I think the thing I dislike about Duolingo is it sort of catches the casual person into a trap by misleading them into thinking that by using this app they'll learn another language. It's not that it's a bad app, it's just that that's not going to happen. There's no one resource that will get you to even an intermediate level in a language. And the State Department's FSI estimates are unfortunately pretty accurate for hours to fluency [1].

For me to put a foundation for French down it was: Assimil for about 6 months (30 min/day), 30 minutes of daily comprehensible input, and Anki & Clozemaster for vocabulary (~15-20 min/day). Mixed in there was a couple months on Yabla doing listening comprehension, some grammar study from Bescherelle books, and some tutoring on iTalki. After about maybe 9-12 months I could listen to RFI's broadcast targeted to learners [2], but even then I still needed to go to the transcription a lot at the beginning.

To mislead people into thinking that doing some vocab study for 30 min a day in Duolingo is going to get them anything beyond the most basic grasp of a language is kinda not cool.

[1] https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-lang...

[2] https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/

I agree with some aspects, and think the author perhaps misunderstood some others.

> If I collect 100 XP, what does it mean for my language skills? For that matter, why do I collect extra XP when I receive a potion? Can the XP I collect be used in a way to carefully guide me towards the specific language skills I would explore next?

Using XP to guide the user towards a particular path is an idea, but it's just not one that Duolingo uses. The purpose of XP in Duolingo is simpler: people like numbers to go up, so they get XP for using the app. It also enables an ecosystem of rewards; I'm generally not a competitive person, and there have still been days where I took a few more Duolingo lessons because I was close to completing a "daily challenge".

Similarly, friend streaks, leaderboards, etc, all have innately appealing hooks. They won't all appeal to everyone all the time, but one of them will appeal to someone some of the time. If they get you to practice for 5m a day more than you would've otherwise, I think they've served their purpose.

Broadly, I agree with other comments about expectation management and time commitment. Could you get yourself to a solid level of understanding in a new language only by using Duolingo? Possibly, but you'd need a lot of dedication and hard work, and much more than 5m a day. If you really wanted to learn a language, and had the time, there are much more effective ways to get there.

Duolingo isn't really built towards encouraging that kind of intense learning, because they know most people who download the app are looking for a bite-sized learning experience, and are willing to accept bite-sized results in return. For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.

My only criticism of Duolingo is the monetization. The ads on the free version are unbearable and makes me want to never use the app again. Also they spam your inboxes with emails every 2 days such as "Duo misses you so much! <sad emoji> Are you giving up on learning?? <crying emoji>". I have a hard time believing that this harassment/marketing works on anybody, but what do I know.

Otherwise I don't share the criticisms in this comment section. It's a fun educational game to learn a few words in other languages. I don't think it's misleading anyone into thinking they will become polyglot by using Duolingo.

Both of my parents are teachers of a European language. They both have phd's in linguistics, and rate very highly with students (who basically adore them).

All of this context to say that not once has anyone using Duolingo been able to "test out" of the first ("101") class that they teach. Duolingo self-learners come in with a very unequal mix of vocabulary and... not much else. Unable to use declension properly [0], unaware of most rules around gender, verb tenses, etc.

I'm sure (and I should look it up) that there have been academic papers written on these quite different methods/approaches: gamified learning vs "academic" learning, immersion by moving to a country, etc.

But in my parents' experience of teaching (which spans ~40 yrs), Duolingo students pretty much all became disappointed in the app: these students thought that they had developed skills when it turns out they mostly got addicted to a game that overpromised useful learning over entertainment.

