A classroom is not the only place to learn a foreign language. Today, you can study any language anytime and anywhere through a mobile app at your fingertips. If you’ve been searching for one, you’re pretty much guaranteed to come across Duolingo.
While people may have different approaches and learning abilities, online language learning has commendably dominated the market in recent years.
Contrary to the textbook and traditional method, software and apps are inexpensive, convenient, entertaining, and, most importantly, flexible.
But as with everything, nothing is picture-perfect. There are some obvious benefits and drawbacks of using language apps.
There are plentiful options in the market that empower you to start with a few clicks. Of so many alternatives, Duolingo is a well-known app for studying a new tongue.
But can you actually learn a language with Duolingo, or overrated?
How effective is Duolingo?
Is it really worth it or a total waste of time? What’s the difference between the free & plus plan?
In this Duolingo review 2022, I’m here to write my honest assessment and explain in detail its pros and cons. This will help you make an informed decision and what to expect. Let’s get the ball rolling!
Table of Contents
The History of Duolingo
Duolingo was founded as an academic project at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh by professor Luis Von Ahn and his Ph.D. student Severin Hacker.
After selling his previous company, reCAPTCHA, to Google, both aspired to try something new in the education niche.
Since there was an enormous demand for language learning tools worldwide, they went with language study.
Eventually, they launched Duolingo by the end of 2009. Later, many others joined and took part in developing further.
As per the Crunchbase report, Duolingo raised $183.3M of the total in over 9 rounds. As of January 2021, the investors estimate the total valuation to be staggering high, up to $2.4 billion.
About the founder’s Track Record
Before launching Duolingo, Luis von Ahn sold reCAPTCHA to Google in 2009 at an undisclosed price. Google might have bought because of the massive user base.
While the amount is unknown, Von said the amount was somewhere between $10 million and $100 million.
Regardless of the cost of acquisition, reCAPTCHA was highly annoying and time-consuming on the internet. It was so stressful that almost everyone hated it.
He claimed that over 750 million people had solved one of his captchas. Yes, it prevented spam and fraud on websites to some extent, but notwithstanding, it wasn’t user-friendly and made life more miserable. I always despised it.
That is the reason, after purchasing, Google redesigned and made it less irritating by adding a checkbox I’m a human”. Now, in reCAPTCHA 3.0, it is invisible.
Do these things in earlier times really matter when I’m writing the Duolingo review?
This inevitably implies a lot!
The track record of the founder plays an indispensable role in evaluating current products. No matter how surpassing and innovative an idea seems, the woeful track record does make a world of difference.
And that’s why it starts with a negative tick. It may not matter to a well-funded company, but it matters to myself and my readers, who trust me for what I say.
What is Duolingo?
Unlike reCAPTCHA, Duolingo is friendly, relaxed, and delightful. This isn’t a Déjà Vu all over again.
With over 500 million users, Duolingo is the most popular language-learning platform and the most downloaded education app. It has grown so much over the past eleven years.
The number of users was 300 million before the spread of the 2020 pandemic. But because of COVID-19, the number has boosted Duolingo’s fortunes. With nowhere to go, many started using this addictive app.
While Duolingo’s headquarter is in Pittsburgh, the United States, but operates worldwide.
As you’d anticipate, Duolingo as a mobile application is available for Android and iOS operating systems. There is a browser version too.
It has successfully combined language learning with gamification intending to make education simple and more fun.
Duolingo offers a tree-based training strategy. It uses flash-cards, images, listening, and writing lessons to motivate you to study new words, phrases, and uncomplicated sentences.
You can also connect with other users who are cramming the same language through their community characteristics.
How Does Duolingo Work?
Let’s jump in to see how Duolingo works!
UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) are pretty likable and straightforward. The modern and creative design gives an intuitive and knockout involvement.
Similar to other language apps, you can register for a free account at Duolingo.com.
They have 3 easy steps to sign up: First, select the language and reason for considering it. Then, you decide your daily goal between Casual (5 minutes), Regular (10 minutes), Serious (15 minutes), and Intense (20 minutes).
Finally, register by using Facebook, Google, or any email account.
Voilà, you have created a profile! This will hardly take a minute or two to wind up the onboarding process. You can then choose a language and begin receiving game-like bite-size tasks.
After spending a few minutes, you will understand everything. The whole interface is minimal and easy to grasp.
The Target Audience
With an intent to make education accessible to all, Duolingo’s primary audience is learners who are interested in acquiring a new language from ground zero.
While the company considers its target audience as “everyone.” But is fundamentally geared towards the beginner’s level.
You always have to start from the first lesson. If you feel a particular section is too advanced or rudimentary, you cannot jump to a different level.
So, if you previously have some acquaintance in your target language and fancy moving to a higher level, it is not for you.
To sum up, Duolingo is solely for elementary learning, which is precisely their target market. Of course, the company will not admit that, but this is what it is.
Courses Available on Duolingo
The Duolingo courses vary hugely, depending on your selection of the language.
For instance, as an English speaker, you can learn Spanish, with 29 million other participants, French, with over 17 million learners. You can even study Romanian, with just over 500 thousand language enthusiasts.
