We love finding new travel apps to help make our life (and travelling) easier and we think we may have found our newest obsession. Awarded the iPhone App of the Year by Apple in 2013, Duolingo may be the best thing to happen to frequent flyers since luggage with wheels.

Completely free — including no ads or fees — Duolingo is a really easy way to learn another language at home, while you’re commuting to work or even while waiting in the airport. They’ve set up the learning to be almost game-like, so each lesson is actually fun. For example, you lose lives when you make a mistake and if you run out of lives, you must do the level over again. What’s also interesting about the set-up of this program is that it’s a crowd-sourced platform meaning designed so as users progress through the levels, users are actually translating websites and other documents.

Currently for English users there are language courses offered in French, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese. Because of Duolingo’s unique crowd-sourcing platform, more languages and translations are being added to their system, so there is a high probability there will be more opportunities to learn even more languages in the near future.

I’ve wanted to brush up on my French for quite some time, so I decided to sign up and start learning. I’ve already zoomed through the basics and am pretty addicted. I’m hoping if I keep at it I’ll be confident enough to order off the menu when I finally make it to Paris. What do you think? Have you tried Duolingo?

Find the app on iOS, Android and at duolingo.com.

–By Stephanie Gray