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.
> And the State Department's FSI estimates are unfortunately pretty accurate for hours to fluency [1].
It's worth noting that the FSI estimates are hours of direct classroom instruction, and that FSI cares a lot more about input than output. For someone who is looking to be fluent across all four competencies and is self studying, you can expect a lot more time to be invested.
Also the FSI estimates are for what it takes to get people who've tested into a FSI language program to that level. Individual differences are known to be a huge factor in language education, and FSI has the luxury of only needing to worry about teaching people who they know are well-suited to learning using their methods.
I doubt they're accurate at all as an absolute measure of how long a random person needs to study to reach S-3/R-3 on their aptitude scale. But based on my own experience and comparing notes with others who've studied languages from more than one of their categories, it does seem that they're at least a good indicator of relative effort. E.g, I wouldn't say that any English speaker can learn Mandarin in 2,200 hours just because that's what the FSI guideline says. But I do think it's true that the same person could learn French in about 1/4 the time it would take them to learn Mandarin.
Yeah, for sure, thanks for pointing that out. For them it seems like fluency is defined as the ability to work comfortably in a professional setting in that target language. I self studied some of their French courses and found them helpful. I've never taken a course of theirs before, but a family member did do a year immersion in Arabic as part of their training for the foreign service, and of course it was a lot more intense than self-study.
There's also various levels of "fluency" - and what you're trying to achieve will inform how you're going to go about it.
There's a big difference between "I need to speak this well enough as I'm going there soon" and "I want to be able to read news from there" and "I need to pretend I'm a native."
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?
I'm urgently trying to learn a language and I've done a lot of research on this. There's no one hack, but here are my top three:
- Anki
- Focus on producing speech over everything else, it's the hardest part 90% of the time. Practice production enough and everything else will follow.
- Work on your accent much earlier than you think you should. If your accent is better than it should be, native speakers will naturally push you to the limits of your abilities when you talk to them.
There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," but it may work well for some people. However, it severely under-trains speech production. You must combine it with speech practice if you are going to make it work.
Highly recommend Language Jones on YouTube, great resource for language study best practices.
Comprehensible input does seem to be the most effective way. i.e. get a lot of input that is only slightly beyond your current level (i+1).
I'm learning Ukrainian and there is a podcast "Ukrainian Lessons Podcast". Seasons 4-6 are not so much lessons but more just discussions about life, history, culture in 100% slow comprehensible Ukrainian. In one of the episodes Anna talks about how she spent most of her life getting English lessons at school and university, but still couldn't use the language freely. Finally, she watched Friends and by the time she'd finished every season, she felt she at last had a good command of English.
Sitcoms are good because they depict a lot of everyday situations, are rich in dialogue (i.e. real language people use daily), and there is a lot of slang and cultural references. Of course, you first need to develop enough of a base in the language to understand what's going on.
In an immersion context I can get to conversational fluency in about 3 months and to complete mastery in a year. I've done it twice, once for Spanish and once for English. A few things in my approach helped me move quite a lot faster than my peers:
1. I would carry a mini-dictionary with me EVERYWHERE. Anytime there's a new word, I would ask a local to teach me how to pronounce it and then make sentences with it while I was walking around. CONSTANTLY.
2. accent and good basics help more than a vast vocabulary: when I went to spain for the first time I would hear in the metro the famous male and female voices saying "proxima parada... something something" and I would repeat that sentence trying to imitate the pronunciation and rythm to get used to "sounding spanish". That helped a lot.
3. date a local: in spain I was dating this girl that was a journalist and from a pretty conservative family. She was very afraid that I would put off her family by being a foreigner and not being able to pronounce things correctly or making grammatical mistakes so she would correct me on the spot EVERY TIME I said something wrong. I dind't mind it and it worked like a charm. Years later I met my American wife that wasn't nearly as concerned about my pronunciation in English so my accent is not nearly as good as in Spanish, but I definitely learned the language, went from being barely understandable to business meeting in about 4 months.
3. Watch tons of movies with the original subtitles (for example spanish movie with spanish subtitles) to understand how people pronounce certain words. DO NOT limit yourself to learner materials, you won't learn a thing. Find something you enjoy and just dive in, you'll learn a lot quicker that way.