But what if you speak Italian fluently or your mother tongue is Italian?
In that scenario, the possibilities are restricted. You can only choose between English, French, German, and Spanish.
Duolingo Incubator
Because of limited options for less common languages and combinations, they have also formed “Duolingo Incubator.” This program allows community users to volunteer to create courses in languages that are not available on the platform.
Suppose you are knowledgeable and possess an in-depth understanding of a particular order (both source and target language), and ready to collaborate and committed to the project.
You can apply for the same from your registered account.
With 100’s of languages, all user-generated contested are divided into 3 categories:
- Phase 1: Courses not yet released.
- Phase 2: Courses released in beta.
- Phase 3: Courses graduated from beta.
Thanks to thousands of volunteers, Duolingo empowered their community to develop all these courses. They also helped the company with Word-of-Mouth advertising.
While this creates a welcome variety, however, these programs vary in quality, sometimes a lot.
The audio quality of the words’ pronunciation’ can differ with strange voices, which cannot be very clear for many. Unlike the official version, some are more prone to influence by vernacular, dialects, and slang.
Despite the sheer number of contributors and checks and balances in place, there is no reliability and standardized flow for any language.
Which language can you learn with Duolingo?
Contextually, beating up almost all the online language learning programs in the current market trend, Duolingo sets to deliver 98 courses that teach 39 different languages.
The platform covers nearly all widespread languages, including but not limited to English, French, Russian, Spanish, Hindi, German, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
Whether you’re looking for less spoken like Danish, Catalan, or Irish or one of the endangered languages such as Hawaiian, Yiddish, and Navajo, Duolingo has all in the palm of your hand.
Are you fascinated with the fictional languages used in the Star Trek movies and Games of Thrones tv-series?
Well, you can learn High Valyrian and Klingon too. Plus, they also offer Esperanto — an artificial language. The probabilities are endless!
Types of activities
Duolingo is all about gamification. They have developed everything in colorful visual design, aesthetically pleasing pictures, progress bar, ticks, and clicks.
When you learn on Duolingo, you earn experience points (XP).
You earn through various activities like completing individual lessons, placement test, checkpoint quiz, skill practice, test out, and stories in a few languages.
This also assists you in increasing your overall standing in leagues.
While you’re at it, it will cheer you for moving to the next part, though you shouldn’t be overconfident about that (more later). In the pursuit of this journey, you will gain lingots, gems, streak, and crowns.
The blue-colored Gems and red-colored Lingots are virtual currencies in Duolingo. The gems are available on mobile apps, whereas Lingots are only accessible on desktop.
You will receive these rewards for achieving various activities like crossing levels, finishing a skill, translation, 10-day streaks, etc.
You can then take advantage of Gems/Lingots for shopping like streak freeze, double or nothing, heart refill, streak wagers, outfits for Duo, and bonus skills like learning idioms, proverbs, and flirting expressions.
Gems are for buying multiple things in the Duolingo shop. Wondering what they are? Here is the list.
(i) Refill your Health
If you make 5 mistakes and you ran out of heart during a lesson, you can use these perks to refill your health. This reminds me of the Candy Crush game.
You can just buy back 5 more hearts and continue with the lesson. The good thing is, the web version does not have the punishing “Health” feature.
(ii) Streak Freak
You have to practice your language on Duolingo every day. If you break your streak, you will back to zero. But there is a way to solve the winning it back.
This feature helps your continuity to remain in place for one full day of inactivity. You can purchase this anytime and will compensate for a missing day.
(iii) Bonus Skills
These are some extra lessons that you can buy from the store. The cost differs, and some of them are only available for a limited period.
Some languages offer you to read some flirting words and idioms & proverbs. So, you can use these incentives to learn something extra related to that language concerned.
(iv) Double or Nothing
You can buy this for 50 gems. Suppose you maintain a streak for 7 consecutive days. You get 100 gems. And if you fail, you don’t get back the five you used to buy “Double or Nothing.”
To summarize, you can earn these rewards if you are consistent in your practice.
Overall, they do a fabulous job of keeping you encouraged and hungry for more learning, making a favorite study resource among new learners.
Pros and Cons of Duolingo
Like any other language learning approach, Duolingo as a language app has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Some could be subjective, depending on how you see and your purpose.
For illustration, Duolingo’s principal goal is to impart foundational skills in various languages. This might be favorable for someone who needs to understand the basic conversation before going for a vacation in that country.
Possibly for a school-going kid who strives to learn something in their free time. They might not get lessons from a teacher. So, Duolingo is helpful.
However, this is a negative for someone who needs a more extensive plan to prepare for TEF Canada, Spanish DELE B2, JLPT N2, or Korean TOPIK V.
To evaluate whether it will be beneficial, let’s touch upon the positives of Duolingo as well as its limitations.
3 Benefits
Here are 3 great and clear benefits!
1. Easily Accessible
Whether you are a homemaker, student, or professional who maintains a tight schedule, anyone can use Duolingo at its comfort with its interactive interface.
You neither need to travel far and wide to enroll in regular classes nor have any obligation to follow a fixed schedule.
