An Opinionated Critique of Duolingo

When did they add that? When I was trying to learn Japanese 6-7 years ago Duolingo didn’t have anything for either kana or kanji…

I would say that my critique is rather unbalanced. Most of it seems to gripe on the shortcomings of Duolingo, but I do think that it is an overall positive.

I expect a critique of accuracy would be non-opinionated.

> but proper gamification combined w/ LLMs for real conversations could be an incredible learning tool.

I don't necessarily disagree but I do believe it will require some really smart design ideas. I am pessimistic that a big name company will come up with them

I've tried learning apps with LLMs and part of the issue is that you can't have much of a conversation early on. A conversation of "how many cats do you have?" "I have two cats" "what color are your cats", etc., isn't much different than the non-AI lessons. At the point where it would be really useful, the other options you mentioned are much better choices.

There's a newer app I use called Natulang, developed by a Ukranian software dev to solve this problem for themself, which is entirely speaking focused w/ AI support and aims to get a person to a B2 level over 360 lessons w/ about 15 minutes each. I'd round up to 30 minutes each for actual time commitment due to the extra SRS sessions tacked on.

I'm 50 lessons in Spanish now and I definitely believe the claim. Recently was on a date w/ someone who knew about as much English as I know Spanish and only grabbed Google translate about a half dozen times.

It doesn't have much in the way of gamification... to me the fact that it seems very evidently effective is enough motivation to do a daily lesson.

Actual LLM powered free-form conversationalist assistants are better once someone has a solid base understanding, probably at least a 2000 word vocab. What you'd really want is a LLM powered instructor that develops and adjusts a lesson plan based on progress.

I teach languages and teaching people how to functionally craft things with a language works much better in the medium to long term. By the time you get some basics down, you can actually have a conversation beyond "comment ca va, comment t'appelle tu?" because you know how to use the language, not just parrot phrases.

You can get quite far with consistent long term approach with stuff like Duolingo. The problem is, its just one or very few... vectors or dimensions in which you progress, specifically aligned with how the material is done. I have a friend, he is doing DL for French for maybe 2 years, every day. He can talk some stuff pretty well, freezes on some other situations. Passive understanding works quite well for him too.

Real use of language has many dimensions, changing also ie the ways you think in that language for example.

Nothing beats real use where you have to express yourself and not skip to other languages as a shortcut, no way around this.

> But if you are self directed, recognize the ways in which it is useful, [...] it's really helpful.

Yes, but once you get the hang of how to learn well from each exercise, it's interesting how the app will seem purpose-built to... slow you down.

You know that exercise where you arrange words into a sentence? I learned a lot better once I stopped looking at those words for cues, and just formed a sentence in my mind and then looked.

At that point, it's a pure waste of time to assemble the sentence and tap through all the UI transitions, I'd rather see the next exercise right away!

But the app doesn't allow me to! I have to pass the minigame first! At the end, it seems 80% of my effort was spent practicing "how to visually hunt for words in a word-cloud".

Theres a persistent myth that you can just "absorb" a language; you can't, you have to understand it either intuitively or unconsciously through experience. Duolingo took so much money from people by pushing this idea.

That's a very, very low bar though.

It's not much better for language learning than just playing Candy Crush. As long as you don't delude yourself into thinking this is time spent productively, then sure.

A language learning platform that works would be nice, instead of this.

People just need to properly set expectations. I've been using Duolingo for about 15 mins per day on average for a few years now. What I've found is that my reading skills are actually pretty good (roughly A2/B1 level), for instance I can open up a Spanish language subreddit and mostly make out what's going on. My listening is rudimentary at best, I can generally have a vague idea of what people are talking about if I listen to a Spanish conversation. My speaking is almost nonexistent.

But you know what? That makes sense. I'm mostly just reading text and clicking words to fill in the blanks. And the listening component is so unrealistic that it barely builds anything up. And I don't do speaking at all.

As you say, it beats doomscrolling. For a free service I'm not expecting that I can parachute into a Spanish speaking country and be fluent. At the same time, I'm a lot better in terms of my skill level than I would have been otherwise.

