice, you will find older completed sections open up again to make you re-practice. As a matter of fact, practice never stops.

As you make progress, you build up points and can share and compare with other learners. What's great about Duolingo is that it's outright addictive. I just can't stop when I take it up and even after I've completed the whole course, I still go back and refresh.

When you finish a particular item, you can click to join a discussion on it. Duolingo users keep arguing over various points in the language and someone explains why something is said the way it is. Users also share resources for more study outside of Duolingo.

Why I think it's a great resolution to aim for is because learning a language through a fun process also takes your mind away from work in a useful way for a spell. Ten to twenty minutes is enough for you to meet the default goal. And you never know when a foreign language comes in useful!

(Lila Ray is a corporate consultant who likes her gadgets almost more than her shoes. Write to her at [email protected])

Tags : DuoLingo