You can study whenever and wherever you want at your own pace. You can jump right back into the next lesson or check out any previous one for revision.
You just need a smartphone, internet access, and an email account, which most people have these days.
2. Everything is Free on Duolingo!
It is absolutely free, and you can access everything. And that’s what makes the most popular education learning platform on earth.
Let’s face it — many people want to learn a language, but they cannot afford it.
A parent might not pay the tuition fee for their daughter, who wants to learn Korean because K-Pop, K-Drama, and K-Movie fascinates her.
Duolingo’s mission to “make education free, fun, and accessible to all” is unquestionably genuine.
You might learn nothing meaningful that can help you in your career or assist you to watch foreign movies on Netflix, but at least, it’s a start.
Remember, a journey of a thousand miles always begins with a single step.
3. You can learn multiple languages simultaneously
Do you want to become a polyglot?
Well, in that situation, Duolingo can play a small but crucial part in your goal.
The app doesn’t restrict how many languages you can learn concurrently. So, now you can easily switch seamlessly between Spanish and French whenever you prefer.
I’ve tried several apps, and most of them don’t allow learning another language unless you finish the first one.
On the contrary, Duolingo allows you to learn many languages simultaneously.
There is no restriction. Suppose you have spent some time on Duolingo. In that case, you will see many profiles (like the one below) with several languages and their corresponding level.
But I won’t suggest going over 1 or 2. Language learning requires undivided attention. Focusing on too many will make you perplexed, and you might not concentrate on anything.
You can always endeavor the second one once you have reached at least an intermediate competency in the first target language.
5 Disadvantages
Despite some apparent benefits associated with the Duolingo app, they still come with many difficulties that you must keep in mind before diving deep into it.
Here are 5 shortcomings.
1. It focuses more on English speakers
As an English speaker, you have plenty of choices.
What if you want to learn Mandarin as a Hindi or Tamil speaker or dive everything French as a Japanese native?
Unfortunately, you are out of luck!
Mostly, you have 1 or 2 options for several languages, and English is a common destination.
The app centers mainly on English speakers who want to learn another language than speakers of other languages who wish to study something other than English.
Perhaps, they don’t have enough resources to make these programs.
This is also conceivable that it is a daunting task since many languages are more colloquial in nature. Thus, creating such a combination meets many localization issues.
Whatever may be the case, your possibilities are pretty unsatisfactory as a non-English speaker.
2. It is only for beginners and not meant for Advanced learners
Duolingo is not a miraculous ‘cure-all’ that will enable you to quickly and smoothly gain any language with just a few taps of your device screen.
Forget about fluency; even achieving an intermediate level is a pipe-dream. This is one of the major problems of online language learning.
Everything begins and ends at the basic level!
Some people even fail to learn anything. Do you want authentic examples?
According to Forbes, Duolingo’s chief revenue officer did not immediately understand the spoken question “¿Hablas Español?” after six months of Duolingo Spanish study.
If this intrigues you, you can read some known criticism and complaints in the image below, taken from Wikipedia.
Duolingo’s lessons leave a lot to be desired for serious learners. If you have any crucial long-term goal like a career requiring languages, higher education abroad, immigration, etc., you should avoid it.
Instead, consider enrolling in a language school, finding a teacher, or taking help from other resources like books, audios, and video lessons.
By all means, you should try. But I’d firmly say keep your expectations low. So you won’t be disappointed once you complete the whole tree.
3. Duolingo is all about a game
Language learning isn’t just playing a game. The entire strategy is gamified. There is undoubtedly some educational value, but not enough to make you learn it.
They don’t teach how to communicate in the language.
I doubt if anyone can even talk to a native speaker for 5 minutes or order food in a restaurant. You won’t catch anything if you watch a movie in that language without subtitles.
They incorporate some random vocabulary and phrases, which in the end means not sufficient for anything worthy.
In the end, it becomes all about beating the game.
4. You can only learn some vocabulary and phrases
You cannot learn a language just by practicing some words and phrases through flash-cards.
Duolingo explains things like informal and formal greetings and commonly practiced sentences. It also comprises frequently used nouns, verbs, tenses, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions in further exercises.
There isn’t any proper and suitable grammatical explanation and rules for sentence structure. Everyone knows the varieties can be productive but are insufficient on Duolingo.
They are also horrible at teaching non-European scripts. If you intend to understand Hiragana, Katakana, or Kanji to study Japanese.
Perhaps, Russian Cyrillic, Korean Hangul, or some of the Mandarin characters or Indian languages, it would be almost unlikely that you will understand anything substantial.
When I first completed the entire tree for French. I asked myself, “Is this it?”
It left me much to be craved. Since I already knew French, I can say this was hardly an A1 level of DELF.
5. This is more useful for Kids and not Adults
These days, Duolingo is focusing more on adding cartoon characters and animations. It seems they are more targeting the youngsters.
The total number of users has soared from 300 million to 500 million since coronavirus spread in early 2020.
This robust growth is mainly contributed by school-going children who are having easy access to smartphones and laptops. Parents are mostly doing work from home, and thus, they don’t mind their children studying something new.