Dedication and systematic work is all you need to move pretty quickly, the human brain is wired for language, if you feed it what it needs it will do the work for you.
The hack is there isn't really one thing, it's using multiple tools like I mentioned in my original comment.
If I were to start again with a new language I'd do 1) A full Assimil course 2) comprehensible input and 3) an iTalki tutor 3x per week. Anki is helpful too, so if you had time to add that in every day I'd do that as well.
That's part of immersion or comprehensible input, yeah.
Watching lots of hours of something in a language works so long as you know at least enough vocab and grammar to mostly understand it. To get there stuff like spaced repetition seems good
but the "hack" comes down to putting in hours doing all that and doing the groundwork too, essentially. you can only speed it up so much
Had a friend in college learn Ukrainian by switching his phone language settings and watching only Ukrainian reality tv… and then he also spent a summer in Ukraine
For me, the best way to learn a foreign language was (besides also studying the grammar separately) to read some books in whose content I was interested and to watch carefully some untranslated movies spoken in that language, until I became able to understand perfectly the books and the movies.
Now, with the free resources available on the Internet, both reading books and watching movies in foreign languages has become much easier.
So I have not used learning books, just grammars and dictionaries, together with exposure to large amounts of written and spoken language expressing a content in which I was interested.
Once you have learned one or two foreign languages, learning more becomes much easier, especially when they belong to the same language family as one of the languages that you already know.
I accept that some people are doubtless much more talented in acquiring languages than I am. But I did take 4 years of high school French and was considered "good." And, traveling with a friend in Paris, I clearly knew a lot more of the language than they did. But I'm a very very far way from being fluent.
Maybe the people who claim to spend a few weeks with Duolingo and get the language are uniquely talented. Or maybe they're BSing.
A few weeks is definitely BS, but I took 3 years of German in high school and after roughly 3 months of 30min-1hr daily Duolingo I was already past the high school material.
I mean in our high school (Poland) it was like maybe 1 lesson (45mins) per week shared with a group. And of course excluding all the holidays and what not.
That's not a high bar.
> 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
But does it? I have learned other languages using it casually (one lesson a day on average.) Enough to read text in those languages and understand basic conversations. It is not getting you to B1, but it is getting you well in to the A's. If you do any type of additional study on the side, you can easily get to B1.
The main issue with Duo is the quality of the courses. It varies a lot. Some of the user maintained ones are fairly poor. Especially for the more niche languages.
By learn another language I mean getting to C1 or equivalent. Being able to comfortably spend time in a country that speaks your target language. Having regular, improvised conversations of various depths. Reading literature in that language. Things like that. I really don't think Duolingo can get you there on it's own, but hey, I'm open to being wrong.
I've just have seen many friends keep their Spanish streak for a year or two and I would say they'd still test around the A2 level. I've said it in this thread that that is of course not nothing, but there are much more efficient ways to get to A2 or B1.
I'm not sure how you can be so confident about that. A year of Duolingo got me far enough along to comfortably follow "NOS Journaal in Makkelijke Taal", seemingly the Dutch equivalent of the RFI broadcast you linked. No transcript needed, though I do pause on occasion to look up an unfamiliar word.
Maybe you call that "the most basic grasp of a language", but it doesn't seem to have been less effective than the approach you took with French.
That's great! Maybe Duolingo has changed things up since the last time I tried them years ago. Being able to listen to even simplified native content and understand it would of course be beyond a basic grasp of the language. What were your study habits with it?
My opinion is of course just an opinion, and it's made up from all the many people I personally know that have done Duolingo for a year (or years) and would maybe be at an A2 level. It's certainly not nothing, and honestly might be better than your regular grammar first course, but I think there's more effective ways. For me it was Assimil as the primary base, which got me to reading "L'Étranger" in about 6 months. Listening to native content took longer.
Given that four of the five are Asian languages, there's a lot of transferability. Not a crazy amount but enough to give you a boost. Knowing Chinese made learning Japanese feel a notch easier, and learning Korean afterwards felt yet another step easier.
https://www.languagereactor.com is something similar to Yabla I think... But you can use it indefinitely and subscribe if you need the premium features.