I have friends and family who earnestly desire to learn a language, and ask me what to use. They often end up choosing Duolingo and make no progress toward fluency in the subsequent years. The criticism is that it subverts their goal, preventing their success by replacing learning with addictive behaviors that don't educate (like someone wanting to enter a new field and getting hooked on "educational" YouTube Shorts podcast clips). It also spoils their ability to focus on alternative learning methods as none deliver as much of an immediate dopamine rush as Duolingo. These alternatives could do better at that, sure, but it doesn't change that Duolingo fries their brains preventing them from adopting productive methods without therapeutic interventions.

That's why people advocate against it and advocate for alternatives.

Their goal wasn't to defeat doomscrolling, it was to learn a language!

Sitting in an empty room beats doomscrolling!

I agree. But should they wish to go beyond "beating doomscrolling", they have other options

Exactly. I know I’m not learning much. But it is a healthy/less harmful distraction and I managed to read some Spanish tweet. Can’t complain.

It's worse than anki because there is no SSR built in ( at least when i was doing it ).

>But there are many situations where memorizing 400 distinct things is pretty useful: countries, capitals, recipes, history etc.

Just memorizing 400 vocabs alone is actually pretty good early on because then you aren't tied to practicing grammar with childish content like " I went to school by bus yesterday" because of limited vocabulary.

I spent the first year alone learning about 2000 vocab without any grammar. And when I go on and do grammar I can actually practice with interesting content that related to my daily life. I now recommend new learner to learn their vocab by N + 1 level relative to their grammar.

In 5 minutes you could probably do 5 new words a day and 30-40 repetitions.

So 1500 words a year, which is useful, if you're not a complete beginner

I had a similar experience, I was a heavy Duolingo user between 2014 and 2016 (I used it for Spanish) and I still believe that back then it was actually a pretty good way to learn the basics and I had learnt enough to be able to get by in Spain, have casual conversations with people, even hang out with a group of natives (but I also was a member of a few WhatsApp groups with Spanish people so I had a bit more practice).

Then they dumbed down the phone app and soon enough they did a similar thing with the website. Tips & Notes section was gone (or they kept it but removed a lot of information? can't remember), the tree-style courses were gone and replaced with some kind of a Path, the exercises became too easy and they'd make you translate from Spanish to English most of the time, which is much easier than the other way around. Then they removed the ability to type with your keyboard, added the "match the word pairs" exercise (which sucks if you use a keyboard and yes, I know you can try to use the numbers on your keyboard), all of which made the whole experience even worse and less effective.

I lost my streak somewhere in the middle of this enshittification process and I've never really gotten back to using the site, other than maybe checking once a year whether it's still shitty (and it always is).

In my opinion, back in 2014 Doulingo used to be a learning website with some gamification aspect that made the learning process a bit easier and more entertaining. Now it's just a gaming app which tries to give you a false sense of learning a language but in reality you aren't learning anything. Just a waste of time.

> I grew to hate the gamification

I don't understand people who say this. I completely ignore the gamification. If I don't feel like doing it one day, I don't do it. I don't even know what the leagues are, despite seeing people talk about them. I never look at any score or badge that they provide.

Why do people care about this?

Curious if you have ever heard of/tried https://www.spanishdict.com/learn?

> gamified learning vs "academic" learning, immersion by moving to a country,

I think it's not unreasonable to point out that, at least for Americans (I'm guessing the largest user base of Duolingo), of the three options you listed, one costs tens of thousands of dollars for us (academic instruction), and the other is virtually impossible to do because we aren't part of a bloc of nations with border freedom (immersion).

The biggest problem with Duo are the extremely limited exercises and educational materials. Gamification is great.

But you're not going to learn declension and cases from repeating the same few stilted examples that don't even exhibit enough variety to pick up the underlying rules, especially as an adult.

Duolingo is trying to do implicit language learning but the language input is far too narrow.

I used Duolingo to start learning a language with a different alphabet, and it taught me the alphabet, the sounds, and some basic vocabulary. But it couldn't teach me verb conjugation, noun declension, plurals, ownership, etc. etc. etc. That I needed a teacher for.