But for the adults who want to learn effectively, this doesn’t serve the purpose.
Neither it explains the fundamental grammatical (they do some parts on the desktop, though), nor will it help you enhance your listening and speaking.
It also has no natural-sounding conversations and resembles more like a computer voice. You will not get a real-life insight into how people actually speak it.
A lack of intermediate lessons and face-to-face interaction like recorded videos is a big disappointment.
How much does Duolingo cost? — Free Vs. Paid
Duolingo’s unique selling proposition is that it is entirely free. This is the primary reason its popularity is rising at an unprecedented speed.
You can locate entire content, stories, and perks from beginning to end without paying a single penny.
You can use it on a smartphone and will sync the progress on all your devices you’re using with your account.
If you want to track your students, you can also try “Duolingo for Schools.” Once added, you can check their improvement from your account.
Is Duolingo Plus worth the money?
Duolingo offers the freemium model to its user base. Initially, the Duolingo plus gives a 14-day free trial, and then the cost is $6.99 per month.
The Plus subscription offers some added benefits:
First, the plus subscription is totally ad-free. You can get rid of the ads and gain access to other features in the process.
Yes, the pop-up advertising is disturbing that randomly appears on your screen. But you can ignore it, the way we do it everywhere. After a while, you won’t care about them anymore.
Second, you can get everything offline, which might be an incredible feature a few years back. Today, when the internet is readily available everywhere, it is pretty much worthless, at least in most parts of the globe.
The last benefit is unlimited hearts and skill test-outs. It also repairs monthly streak and provides quizzes to assess your progress and mastery. These aren’t a big selling point.
In fact, there are some tricks to get all these in the free plan.
For example, you can use the browser version to get unlimited lessons rather than a mobile app. The last time I checked, there were no limitations on the number of mistakes you make.
Instead of paying for “Plus,” you can also track your progress on the Duome website. Type duome.eu/Your_username, and now you can see all.
It shows the languages you’re learning and their levels, the required XP to reach the next level, and the Golden Owls you have gained!
You can access everything, albeit with some weaknesses, without taking a paid subscription. I’d recommend sticking with the free plan.
I don’t think the Duolingo plus will help you learn more or in a better way. This is honestly not worth it.
If Duolingo is not great, why is it so popular?
The reasons are the same as the 3 benefits and other points I mentioned above in this review.
- Duolingo is 100% free. Yes, you don’t need to pay a single penny to learn whatever you’re interested in. Who doesn’t like free stuff?
- You can access it from anywhere, anytime, and anywhere. The interface of the platform is also appealing, captivating, and simplistic.
- You can learn various languages at the same time. Again, this is difficult to do on other platforms. On Duolingo, you can switch to another language with 2-clicks.
- This is all about gamification. It occupies the learners’ thoughts more quickly and gets them excited about learning. The rush towards finishing the tree and gaining the reward makes you use it more often.
- You can also study some less common, going to be soon extinct, artificial, and fictional languages. You may not locate enough support like an educational center, books, or teachers who can support study some of these.
My Duolingo Review: Average — 3/5
Duolingo is the most familiar and straightforward language-learning tool and 100% free.
Although this is somewhat hit and miss. There wouldn’t be enough explanation if you stuck at any part.
I hope this Duolingo review was valuable for you to make the right decision. Overall, my experience with Duolingo wasn’t great. This isn’t meant for serious learners.
If you’re still on the fence, you can check it. At least there is no harm in trying it. Despite various negative aspects, at least it is free.
But don’t expect to achieve any notable fluency with Duolingo by spending 5 to 20 minutes a day with a few virtual flashcards activities. That is simply not possible. Here is my rating.
Duolingo Review
Summary
Duolingo is the most well-known language learning app. But, it is only meant to learn some beginners level skills. Don’t expect any meaningful proficiency. It is not worth it. By considering all the aspects, I rate “Average.”
I’ve tested several apps, and this is my second one after the in-depth Memrise review. I’ll write more in the future.
Let me know if you have questions about my Duolingo review. You can also share your experience in the comments!
I took Spanish in school for 9 semesters. I have no gift for foreign languages. I memorized lots of stuff including all conjugations for all tenses and passed exams but never became conversational. A few years later I forgot 80%. A couple of decades later I’d forgotten 98%. A few months Duolingongo brought some of it back pretty rapidly, and while I surely could not pass advanced exams today, I can deal with the stores and ordinarily conversations I encounter in the Hispanic parts of my city which I never could before. So for a free app, I’m quite satisfied.
I have used Duolingo off and on for 2015. I’m an English speaker learning Spanish (no prior knowledge). I have used FSI Spanish to listen and mimic native speakers and various Memrise Spanish courses. I also watch content on Netflix in Spanish to work on my listening skills. What I have found most effective as far as Duolingo goes is to use your phone to say the sentences in the desired foreign language you wish to speak instead of typing the sentences. To do this, you just need to go into your mobile phone’s settings and install the second language capability (or keyboard).