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Imho, the ugly truth is that language learning as an adult is deeply hard and requires a tremendous amount of effort and "tricks" to keep yourself motivated. People who watch native media with subtitles, play with AI apps (such as the YC backed https://www.issen.com/ which is quite nice), take a mix of "classic" classes, spend time in a country where the language is spoken and force themselves into situations where they "have" to speak, etc. all do much better. But it's a ton of effort.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

I'm currently holding a 1100 days of streak of Italian in Duolingo, so I think I am entitled to drop in my 2 cents ;)

To some extent I agree with the critique. Would I be able to write an assay like the op in Italian? surely not. Is their marketing annoying? yes, very much. Is the platform perfect? far from this. However - after 3 years with Duo I am capable of having causal, simple conversations, I can navigate most of the websites in Italian, I understand most of the marketing emails, I can write simple emails myself. I trust this is mostly due to DuoLingo - building the vocabulary and quickly recognizing the patterns (and It was not super simple, my native language is Polish, and I was learning Italian via English interface - there was no Polish-Italian course back then, now there is one but it's just very low quality).

Duolingo helped me build a habit, knowledge of words and patterns. During the 3 years I've spent with the platform I made trips to Italy, I tried talking to people, tried to read texts and and explored some grammar myself. About a month I go feeling I've outgrown the platform I started doing 50min conversations on Preply platform and I am now confidently moving into stage where I can build longer sentences, use past and future tenses and irregular verbs.

In my discussions with friends I emphasize that IMHO Duolingo alone is not going to teach you (complete) language. If you have a goal to learn a language (in general, not on Duolingo) and you use it as one of the tools - it could be really helpful.

Anki is Free and Open Source Software and it's way more effective. Why waste any time on Duolingo when you could be using Anki instead?

I used Duolingo a fair bit in 2015–2017 to improve my Swedish, and generally enjoyed myself. Having not touched it for most of a decade, I downloaded it earlier this year to try my hand at basic Greek and wow but it’s gone downhill. Everything is massively over the top, all subtlety has left the system, and when I stopped after a couple of days because I couldn’t deal with the intensity they sent me nagging messages for over two weeks in more and more pleading tones trying to get me to come back. I’d never use them again at this point.

Edit: just went to delete my account and they’ve got a tearful owl above the “Erase personal data” button to try to guilt-trip me into staying. https://drive-thru.duolingo.com/static/owls/sad.svg

Duolingo's marketing of "learn a language in 5 minutes a day" or whatever their similar slogan is, is bad. Duolingo won't teach you hardly anything at all in only 5 minutes a day, and even with considerably more time (30 minutes to an hour a day), on it's own it is unlikely to teach you a language. However, in combination with other learning tools like classes, immersions, comprehensible input, etc. It is a very valuable tool. I finished the German class in about 2 years, and I found it helpful, and wished that the Duoloingo German class continued further than it did.

Yeah, I agree, I don't like aspects of the league, and I think that the way they apportion XP encourages less-than-idea ways of spending your time. Basically, if you use Duolingo exactly the way they encourage you to use it, and only that way, you won't get much out of it. But if you are self directed, recognize the ways in which it is useful, and use it as another tool alongisde the rest of your learning, it's really helpful.

Like I always say to my friends & family who are complaining about Duolingo not really teaching anything: it beats doomscrolling, what else do you want?

The thing that sorta gets me about Duolingo: If it became mainstream for everyone to do what is essentially 5 minutes of anki every day (which is kinda the Duolingo pitch), language learning would be kind of a bad candidate. If you spend 2 years memorizing 400 words you still aren't close to knowing a language. But there are many situations where memorizing 400 distinct things is pretty useful: countries, capitals, recipes, history etc.

I think it's important for those responding about their Duolingo experience to include the tier that they are using. Specifically, I wonder if the conversations with AI, and the "explain this" feature in Duolingo Max change outcomes? I'm new to Duolingo, chose the max tier, and feel that I'm learning quite a bit specifically because I am having simple conversations in French daily (albeit with an AI that seems to me to have questionable hearing at times). I haven't used it long enough to provide insight or even judge the platform, but for those using the more expensive tier(s) I wonder your thoughts...

Duolingo has been around for so long that I feel like there should be a wealth of case studies showing how folks have used it to actually learn new languages. I've yet to see one, personally. (But perhaps I'm not looking hard enough!)

