Can Duolingo's chatbot teach you a foreign language?

The less embarrassed you are, the better you tend to be at learning languages. The answer? Chatbots

Chatbots suck. We all know it. If you want to get something done with a computer, it turns out, there are better ways to do it than laboriously type out conversational sentences to be read by a programme with a shaky grasp of the language and a gratingly affected sense of humour.

So I'm as surprised as anyone that for the past week, I've started every morning with a 10 minute conversation with a chatbot. In French.