I tried it for a few months, but never was really able to get it to work for me, although I did find the dictionary hover overlay in YouTube videos to be helpful at the beginning. Yabla is different in that they will break up a video into pieces, have you listen to it without subtitles, and then ask you to type out what you heard. This was really helpful, particularly on the advanced levels, as picking up various accents can be difficult until your ears adjust.
I hate this take. Duolingo users understand fully, once they clear their language's Section 3 or higher, that they have a long road ahead.
The point of Duolingo is to be a hook into language learning, not a complete replacement. It should be coupled with Pimsleur and other traditional study methods if one is truly serious about learning a language.
Would you rather have teens shitposting on TikTok or learning Duolingo? Posts like yours are doomer cringe.
This is an app that constantly nags you to use it, to the point that its mascot is so widely known as annoying that they play it for laughs in their ads.
All that to say: you and Duolingo’s owners may disagree about what “the point of Duolingo is”. I don’t think they care if users are achieving fluency, they want users to keep coming back to the app so they can be served ads.
And yeah, that doesn’t mean users can’t take initiative and build a better habit-based approach that incorporates Duolingo, but that’s not what the app is pushing you to do.
When I see my friend getting their smartphones out at 23:58 to complete a lesson and not lose their streak because they paid for the app I can confidently say that the point of duolingo is to make money by appealing to your monkey brain through gamification
I agree with you, it could have a place in a toolkit of things to acquire a language with. But I don't think that's what they're marketing themselves as. Their tag line is "The world's best way to learn a language", which, personally, I wouldn't blame a person for reading and thinking "cool, I guess I'll just do this and finally learn a second language!". They didn't say "build your foundation in a foreign language" or "first steps in your language learning journey". They said "best way to learn a language", which, I'd say, is false and misleading.
I've never used TikTok, but I actually wonder if this hypothetical teenager would learn more following a ton of users in their target language or playing games on Duolingo. I'd be interested in that study.
You're instinctively ranking TikTok as worse, but I think that parent is trying to say that Duolingo is effectively a waste of time. If you have two ways to waste your time on a phone, what makes one of them worse?
If the difference is that TikTok is a thing that "the youth" does and that we don't understand, then I guess some introspection is warranted on your closing ad hominem...
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.
---
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.
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.
I think the gamification is at the core of why Duolingo has persisted even though it doesn’t work.
At any point in real learning, or in acquiring any kind of skill in anything, one hits a plateau and the thing becomes boring or dull or hard. Internal drive to learn the thing must overcome the drudgery of repetition until you exceed that plateau. And then eventually there’s another one down the road.
What’s more is that the more we learn the more we get rewarded for confronting and pushing through the boring or hard. It’s a real reward that dopamine is evolutionarily designed to encourage. In a way, learning is already as “gamified” as it needs to be.
Gamification on the other hand convinces us that we’re making progress but it’s completely artificial. It manipulates dopamine in ways that don’t encourage actual and more learning. Instead gamification rewards gamification.
We need less gamification in our world and more internalification.
For real. My French always skyrockets every time I take any vacation to France, even for a week. After just one day I'm back to being able to understand a lot of what people are saying and respond pretty comfortably. It's also surprising how quickly the words come back to me after having been away for a year or whatever, with minimal practice between.
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.
> 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).
There are a number of institutes/colleges dedicated to language learning in the US: Alliance Française [0], Goethe institute [1] with multiple satellite offices around the country, all offering language classes for a few hundred dollars.
There are a multitude, nay - infinite! number of online classes with teachers who will use "traditional", textbook-based approaches. [2]
Young Americans regularly go for 1-2-3 month trips to Italy, France, Germany, etc. American passports give folks a ton of latitude. You can stay in a hostel and eat cheaply - many thousands of people have done it.
I'm not saying it's easy, but I will definitely push back on the idea that it's impossible.
(and will also absolutely agree that the convenience of an app will be 10,000,000x more tempting to use than doing any of the above)
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.
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.
This. Same experience. It's worth noting that Babbel is designed with much input from actual language teachers, not just statisticians and coders. It also received funding from the EU, which makes a subscription a particularly good deal.
I don't remember what's their impression of it, sorry. But I definitely know someone who loved and used Pimsleur in her journey to learn French (in addition to the other tools I already mentioned)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, same for me using Assimil for French (along with a few other tools). Six months in I could read L'Étranger in French.