With the teacher, I then used Anki cards to help with remembering more vocab and with keeping things fresh everyday in between lessons. Duolingo could be that, if they had enough examples, perhaps. I would prefer Duolingo type exercises over my Anki cards, as well as the streak and friendship network effects, but there's simply not enough content.

Your parents have any impression of students that used Pimsleur?

Personally I like Babbel. It looks a bit dated (or did the last time I used it), but its content is really good and it helped me bootstrap 3 out of the 5 languages I speak fluently.

There's no gamification like in Duolingo, you have to bring your own motivation and endure the UI, but it really does get you to the level where you can continue on your own.

> spend time in a country where the language is spoken and force themselves into situations where they "have" to speak, etc.

In the end this is the only one that matters.

You can do things before going to that country that will help. But you'll never be close to fluent without taking that final step.

I want to learn German (as an adult). What should I do then?

I’d broadly agree with this critique but I’ve had some success with Duolingo. About 10 years ago, I used it with the aim of learning enough Spanish to get by for a two-week holiday.

While learning useful language constructs (gender of nouns and pronouns, how to conjugate common verbs), I also had to learn some useless – to me – vocabulary, e.g., names of animals at the zoo. Anyhow, after a 2-3 months of using Duolingo, I had learned enough to be able to communicate with bus-drivers and shop staff. My conclusion was that Duolingo would be a useful tool to complement more structured learning.

I’m currently learning guitar and I feel the same way about Rocksmith: it’s a lot of fun and a great tool to incentivise me to pick up the guitar but it doesn’t substitute a more structured learning course and it completely neglects the theory of music.

It's funny that Issen doesn't have HN on its "how did you hear about us" list.

> keep yourself motivated

As an entertainment device, Duolingo is fine. I used it to start my French journey, not truly appreciating the INCREDIBLE difficulty and quantity of effort required. Fortunately for me, I was and still am super curious about languages, and I really want to learn.

I speak French now at roughly a B2 level. When I travel to la Francophonie, I get by, and people are usually reasonably impressed by my level (or at least are humoring me, which is fine). But my friends and family who have seen me hold conversations in French, as impressed as they may be, would never put in the amount of effort that I have.

issen looks rather interesting at a first glance. Thanks for the pointer.

I've also got a 2000+ day streak (Spanish) and keep it going for similar reasons. I can't stand the goofy animations they keep adding to Duolingo. I'm about to dump my streak and move to something that doesn't make me feel like the developer thinks I'm a child clapping at the cartoons on the screen.

Last year they replaced all the recordings of native speakers with ML-generated recordings, in both Russian and Ukrainian (probably other languages too but those are the two I have). The ML-generated recordings are terrible, for example they can't deal with the ambiguity betweeen vse and vsyo (written identically in Russian) so they always say vsyo. They'll sometimes randomly say the names of individual letters instead of reading the word, particularly the hard and soft signs. One recording is for a sentence with the word "tochka" (period, as at the end of the sentence) and instead of reading "tochka" the recording just has a silence there.

I've reported these issues hundreds of times since they added the ML recordings and none of them have been fixed.

But like you I keep using it just to get that little daily exposure to the language. I suspect it's useless for actually learning a new language, but it's maybe just barely good enough to keep up a language you already know.

I was frustrated that the Russian course was so short, so I started doing English as a Russian speaker, but soon the Russian part got thin and it's almost completely English.

Duolingo was exceptionally useful to get me started on my language learning journey (Spanish, a bit of Japanese) while knowing basically nothing. It tapered off pretty fast, is very slow to introduce new vocabulary, and the core lesson structure doesn't explain much unless you dig into the submenus with intent.

As a basic starter tool, it's cute and briefly enjoyable, and that's enough. But you'll need to supplement it with something else almost right away, and your daughter's structured classes and reading material were almost certainly that something else. I think Duolingo's *streak* is the only key feature worth imitating in any form, as it gamifies habit development, which is difficult for many people. If only the lesson content could keep up with that one good idea.