The global icon on my keyboard to the left of the speaker button (that I tap to speak for Siri on my iPhone) allows me to change which language I desire to speak in. While doing the Duolingo phone app, you usually do not need to switch back and forth. The app is intuitive and must have a built-in prompt going back and forth when answers are desired in Spanish or English.
I also found that writing down the sentences for each bubble in English. Then Spanish was far more effective in decoding how much repetition the app does (let’s face it, those 4-5 levels with 4-5 lessons can be pretty tedious when they’re about a topic like “banking”). I’ve found each bubble has roughly 98-112 unique sentences. I have only tried this for unit 7 since they have (and continue) to expand the tree. In addition, I have listened to 3/4 of the silly stories; I haven’t tried their podcasts yet.
I found tiny cards annoying and only used them 1-2 times. For an absolutely free app, I think it’s incredible. The ads are super annoying, but I close them on my phone and reopen it. It’s easy to lose track of time as well since you strategically do not have your clock on mobile visible while you are doing your lessons. Be careful because it can make you late for appointments or other important obligations. The new voices are quite annoying, as the other comments have said.
I like the original female and male voices they had a few years ago. Now they added a depressed-sounding female, an annoying female juvenile voice, and an s-l-o-w talking male voice (which is kind of funny because when do you ever hear a Spanish speaker speak that slow)?! Anyway, try the dictation phone hack, it works better than Memrise’s dictation feature, and I use it for EVERY sentence DuoLingo expects me to type out (I want to speak a language, not read and write in it only). The only time I type is to fill in the verb endings in those new bubbles they added. The grammar tips they added are pretty good too.
I wish they would tackle topics as SpanishDict does or a grammar book – por vs. para, when to use “se” as a marker, reflexive mixed with objects, common prepositions that usually follow certain verbs, etc. I haven’t even finished the new tree with its added levels, and I have tested B2-C1 (however, I learn idioms, combined phrases, use cheap grammar books, and spend roughly 30 mins – 1 hour per day learning reviewing. So I can only give Duolingo credit for 45% of this 45% to Memrise & 10% to other tools (FSI, SpanishDict, Netflix, Braid, grammar books, etc.).
Side note: I have not done this, but unit 7 has more than filled up a composition book with its sentences in Spanish and the English equivalent, so now that duo has 10 levels of Spanish ..,
¿puede ser que se llena más de diez cuadernos mientras aprendiendo con duolingo? eso es un montón.
Thanks for your detailed opinion, Carrie.
I am on Level 6 and I use Steno Pads, English on the left, and Spanish on the right. I am currently in Steno pad number 5. I definitely agree that DuoLingo does not train the user enough in the spoken language. I want to be able to be reasonably fluent by the time I get to Level 10.
Lots of complaints …
Name a better app you all.
There doesn’t have to be a better app for Duolingo to have depreciated in quality over the past several years. It used to be well engineered, if occasionally flawed. Now, it is extremely balky, over engineered, and tedious for those who don’t pay for it. It is almost as tedious for those who do. Either way, growth has apparently not been good for the app.
I just finished typing up a lengthy comment for DuoLingo support, explaining my bailing out, after 10 weeks of toying with their Spanish course (as a 60yr old German).
It all started great and was very encouraging, I used the Duolingo Android app daily for 30min avg, accumulated 20000 ‘XPs’ in the first eight weeks, the app tracked almost 700 new words. I finished at the top of each weekly ‘gemstone’ league, yet the ‘progress reports’ really did not help me to find out my true or relative performance. There is no insight into the ‘word’ list of acquired or weak words, no long-term tracking of my progress, no longtime scoring on a relative scale. Colorful, but simple charts, useless reward lists, no way to see my real performance, my weakest words, my overall ability growth. Instead hearts, gems, XPs and other nonsense trinkets.
The ‘timed’ exercises turned into typing and picking frenzies; almost impossible to finish typing long phrases, correcting spelling, etc before the clock stopped. ‘Buying’ time with gemstones (their accumulation remains a mystery to me until today) was not inspiring either. Being forced to repeat these XP hunting rounds over and over to finish at least one was not fun, just stress.
Being forced to repeat finished lectures OVER AND OVER (to prevent their status from being stripped down) turned into a boring chore. Seeing, hearing, speaking the same nonsense sentences like ‘I am a lion, I speak Spanish’ or ‘The birds are reading the newspaper’ again and again. I must have seen these two silly sentences 30x within the last 4 weeks alone.
I tried to change my strategy of finishing each lecture bullet prior to progressing to the next one, in order to gain some speed and overall skills: I opened up a few lecture bullets, working on their topics and levels in parallel. Resulting to be confronted with many unknown words and expressions in the ‘XP’ exercises and questionnaires – being forced to guess rather than know their meaning. Apparently, the app does not really track personal progress and uses the entire lecture content in these quiz rounds.
As of today, I do not know how fast/good/effective I REALLY was in these 10 weeks of learning Spanish. Personally, I did discover a lot of similarities between Spanish and Italian (vacation level skills from my childhood), Latin (school knowledge from the 1970s), I can read Spanish fairly well now, can follow SLOW communication decently, but clearly did not learn much about proper pronunciation nor sentence building, my acquired 700-word vocabulary is shaky at best. The ‘Talk’ feature turned out to be stubbornly unforgiving in some cases (despite very accurate phrasing), while accepting mumbled nonsense and even wrong cases and words in others, oh well.