My next project once I can pass the C1 test is to use their French -> Spanish course. I kind of recommend them to anyone that will listen, as their method worked really well for me.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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!
I've been doing "Dreaming Spanish", which is a comprehensible input service, and using Duolingo as a self-test of sorts. Watching a lot of curated spanish-language content is very engaging, and I believe this method will work (for some definition of work), but it is nice to have duolingo as a fancy flash card system. I think duolingo by itself probably isn't very effective, but it serves as a motivator and i think it's useful as part of a more complete language learning strategy.
Yes and mine say things like "why pay 500 for a language course when I can do this?" Of course they ignore me when I say language meetups are free, because "im not at that level yet." It's usually anxiety.
It’s a bar that every Duolingo user is hopping over while a bunch of procrastinators are making excuses about why they haven’t started yet.
Duolingo is not a complete solution and I don’t think they or anyone else claims that it is. What it solves fantastically well is the zero-to-habit transition.
Duolingo should have been that. Founded by a professor who wanted to make language learning free for the world, funded by a MacArthur fellowship and a National Science Foundation grant. When they rejected making it a non-profit, it lost its potential to be that platform IMO.
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.
I disagree. Duolingo will never make you fluent, but you'll at least learn some vocabulary. Even setting Candy Crush to a different language won't really teach you much.
Duolingo is surely flawed, but realistically I don't see any other way how I could have progressed in French by spending exactly 3 minutes per day with near-zero mental effort. I do it on auto pilot before going to bed, usually being dead tired after work. After 1000 days (so like 50 hours) I can have simple conversations, I can read and I have a rather big vocabulary.
Of course learning in other ways could have given me more in 3 years but the amount of time and efforts would be orders of magnitude bigger, impossible at this point in my life.
I think the trick with Duolingo is to resist the temptation of easy paths the damn app pushes you into.
* Maintain the streak by progressing in the course. Don't redo old lessons, don't do pairs matching or other side quests.
* Ignore XP and leagues and challenges and any other shit.
* Ignore music, math and other courses
* Stick to 1 language, at most 2.
Just do N lessons per day (N=1 for me) and you'll most likely see progress. The lessons are too easy IMO, I rarely make mistakes which is a strong signal. I have to make them harder on purpose: I don't look at the screen to force myself to listen instead of reading, I close the right half of the screen with my palm when I need to do pairs. Even then the progression is too easy and too slow BUT it's a progression.
It's A2, and yes I think it's a very good return on the time and effort I invested: around 50 hours, no homework, no memorization of words or grammar rules.
Realistically in my situation it's either this or nothing. I work 55 hours a week, the rest goes into my family and running, I hardly can do anything else.
Readit News
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/
It's worth noting that the FSI estimates are hours of direct classroom instruction, and that FSI cares a lot more about input than output. For someone who is looking to be fluent across all four competencies and is self studying, you can expect a lot more time to be invested.
I doubt they're accurate at all as an absolute measure of how long a random person needs to study to reach S-3/R-3 on their aptitude scale. But based on my own experience and comparing notes with others who've studied languages from more than one of their categories, it does seem that they're at least a good indicator of relative effort. E.g, I wouldn't say that any English speaker can learn Mandarin in 2,200 hours just because that's what the FSI guideline says. But I do think it's true that the same person could learn French in about 1/4 the time it would take them to learn Mandarin.
This is a far better one: https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/1...
There's a big difference between "I need to speak this well enough as I'm going there soon" and "I want to be able to read news from there" and "I need to pretend I'm a native."
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?
There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," but it may work well for some people. However, it severely under-trains speech production. You must combine it with speech practice if you are going to make it work.
Highly recommend Language Jones on YouTube, great resource for language study best practices.
I'm learning Ukrainian and there is a podcast "Ukrainian Lessons Podcast". Seasons 4-6 are not so much lessons but more just discussions about life, history, culture in 100% slow comprehensible Ukrainian. In one of the episodes Anna talks about how she spent most of her life getting English lessons at school and university, but still couldn't use the language freely. Finally, she watched Friends and by the time she'd finished every season, she felt she at last had a good command of English.