DL was a core part of my German studies before my first kid was born so I could start speaking my family's heritage language with her. I spent about six months working through the entire tree (this was a small-ish tree, back in 2016), supplementing with Wiktionary + Hammer's German Grammar and by the time she was born, I was contacting tutors to work with them and saying "I'm guessing I'm around low-B1" only to have them evaluate me as probably B2 for spoken language.

The caveat here was that I was intensely motivated, my native language (English) is related to German, and I already had learned two other languages, so I had internalized a good process to learn a language (plus an interest in linguistics meant I could read "here's how the subjunctive is constructed in German" and not have to read fifty pages of explanation about what the subjunctive even is.

It CANNOT be overstated how useful it is to understand grammatical concepts at an academic level when you're learning a new language. There's so much that can be conveyed with one term instead of twenty examples you have to read over and over to grok what this construction is for. Pay attention in seventh grade English when you're being taught what passive voice is, pay attention when you're learning about mood. When you hear past and past perfect, remember it! It will make things SO much easier when you decide to acquire another language.

(Edit) Even very different languages like Japanese still have a lot of the same concepts. The most complicated verb ending IMO is the "causative-passive," and many of my classmates struggled to learn it. IMO it's probably because of the "passive" part. But passive voice exists in English, and if you can recognize it, the construction in Japanese is really easy. "To be allowed to XYZ" or "To be forced to XYZ" if you translate in your head (like most learners do at first). You speedrun the whole concept but for actually learning the mechanics of constructing it: for one category of verbs, drop -ru and add -saserareru. For the other, drop the -u and replace with -an and then -serareru.

Bam, if you already know what passive means, you're done. You've literally just learned the entirety of it, a thing I watched take a full week in my university class.

I think what you say about having 'outgrown' the platform is basically hitting the nail on the head here. Duolingo knows their audience is people just looking to start learning a language. That's the top of the funnel and therefore the place where they can capture the most users, which for them makes sense because the majority of users are monetized through ads.

There are so many other platforms around Duo though, Preply being one of them, that go a lot deeper with techniques that are great once you have that baseline understanding but maybe wouldn't work so well on people who are maybe just starting to try to commit to a habit. If from day one you make someone sit down and have a 50min conversation they are much more unlikely to be doing it 7 days later (and therefore watching ads) than if you just introduced them to a few basic words and concepts.

So i don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing that duo is built this way, it's just serving one audience. And that audience are the ones that need the most help in habit forming and motivation - hence the gamification is strongest.

Sure maybe they've gone too far, and maybe the way they've done some features like the leaderboards and leagues kinda sucks but even if these things are always a bit marmite, they do work for a lot of people. We've built a very similar system in trophy and we see the data - streaks, achievements etc really do work.

I do think if duo made the leagues, points, challenges etc more friend-focused rather than being put into cohorts of people who you have no idea who they are then that would be better. I think at one point I was asked to 'import my contacts' but tbh phone contacts are such a dead feature in 2025 that I don't want some rando that I spoke to 10 years ago being my friend on Duo lol. If I had a way to discover my friends maybe by username or whatnot then that could be better. Not sure if they already have this...

I agree with your last point. I get the criticism of Duolingo and it is fair, but I can't agree that it is completely useless. I learned/am learning French. I can get by with non-English speakers and people won't immediately switch to English when they hear me.

It took about 5 years of on and off practice. Not sure how much actual time I put in. Duolingo was one aspect, where honestly I probably learned like 75% of my vocabulary. I also have a French wife and friends, took classes, hired teachers, watched movies, read news, etc, etc, etc. I probably could have got to where I am without Duolingo but I'll never know. Learning a language is a pain in the ass and I don't think any one thing is really going to do it. Duolingo is free and can be one aspect out of many that will help get you there.

> Duolingo helped me build a habit, knowledge of words and patterns.

I definitely agree. I would say that my Spanish proficiency was somewhat similar.

I think the Duolingo base is a good launchpad to kickstart your additional learning from. Boska Wloska!