The kiddie style design, the silliness of the entire appearance does not convince me; all seem to be aimed at youngsters, collecting “gemstones” and acquiring silly titles as rewards. It lacks seriousness, professionalism, sincerity, from my view as a 60yr old geezer.
My original plan was to utilize a grassroots level of Spanish during a planned first vacation trip to Spain. As this trip fell through my interest and also my eagerness naturally dropped alike. I will stop hunting for XPs, gemstones and victory laps in weekly challenges now.
And maybe peek into some other language tools mentioned here and elsewhere, out of curiosity. Maybe I will find one that keeps me fascinated and attracted, DuoLingo did not. The initial thrill is gone, tapered off due to repetitiveness, odd progress rules, lack of strategy and reporting. As well as lack of support whenever telling them about errors and glitches found in their Android version.
So be it.
Thanks for your detailed and in-depth review as a lingual ‘pro’, I am only an ‘am’. At least my ‘German English’ appears to be intact these days. Acquired the old-fashioned way and half a century ago, school bench and all..
Thanks, Mike, for taking the time to write this detailed opinion and experience.
Hi Mike,
56 year old here who also decided to try to learn Spanish. I picked up the Duolingo app a couple of days ago, and found the education style quite good, but found the gamification also a bit “fluffy”. I’m curious if you found anything else that’s as good for learning Spanish, but without all the bells and whistles?
For me this site is good enough, i just learning Japanese like 1-2h/day for almost 6month and not even pass checkpoint 3 yet, and at least I able to pass n5 online test. According to data i see on the website ‘ articles talking about it should be about 350-400 hours for people with Kanji knowledge and 325-600 hours if you do not have kanji knowledge.’ And I am in the category that not have kanji knowledge because i just know few kanjis from games but am still able to pass it below 300h. for listening to i also not have a problem because already used with Japanese dub whatever from games, movies or songs. making study fun is makes learning easier.
Me piense que yo aprendo mucho por Duolingo. Ahora estoy cerca de hablando con fluidez por ellos. Me pienso que ellos hicieron un buen trabajo. Porque es la verdad que su trabajo para ensenar las letras de otras abecedarias es terrible.
I think I totally learned a lot from Duolingo. Ask my previous Spanish-speaking boss or my other Spanish-speaking co-worker who was a missionary for 15 years in Mexico with whom I often have complex conversations in Spanish on our breaks. I’m almost fluent. However, I do agree that Duolingo is really bad at teaching non-English scripts.
Thanks for sharing your opinion Kezia.
I like duolingo and its game-like qualities. The word strength that I cannot strengthen annoys me. That there is nothing to use lingots for annoys me. 🙂 Love the stories. Taking the Spanish. After 6 months went to Peru and people seemed amazed at my ability to “read” –at least pick out the approximate meaning after that time period. Now I have been off and on for 4 years. Almost done with level 5 out of 9 levels. Duolingo has about doubled its learning content. Getting easier to understand–definitely not fluent conversationally but reading signs in stores, hospitals–fairly good. Beats playing freecell. 🙂
I wanted to start learning Spanish, but the adult ed courses in my city were canceled because of the pandemic. I hope to take one of the courses in the future. So I heard about Duolingo and tried it. After a month or so, usually five minutes a day, I had picked up enough words and phrases that I could understand a little, sometimes, when I heard Spanish or saw it on a sign. I pay particular attention to bilingual signs.
Two big drawbacks I had: it doesn’t explain when to use accents in Spanish. If you don’t accent a letter when you should, it just says, “Pay attention to the accents.” I found an explanation of Spanish accented letters online, but the rules didn’t always match what I saw on Duolingo or elsewhere. The other drawback was the tiny gray type on a white background. I could barely see it.
The thing that made me give up was that you can’t skip the gay content. I have gay family members and friends. I accept and love them, but I don’t want to read about two newlywed women and their honeymoon or the guy whose boyfriend is studying Italian. However, if I clicked Skip for even one phrase in a lesson, I couldn’t finish the lesson or go on to another lesson. Reading this stuff shouldn’t be a requirement for studying Spanish, but in Duolingo, it is a requirement, so I stopped.
Yea, I hear you. As a gay man, it also annoys me when I have to read about hetero honeymoons or dates. But I stick around to learn the language. We, gays, have probably thicker skin.
Hi, I’ve been using Duolingo for about a month and just want to offer a different perspective from the “It’s only useful for beginners” take.
The main reason I picked it up is that I will be going to Japan in about a year and I wanted to exhume/reactivate my rusty knowledge of Japanese. So far Duolingo has proved to be a REALLY helpful review tool for reactivating a dormant language. Background: I completed 4 years of University level Japanese and also spent 4 weeks in an immersion course in Japan over 10 years ago, so I got to the level of kinda sorta fluid conversation (not fluent, but at the level where I could open my mouth and Japanese would come out without any special effort, and I could navigate an everyday conversation about nontechnical topics) and pretty basic knowledge of the writing system (learning all the kanji required for level 4, which is what is expected for Japanese 6th graders) BUT unable to read a newspaper.