I have a 2000+ day streak on Duolingo, mostly learning Russian. The app has got progressively worse since I started, for a while just giving me the same lesson every single day. I of course finished the course years ago, but I keep up with my one lesson a day to keep the bird happy. I find the UI incredibly annoying, I've disabled all the sounds and animations that I can. You might ask why don't I stop? Well I want to keep up my Russian, and the one lesson a day keeps my brain ticking over.

> Games worth their salt are not created by bolting together a collection of numerical statistics. That is how you get cookie clicker.

I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of the article, but cookie clicker IS a game worth its salt. Input mechanic difficulty is not the sole factor to consider when determining the quality of a game loop.

I can relate to this post - great thoughts!

I took Spanish in high school and college, so had a rudimentary understanding of verb tenses and some vocabulary. Before I walked the Camino de Santiago el Norte (45+ days in Spain), I used Duolingo to brush up on my Spanish.

It helped my reading most, my speaking a fair amount and my listening/conversation the least. I was able to ask questions, but was often flummoxed at any reply that wasn't the most basic.

I grew to hate the gamification, but was addicted to my "streak' also ... using math lessons when I didn't feel like doing a Spanish lesson. The so-called "leagues" were kind of useless since the same people weren't in the league from week to week. Any friendly competitiveness to "learn more" was lost when randomly assigned to a different group each week.

I finally abandoned the app this spring.

I'm trying Babbel now since I'm going back to Spain for a month and Patagonia next year.

I did Language Transfer for Modern Greek and found it excellent. The host and creator is a native Greek speaker. I cannot recommend it enough!

Anecdata: my daughter, when a rising high school sophomore in 2023, used DL to skip a full year^1 and join upperclassmen in Spanish 3. She went on to take AP Spanish, earn college credit w/ her AP test score, and join the Spanish National Honors Society. She credits DL w/ giving her the confidence -- and vocabulary -- to make the leap when she did. Of course that doesn't mean critiques aren't valid, and YMMV, but it does help show that DL isn't necessarily useless, either.

1. Despite US high-school language classes generally having a (usually deserved) reputation for failing to impart real fluency, our town's language instruction is actually first-rate.

I think Duo could be a good way to get started on language learning, but it is not effective on its own. What it lacks is an obvious way to graduate from its call and response mechanic to synthesis, as in creating your own sentences and participating in conversation.

Tandem was a good way for me to improve my Spanish to the point that I felt comfortable traveling. I dropped Duolingo pretty soon after starting on Tandem. Language learning is much more than memorizing words. Unfortunately, Tandem is also basically a dating site for many people, and scammers are using it as well, and this makes it hard to use consistently for language learning.

Once you get the minimal confidence that you think you could find your way back to the airport or bus station in another country, you really should just go visit. Couchsurfing really helped me meet people in many cities. I don't know if the community is still as strong, but it used to have regular meetups of people within a city who are interested in talking with foreigners. You don't need to stay on people's couches if you don't want to.

A lot of people seem to be learning English through multiplayer online gaming. I do not know if this approach works for learning other languages, as I am not inclined to participate.

I can't stress it enough, though. Any language learning approach that isn't writing or conversation is going to max out at a very low level.

It sucks balls. I learned more in one month of studying from a textbook and attending conversation classes than I did in two years using Duolingo. And its so much worse now than its ever been!

Duolingo was amazing for learning the Russian alphabet, something I struggled with from YouTube videos, etc. I can confidently read Russian nowadays (although I may not understand everything). I did get quite far in the lessons as well, but I don't have a high opinion of them. There were things I've learned from Duolingo that I said to native Russian speakers who were like... "we don't say that".

Note: The alphabet lessons are separate from the main content.

Duolingo and many other apps avoid the hardest and most essential skill: translating from your language to the other.

It's often easy to guess what words mean especially with the help of cognates and other similarities between languages. 99% of Duolingo mobile is like this. Even when you see words in your language first, your task is to tap the presented foreigin words in order.

You'll never learn to speak this way. The best way is to flip the order:

    The language is difficult -> La lengua es difícil.