I do feel like many of the Duo critiques are strawmen. Of course no single method will lead to new language fluency. Even full immersion requires practice and often classes.

I use Duo, Pimsluer, live in Italy, and will start classes in a month or so. Duo is a fun game that also helps with my language journey.

IIRC the CEO(?) of Duolingo was asked what he would choose if he had to choose between a more effective language course and more gamification. His answer was gamification, because the best course doesn't help anyone if noone shows up. So at least they know that it's not the best way of learning a language.

Duolingo was helpful for me to expand my Spanish vocabulary, but it definitely did not teach me the language itself. Some of the most critical linguistic concepts are buried at the top of stages and not brought up in the gamified lessons themselves. I'm in a privileged position since my wife is a native Spanish speaker, so I quickly began to grasp how much Duolingo wasn't teaching me and how much speaking Spanish with my wife (and watching Spanish-language shows without subtitles) _was_ teaching me.

>But the treadmill, used properly, is still significantly better than an extra 30 minutes sitting on the sofa,

That's right. Most of the criticism directed at Duolingo seems to be about unrealistic expectations of engaging with an app for 10 minutes a day. That is not going to get you to fluency, but it does beat doom scrolling on your phone.

Before I committed to study Japanese seriously I did about a year of Duolingo. I learned about a thousand words, maybe 100 kanji, I could follow parts of conversations and read easy sentences, and that is exactly what I expected from the effort I put in. In fact I was happy with what I got out of it. What it excels at isn't teaching you a language fast, it's that it keeps you going and has course material laid out for you.

Now you are making me feel bad about walking on the treadmill for 30 minutes.

Jk, I agree with you but that doesn't mean there are no meaningful criticisms of the treadmill

See, that's my issue. If Duo is only a good way to "get started," then it isn't a good way to LEARN a language, as in learn how to actually use it to a level approaching fluency. The whole thing is false advertising, not because of the specifics, but because of the advertising which makes people think (and yes, millions believe(d) it) that you can become fluent by using Duolingo.

I think duolingo is taking some steps. Not sure how effective they will be.

they have added some "write your own sentence" exercises in recent months. generally a story you listen to and then you write a summary or answer a question about why or how something happened in your own words. your sentence is then graded/corrected by AI. these are still rare but they do make me think more than the typical forms.

there is also some new more expensive level called Max that claims to have audio conversations with you using AI. I haven't tried that one.

> avoid the hardest and most essential skill: translating from your language to the other.

The hardest and most essential skill, second only to: not translating from your language to the other :)

(or maybe it should be the other way around; translating is useful but a really hard crutch to kick. Keeping it around will make it hard to keep up while speaking/listening and make reading a slog)

^^^^^

In other cases, "materials" could refer to course content, for example

I meant _learning_ materials. I could have used the word "content", but that signals a kind of fungible slop.

By contrast, when I was studying Spanish using something more similar to the Assimil method, I was reading full length novels and watching Yo Soy Betty, La Fea within about six months.

It's not just me. There's been some research on this sort of thing, and it tends to find that just about the only thing that's slower than Duolingo is traditional classroom language education.

Admittedly I was doing more than 10 minutes a day. But that's because I was legitimately having heaps of fun. I wanted to spend a bunch of time with Spanish, and I didn't need any weird gamification tricks to help me sustain that level of motivation.

> 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.

This has been exactly my experience with it. I would probably progress faster if I had others to speak with, but for just doing the lessons offered, I'm pretty happy with my results.

For me I mostly use Duolingo as a mechanism to encourage myself to spend time learning each day. I find that it's helpful for reviewing a lot of basic vocabulary, but I typically supplement it with other stuff (listening to music, watching shows, youtube language channels, AI conversations, etc). I find I make the most progress when I choose to do things that are challenging which Duolingo really is not.

So what's the hack? I'm guessing there isn't one?

Asking as it's "hacker news" after all, I remember reading how North Korean agents would watch shows like Friends for hours on end to become familiar with English, is that a hack?

That's a super helpful list from the State Department!

Good to know ahead of time what you're getting yourself into.