However, unlike the European languages I know, Japanese just seems to fall out of my head, and the kanji, in particular, I forget QUICKLY if I am not constantly reviewing them. The last time I was in Japan was 5 years ago, and I was able to manage to stay in a Japanese hotel and having casual conversations, but I wanted to be able to do more for this next trip and not have my head hurt so much as it attempts to retrieve long dormant knowledge! So for really rusty languages, I think it can be a really useful review tool.
Apart from that, it IS fun to dabble in a completely unfamiliar language (I picked Swahili) so I do see that the basic design is geared to complete newbies. So… not disagreeing about that, for sure!
I find it to be hyper annoying. They’ve seemed to have made its game aspects better at the expense of its learning aspects. But I don’t want to play a game, I just want to learn a %$#@ing language. Also, what’s with the really annoying voices? Do they think we find them cute? Because we don’t!
If it wasn’t free I’d drop it like a hot potato.
No offense, but Using Duolingo and also with a bit of Online research to follow up…I was able to achieve fluency enough in Spanish enough to communicate with natives in-game for the most part! I started 3 years ago! I understand this review’s implications but when using These apps it’s about Dedication and how much you utilize it … Duolingo does train you on Grammer too if you read tips and follow through rather than playing it just for the sake of a game! It depends on how you utilise! I have also used Memrise, a great app that took me a long way in reading/writing Russian comfortably, although I won’t say I’m that good in communication with it so far in that language! But that’s mostly because I invested minimal time in it, I could still handle basic convos with natives! About Duolingo, It could get you easily to A2 or even B1 if you do proper research and is sincere with the task! And Ofc, being mostly free and easy to use comes with setbacks like no ability to converse which is there for any other app, but it does make you Somewhat fluent with enough effort!
On a non-serious note, it’s fun and does make the user know some words by heart because of the repetitive nature of lessons. Otherwise, I’d have to write each word and then had to learn them on my own. Of course, a free app is not meant to make you master a foreign language. For that, one must join some authorized school and get certified. But this makes one understand their favorite foreign drama at least a bit.
Duolingo will not make you bilingual, o trilingual, but I’m a publisher, and I started using it because I wanted to read in different languages so that I could evaluate books in their original form. One year on, to my enormous surprise, I am now able to read Portuguese fluently and I’ve started to understand full dialogues in TV series, I may not know to understand every word, but this is something that I wasn’t able to do a year ago. I’ve also started to recognize sentences in Norwegian and Finnish, of which I knew nothing of, so it feels a little bit like magic. Thus, even though the exercises might be repetitive at times, and it may feel like a chore some days, in my experience, Duolingo works.
Personally, I love Duolingo, sure it’s not perfect and there are frustrations but that’s how you learn, following up, and checking out those things that don’t make sense or annoy you. I think it’s a great stepping stone, everything you learn is a little platform for where you see or hear it again in Duo lingo or elsewhere. Also, it is free and I am very grateful!
I found the DuoLingo app helpful in the beginning, but now it has become tedious. I pay for the Plus version and I am frustrated with the lack of communication with customer service. They have not updated their stories in French for the last six months. I have sent them three messages with no response. I will be canceling my subscription and search for a different app.
Exactly this 1000 times over. I have been a paying Duolingo member for over a year to really try and give it a decent go. I’ve been learning Mandarin via the app and while theer is progress it is incredibly slow. I learn more watching Chinese TV with subtitles.
What is most frustrating is the complete and utter lack of consultation and notification with customers of changes and “trials”. An absolute zero on customer service and communication.
There are much, much better apps and ways of learning languages out there than Duolingo. Don’t waste your time.
The theme in the comments, as well as my own experience, is pretty consistent:
– On its own Duolingo is of very limited value, particularly for speaking.
– It pays to explore all it has to offer. For example, their podcasts are both valuable for listening practice as well as interesting (not mentioned in your review).
– As part of a strategy that combines multiple channels / resources such a teacher, classes, immersive trips, podcasts, books, grammar study, etc. It has its place and can be a useful addition
I think you need to update your review to mention the podcasts, as well as answer the question: “how can Duolingo be used effectively (given its constraints)?”
Thanks for your viewpoint.
I did check the podcasts. However, Duolingo offers only Spanish and French for English speakers, whereas English for Spanish. This is a pretty limited combination and doesn’t help a vast majority of learners. Also, the quality is just average, and there are 100’s of free options available on various sites and Youtube. So, I didn’t find it useful. But if it is valuable for you, that’s good.
Hi Vikash,
Thanks so much for this thorough review!
I’ve only ever used Duolingo together with language courses and have found it to be a really helpful tool to learn vocabulary and understand structures a little better.
I’ve completed the Arabic and Romanian trees and both courses have big downsides. Verb conjugation and plural forms are tricky in both languages – and badly explained in Duolingo. Plus there are surprisingly few Arabic words in the course, as each person of the verb and each plural form is counted as a separate word.