I actually wrote a script to build Anki decks from Duolingo and Busuu[2] which did this. The front front is a short sentence. The back is a transliteration and translation. Then I discovered Mango Languages (free through many US public libraries) that's the same with great audio and a pretty good flash card system.

I used that strategy 2 hours a day for two months, and I learned enough Italian to argue with a cab driver whose meter "non funziona."

[0]: In Duolingo's defense, the desktop version isn't a tap fest, but there's not enough opportunities to

[1]: https://mangolanguages.com (not sure why no one knows about this)

[2]: https://busuu.com (probably the best for grammar)

[3]: https://memrise.com (very, very good AI text convos with corrections provided and mixed language support)

I first used Duolingo back in 2018. That was how I started learning French. I majored in Classics in college and had taken Spanish all eight years of middle school and high school, so my vocab progress was very fast. Within that year, I felt like Duolingo had become too slow, and decided to switch my learning over to reading books and watching movies in French.

Earlier this year, I got back on Duolingo because my partner and her brothers were trying it out, so it was more a social thing than anything. I was on it for about a month before we all agreed that the quality was too poor and the pace too slow for it to be worthwhile.

Duolingo is a case study in a good-enough-to-ship product that needed improvements and instead got dark-patterned into something much, much worse than it had been previously. I'm sure there are many superior platforms for language learning online today. I've gone back to books and movies. I'm currently enjoying watching Blaise le blasé (a Quebecois cartoon) and reading Chair de poule (Goosebumps in translation).

A lot of Duolingo criticisms to me read like someone saying "I was walking on a home treadmill for 30 minutes every day but I didn't really get in shape until I started spending 5 hours each week in the gym with a professional trainer."

Yes, obviously an actual class with a qualified teacher is going to teach you a language faster than Duolingo. Obviously you will learn faster if you move to a foreign country or if you have people around you to regularly speak your target language. Obviously you can cheat at Duolingo and not learn anything, just like you could turn the speed way down on your home treadmill and not really get any exercise.

But the treadmill, used properly, is still significantly better than an extra 30 minutes sitting on the sofa, and a ten minute language lesson will still teach you more than no language lesson at all.

"Big tech embraces blitz-scaling: the primary goal is neither financial sustainability nor the quality of materials but making the number of users grow."

In most cases, there are no materials. It's intangibles only. Duolingo, for example

There are exceptions. High quality materials are a goal for Apple

One thing that I have found Duolingo helpful for is kana and kanji practice in Japanese. It's better than flashcards in that it also gives you stroke order.

Duolingo is great at gamification and terrible for actually teaching you the language. You memorize a ton of random words without really learning how to put everything together.

I found Babbel to feel much more like an app designed by language instructors.

Duolingo did a great job of encouraging me to find a real human to learn from.

I bought Rosetta Stone for a similar purpose.

They cannot give you a chart or synopsis to save their lives. They are quite weak on tenses for this reason.

What is a non-opinionated critique?

What do you guys think about DuoBook.co?

Duolingo app doesn't even work at all anymore; it is non-functional. The sad thing is that it used to work in the past.

I couldn't stand Duolingo because of the gamification. I'd complete a section and then there would be four screens telling me I earned points, then another screen saying I earned a different type of points, then a screen asking to share my results, etc... Each lesson was only a couple minutes so this ends up taking a non-trivial amount of time. Also, the sentences were often times nonsensical and nothing you would use in a real conversation. However, I would sign up tomorrow if I could get rid of all the gamification nonsense. There simply aren't that many half-way decent Hindi options out there. Pimsler is by far the best, but it only has two levels and you can only do it so many times.

Duolingo is terrible†, but proper gamification combined w/ LLMs for real conversations could be an incredible learning tool. (I might build this if no one else does.)

†It can be useful for going from absolute 0 to epsilon, just to kind of get familiar with the language, but if you're using it more than like 2 weeks, you're seriously wasting your time (vs. reading material in the target language, watching TV in target language, trying to talk w/ people in target language). Anki, too, can be a trap that feels like learning but isn't, really, in my experience.