Sitcoms are good because they depict a lot of everyday situations, are rich in dialogue (i.e. real language people use daily), and there is a lot of slang and cultural references. Of course, you first need to develop enough of a base in the language to understand what's going on.
1. I would carry a mini-dictionary with me EVERYWHERE. Anytime there's a new word, I would ask a local to teach me how to pronounce it and then make sentences with it while I was walking around. CONSTANTLY.
2. accent and good basics help more than a vast vocabulary: when I went to spain for the first time I would hear in the metro the famous male and female voices saying "proxima parada... something something" and I would repeat that sentence trying to imitate the pronunciation and rythm to get used to "sounding spanish". That helped a lot.
3. date a local: in spain I was dating this girl that was a journalist and from a pretty conservative family. She was very afraid that I would put off her family by being a foreigner and not being able to pronounce things correctly or making grammatical mistakes so she would correct me on the spot EVERY TIME I said something wrong. I dind't mind it and it worked like a charm. Years later I met my American wife that wasn't nearly as concerned about my pronunciation in English so my accent is not nearly as good as in Spanish, but I definitely learned the language, went from being barely understandable to business meeting in about 4 months.
3. Watch tons of movies with the original subtitles (for example spanish movie with spanish subtitles) to understand how people pronounce certain words. DO NOT limit yourself to learner materials, you won't learn a thing. Find something you enjoy and just dive in, you'll learn a lot quicker that way.
Dedication and systematic work is all you need to move pretty quickly, the human brain is wired for language, if you feed it what it needs it will do the work for you.
Language Transfer is a good completely free resource: https://www.languagetransfer.org
If you could de-age yourself, becoming a child would also help immensely, as child brains are much better at learning languages.
That's it.
If I were to start again with a new language I'd do 1) A full Assimil course 2) comprehensible input and 3) an iTalki tutor 3x per week. Anki is helpful too, so if you had time to add that in every day I'd do that as well.
Watching lots of hours of something in a language works so long as you know at least enough vocab and grammar to mostly understand it. To get there stuff like spaced repetition seems good
but the "hack" comes down to putting in hours doing all that and doing the groundwork too, essentially. you can only speed it up so much
But you can speed up the process by simply getting better at memorizing words to give you a much wider vocabulary.
There are various hacks to memorize things such as decks of cards or long sequences of numbers and similar techniques can aid you here too.
(motivation, I guess, plays a role too)
Now, with the free resources available on the Internet, both reading books and watching movies in foreign languages has become much easier.
So I have not used learning books, just grammars and dictionaries, together with exposure to large amounts of written and spoken language expressing a content in which I was interested.
Once you have learned one or two foreign languages, learning more becomes much easier, especially when they belong to the same language family as one of the languages that you already know.
Maybe the people who claim to spend a few weeks with Duolingo and get the language are uniquely talented. Or maybe they're BSing.
I mean in our high school (Poland) it was like maybe 1 lesson (45mins) per week shared with a group. And of course excluding all the holidays and what not. That's not a high bar.
But does it? I have learned other languages using it casually (one lesson a day on average.) Enough to read text in those languages and understand basic conversations. It is not getting you to B1, but it is getting you well in to the A's. If you do any type of additional study on the side, you can easily get to B1.
The main issue with Duo is the quality of the courses. It varies a lot. Some of the user maintained ones are fairly poor. Especially for the more niche languages.
I've just have seen many friends keep their Spanish streak for a year or two and I would say they'd still test around the A2 level. I've said it in this thread that that is of course not nothing, but there are much more efficient ways to get to A2 or B1.
Maybe you call that "the most basic grasp of a language", but it doesn't seem to have been less effective than the approach you took with French.
My opinion is of course just an opinion, and it's made up from all the many people I personally know that have done Duolingo for a year (or years) and would maybe be at an A2 level. It's certainly not nothing, and honestly might be better than your regular grammar first course, but I think there's more effective ways. For me it was Assimil as the primary base, which got me to reading "L'Étranger" in about 6 months. Listening to native content took longer.
Good to know ahead of time what you're getting yourself into.
> Category IV Languages – “Super-hard languages” – Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.
The 2200 hours represents learning from scratch.
