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The app can be irritatingly pedantic: translate “the boy eats cheese” instead of the “boy eats some cheese” and you stand to lose a life, but once you get into its mindset, you make impressively rapid progress. The app makes liberal use of repetition and gamification, hammering vocabulary and grammar skills into users with a variety of written, aural and oral questions, of which you can get only four wrong on each level before progressing to the next. Now the website has been converted into a free iPad/iPhone app, allowing tablet users to brush up their French, German, Spanish, Portuguese or, of course, Italian skills.

The Duolingo website has already taught one member of the PC Pro office to speak Italian, as readers of Darien Graham-Smith’s Technolog column in the magazine may recall. It all adds up to a smart-looking, intuitive and fresh iPad browser that – like many of Opera’s products – deserves greater attention than it will probably receive. You can swipe left and right to browse back and forward, and there’s also an option to skim through large previews of open tabs by clicking on an icon in the bottom-right of the screen. Tap on a tile, and the screen dissolves to a coloured display showing the site’s logo flashing until the page is loaded likewise, tap on a link on a web page and the link flashes until the page is ready, giving a visual indication that your tap has been recognised.

The homescreen, for example, is an easily tappable selection of tiles for your favourite websites, with an address bar at the top if you need to manually enter a URL or search for a site. Opera’s Coast brings some much-needed fresh thinking to tablet browsing, playing to the strengths of the touchscreen, rather than merely shoe-horning a desktop browser onto the iPad.