Duolingo Is Ruining Language Learning

Good marketing ≠ Good results

Photo by Paul Morley on Unsplash

I love the fact that Duolingo's made language learning approachable.

Ever since it was created in 2011, more and more people have taken up learning foreign languages.

I also have a deeply rooted hate for Duolingo.

I also hate the lies created by its over-the-top marketing. I'm willing to bet that despite the higher number of learners, there's also a lower number of people reaching a conversational level in their target language.

And let's not even talk about reaching fluency. Duolingo can never get you to that level.

You see, Duolingo's basic approach to language learning is not wrong. The way we're often taught languages in school is tedious. It teaches us words we don't care about and ways of talking not used in daily life. Who cares if Brian is in the kitchen?

The most common reason people learn a foreign language is to communicate.

Why are classes focusing on reading and writing? That's not the goal, is it? I get it's important to know the basic structure to spread from there but that shouldn't be the focus for years on end.

Language learning must be mostly fun.

Duolingo provided a solution. It was a good idea.

But its over reliance on gamification ruined it.

Gamification Galore

In 2018, I kept a one-year streak for Korean with Duolingo. I wanted the real experience of staying with it for a while and see the progress I'd make.

The results in short?

Some progress. From experience, I know I'd have made more progress with pretty much any other tool.

Duolingo users focus on keeping their streak. More than anything else, they don't want to lose their streak. If they realize they're about to lose their streak at the very end of a day, they'll spend 5 minutes on an old lesson they know they mastered just so they can save it.

Is it better to spend 5 minutes on the personal pronouns or the present tense when you've already mastered them months ago? Or would watching a 3-minute video in your target language be more useful? I vouch for the latter. Even if it's shorter.

Duolingo is a gamified version of classes.

We're taught words and sentences we'll never use in real life.¹

Now, don't get me wrong. It's good to have a daily reminder to connect with the language. That connection just shouldn't be Duolingo.

Duolingo isn't your target language. It's a tool to improve it. That's where most people get confused.

And with the recent announcement Duolingo would become an AI-First company, I've heard complaints from countless users about the decreasing quality of content.

So now, not only do users get to learn pointless words and expressions, but these also often happen to be wrong! I mean, come on. If you want to be wrong in a new language, you don't need Duolingo for this.

It's what we language learners are the best at after all! 😅

In the past month, I've exchanged with 3 friends and 1 random person who use Duolingo daily. Two of them learn French, one Japanese, and one I forgot but which was a lesser-studied language..

For that last one, I can't say much. I suppose resources are scarce so any resource is better than none, I suppose.

For French and Japanese, though, phew, don't get me started. These are major languages with thousands of better options. Why stick to Duolingo? "Because it's fun" is the usual answer I got. Great. But if the goal is to learn the language, shouldn't fun be complementary to progress? These are people I know well and who have contacts speaking their target language. They also know Duolingo's not that useful yet they keep using it.

What would be better?

First, if you’re looking for a bite-sized app to use daily even when they don't have time, I'd recommend Anki. This flashcard-based app/website shows a set number of flashcards and, depending on how hard it was for you to know the other side, the card will appear again sooner or later. This is what is called spaced repetition, a system known to be the best way to recall new things in the long term.

Research has proven it multiple times. Here are three papers if you’re more curious about it:

• The Effect of Spaced Repetition on Meaningful Retention (1963)

• Spaced Repetition Promotes Efficient and Effective Learning: Policy Implications for Instruction (2016)

• Enhancing human learning via spaced repetition optimization (2019)

Second, if you’re a new learner, you can find a website with very basic grammar to get started. For example, this could be great for Japanese, and this one for French. Grammar might look boring, but it doesn't have to stay the focus for long. What matters is to know some basics and then learn the rest as you go.

I wrote this article about the most important grammar to learn when you start.

Another option is to use YouTube or podcasts for learners. The Coffee Break collection is full of short lessons and dialogues that are fun and useful to learn real and useful sentences.

Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services are also great for staying connected to the language. Language Reactor can be a good tool to get double subtitles when watching your favorite drama. That allows you to connect the sound of the language in a "real" situation with how the language is written.a

Apart from this, there are also physical resources. Assimil helps reach an alright conversational level in 90 days with only 30 minutes per day. Graded readers work wonders for both reading skills and confidence in these skills by providing a full story that is aimed at teaching words and sentence patterns people actually use in daily life.

Finally, I can't not mention AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude.

These tools require more work from the learner because they need you to prompt well to get useful output. With a bit of experience, they can work wonders. The voice chat is also a godsent tool for us introverted learners as it allows practicing with our awful pronunciation and hesitations without anybody there to suffer through that.

NotebookLM is also a magnificent resource, although I'd mostly recommend it for higher-level learners instead. It can be useful as a beginner or low intermediate learner as well, but rather as a way to get a podcast explanation of a text you want to work through. That way, you can start working on it with a basic understanding of its content. Its best use is turning anything into a podcast in your target language, though.

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Anyway. You see what I mean.

There are countless other options.

In short, please—please!—don't get tricked by the marketing and false claims that Duolingo works better than classes.²

There are other ways to have fun in your target language. AND make more progress.

Wouldn't that be a better solution?

You tell me.

1. I'm willing to bet every single long-term user of Duolingo knows how to say "owl" and "bear" in their target language, even if they will never need these terms in their lives.

2. That research was done by Duolingo itself and was only on French and Spanish, their (admittedly) "best" languages.