Same problem as dating apps: if you could actually learn a language with Duolingo, then you would stop using Duolingo. No good for business.
The hard part is how to trick people into believing that it works or even "it's better than nothing". Hence gamification.
Dead Comment
The point of Duolingo is to be a hook into language learning, not a complete replacement. It should be coupled with Pimsleur and other traditional study methods if one is truly serious about learning a language.
Would you rather have teens shitposting on TikTok or learning Duolingo? Posts like yours are doomer cringe.
All that to say: you and Duolingo’s owners may disagree about what “the point of Duolingo is”. I don’t think they care if users are achieving fluency, they want users to keep coming back to the app so they can be served ads.
And yeah, that doesn’t mean users can’t take initiative and build a better habit-based approach that incorporates Duolingo, but that’s not what the app is pushing you to do.
I've never used TikTok, but I actually wonder if this hypothetical teenager would learn more following a ton of users in their target language or playing games on Duolingo. I'd be interested in that study.
If the difference is that TikTok is a thing that "the youth" does and that we don't understand, then I guess some introspection is warranted on your closing ad hominem...
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.
---
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
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.
Is it?
I think the gamification is at the core of why Duolingo has persisted even though it doesn’t work.
At any point in real learning, or in acquiring any kind of skill in anything, one hits a plateau and the thing becomes boring or dull or hard. Internal drive to learn the thing must overcome the drudgery of repetition until you exceed that plateau. And then eventually there’s another one down the road.
What’s more is that the more we learn the more we get rewarded for confronting and pushing through the boring or hard. It’s a real reward that dopamine is evolutionarily designed to encourage. In a way, learning is already as “gamified” as it needs to be.
Gamification on the other hand convinces us that we’re making progress but it’s completely artificial. It manipulates dopamine in ways that don’t encourage actual and more learning. Instead gamification rewards gamification.
We need less gamification in our world and more internalification.
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.
Of course, that's easier said than done (and paid for). But if you can afford the money and time away from home, it's probably the way to go.
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.
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).
There are a multitude, nay - infinite! number of online classes with teachers who will use "traditional", textbook-based approaches. [2]
Young Americans regularly go for 1-2-3 month trips to Italy, France, Germany, etc. American passports give folks a ton of latitude. You can stay in a hostel and eat cheaply - many thousands of people have done it.
I'm not saying it's easy, but I will definitely push back on the idea that it's impossible.
(and will also absolutely agree that the convenience of an app will be 10,000,000x more tempting to use than doing any of the above)
[0] https://www.afusa.org/
[1] https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/index.html
[2] https://www.italki.com/en/teachers/french
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.
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.
Babbel was mentioned a few times, Pimsleur as well (they're different companies/methods), https://www.languagetransfer.org/ ...
Mix and match to find what works for you - what seems fun and motivating.
Oh, and consider informal irl meetings as well - https://www.meetup.com/topics/german/ (depending where you live ofc)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
My next project once I can pass the C1 test is to use their French -> Spanish course. I kind of recommend them to anyone that will listen, as their method worked really well for me.
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.
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".
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.
That's why people advocate against it and advocate for alternatives.
Their goal wasn't to defeat doomscrolling, it was to learn a language!
Duolingo is not a complete solution and I don’t think they or anyone else claims that it is. What it solves fantastically well is the zero-to-habit transition.
Of course learning in other ways could have given me more in 3 years but the amount of time and efforts would be orders of magnitude bigger, impossible at this point in my life.
I think the trick with Duolingo is to resist the temptation of easy paths the damn app pushes you into.
* Maintain the streak by progressing in the course. Don't redo old lessons, don't do pairs matching or other side quests.
* Ignore XP and leagues and challenges and any other shit.
* Ignore music, math and other courses
* Stick to 1 language, at most 2.
Just do N lessons per day (N=1 for me) and you'll most likely see progress. The lessons are too easy IMO, I rarely make mistakes which is a strong signal. I have to make them harder on purpose: I don't look at the screen to force myself to listen instead of reading, I close the right half of the screen with my palm when I need to do pairs. Even then the progression is too easy and too slow BUT it's a progression.
Deleted Comment
Realistically in my situation it's either this or nothing. I work 55 hours a week, the rest goes into my family and running, I hardly can do anything else.