On the other hand, the Arabic course is – despite a few mistakes – an excellent way to learn the script. I started an A1 course after doing half the tree and it was a huge head start. With Romanian, I’d already been learning the language for a year and vocabulary was a big hurdle. Grammar less so, as I speak the four Romance languages to B2 to C2 level. The Duolingo gave me a lot more confidence with vocabulary and allowed me to write, speak and read much better.
With both courses, I made a vocabulary book to write down every word, independently looking up plural forms, verb conjugations, etc. I also chose to use the keyboard to type all the words all the time, not just when Duolingo suggests it. That all takes time and Duolingo won’t help you with that, but learning vocabulary has always been a chore for me and the gamification helps. But just one method is never enough to learn a language. You still need a dictionary, grammar, real people to talk to, and a teacher. In summary, I doubt Duolingo is effective on its own, but within its own limitations, it has its uses.
Thanks, for your detailed view, Rob. I truly appreciate it.
I agree with your issues with Duolingo. I do think it has some merits as a speed learning app tho. I use the paid version and often test out of each lesson (through context clues and dictionary lookups.) I’ve made it through the Japanese skill tree pretty quickly this way and it’s been a great way to learn new vocab and improve my reading and listening skills.
That may be a method that’s only possible for ppl with prior experience (I’ve taken a Japanese class in the past), but I have found that I’ve actually improved my comprehension and reading abilities significantly this way.
But I agree that the usual way of using it is inefficient and not conducive to learning to speak a language. I also feel like I get the most benefit if I do several lessons a day because I forget what I learned quickly otherwise due to the lack of spaced repetition.
I also really dislike that the app seems designed to slow learning. I don’t see how it makes sense to do five lessons on the same small set of vocabulary before moving on. Getting through a skill takes too long that way and then you have to hope that the vocab shows up in later lessons (which I’ve noticed it doesn’t always.) I’m only planning on using it for a few months before moving on.
Anyway, thx for the review!
I appreciate your genuine feedback, Lea.
Duolingo sure has good and not good points, however, it is good either for beginners or non-beginners, it is an excellent practice short of speaking with someone right in front of you. Nothing beats this kind of practice, Of course, it is free, the reason it is very popular, any more questions and to practice the language no matter how if, it is repeatedly done over and over again is good. Practice makes perfect eventually you speak a language without thinking anymore.
One hears another language via robots and I think is very admirable, though not perfect, anyway, nothing is perfect, nobody and nothing is perfect each has its shortcomings, the less shortcomings the better. And Duolingo offers the convenience of learning short of someone speaking a language in front of you. I supplement Duolingo with other references, like books, videos, etc. I am very thankful that Duolingo is here, I give it a 5 ***** rating, it has helped me fine-tune my speaking better. One should not diminish the value of help Duolingo has done. Learners who complain that the medium of learning is English should not decry Duolingo for obvious reason because, Yes, English is almost a global medium of conversation, let us face it it is.
I appreciate your opinion, Cecilia. 🙂
This app is garbage. There is no possible way anyone could ever “learn a language” from this worthless trash. If you really want to learn a language, spend a few dollars on a quality product – and this isn’t it. This is a distraction, at best. You may learn a few words, but that’s it. Try a serious language teacher like Rosetta Stone. Remember – you get what you pay for.
I have to agree with Kevin, I think 3/5 is being very generous.
Duolingo trains your mind to look for the ways to score a win, not the ways to learn and have that knowledge embed (if that makes sense).
Thanks for the review, very well done.
What is your favorite app then? Have you checked out fluent forever? Trying to learn Swedish and there are not a lot of good options. I was thinking about getting the Anki flashcard set as recommended by fluent forever, and continuing with Babbel, Duolingo, and Memrise.
As of today, I don’t have any favorite app, but trying a few to check how effective they are. Anki is the right choice, and you can find plenty of Swedish decks to help you memorize new words.
I think Duolingo has good and bad. The good – learn new words, the bad – no teacher and can’t be replaced to do the order sentences and not understand where words go in the new language is not learning you are guessing. I love to learn with a teacher who helps me in Gaelic know why things go where they do.
Duolingo is just for time pass, no one can learn foreign language without trainer or environment.
Honestly, Duolingo starts exciting and rewarding, but as you progress more and more it starts to feel like a chore. Each skill level begins to require at least seven long lessons and you’re really just repeating and repeating the same sentences and words, only to find out later that your grammar skills are quite mediocre and you stutter and can’t form sentences properly, outside of translating them in the platform. Even if you are an attentive learner and squeeze the most of it, Duolingo is just not time efficient. With the time that it takes to complete a tree with all skills at level 5, you could learn way more if you spent that time with class videos instead.
It’s okay for beginners, but any app or content that focuses on gamifying the experience without a solid basis on grammar is doomed to fail if you want to pass anything above the intermediate level. (And as the post says, intermediate level, B1 is saying too much).
Very good post. Detailed, helpful, and explanatory in dept.
I appreciate the time you spent writing this. I agree with your opinions, and that is what I felt while reviewing Duolingo.