Over the last few years I've seen a lot of people ragging on Duolingo for being a terrible way to learn a language. According to them, it's a big waste of your time, it just teaches you random words, you learn nothing about the language, you'll never become fluent by using it, et cetera.
These people are coping. Duolingo is fine. You're just using it wrong.
I Can't Believe I Have To Disclaim 'Er
First off, let me disclose that, like many tech companies run by idiots, Duolingo has shoved "AI" (in reality Large Language Models) in the face of its users regardless of whether they want it or not. The CEO has declared that they are an "AI-first" company and they will aggressively shove AI lessons in your face to upsell you on a Super Premium Max™ subscription. If this bothers you, do not begin using the service.
LLMs are bad, for a variety of reasons. Arguably, learning a language is something that a large language model would be best suited to, but I'm sure I don't need to tell you why the technology is problematic. That's a topic for another blog post. I'm not specifically defending Duolingo here. More accurately, I'm defending the model that Duolingo created and champions, which is really what people are criticizing when they rag on Duolingo.
I personally am several years into using Super Duolingo (the paid version), and its primary appeal is the habit-forming nature of its gamified streak mechanic, so I'm rather stuck. There are plenty of alternatives, which I can't individually speak to, or verify that they are themselves AI-free. This is just the world we live in now. Back to the blog post.
Learning Through Doing
Duolingo advertises itself as being a learning app which teaches you a language through daily repetition, using gamification to help you form a habit of practicing it. The foundation of its pedagogy is teaching you the language the same way you learned your first language as a child: by repeatedly exposing you to it until you figure it out.1
This draws a lot of criticism. People do not like Duolingo's relaxed lesson structure. They don't like being given the briefest introduction to words, and then just having them mixed into your vocabulary and thrown at you until you figure them out. They don't like the very minimal grammatical instruction.
All of these are fine. Duolingo is not a flash card app. It gives you fully-formed sentences, and asks you to create ones of your own. You will learn the language by doing it this way. People don't like it because it makes them feel stupid. They think they should be given proper instruction, but that's not how Duolingo is supposed to work.
The linguistic theory underwriting Duolingo's teaching model is perfectly sound. It is based on the actual science behind language acquisition. You learned your first language by exposure, not instruction. Duolingo mimics this by creating a structure for you to be progressively exposed to another language in a very similar fashion, beginning with words that are similar to ones you already use (called cognates), and progressing to increasingly less familiar translations as you create room in your brain for the language.
Where this approach upsets people is that it takes a while to pay dividends. Duolingo introduces very few words at a time relative to classroom instruction, and makes you practice them thoroughly before giving you any more. Your first few weeks in Duolingo, and at the start of every new section, are mostly going to be struggling and feeling lost until you begin to absorb the language. Then you're going to feel very limited for a long time as you build your vocabulary. This makes people feel dumb, which upsets them, and rather than sticking with it, they blame it on Duolingo and bail.
The Enemy of the Good
One of Duolingo's taglines is "fifteen minutes a day can teach you a language." Many people will tell you this is totally false. It's empirically not. Ahora yo puedo hablar español en un nivel intermedio, cuando hace dos años, no podía.2 I can read, write, and speak Spanish, without the use of translation software, though I might use it now and then to refresh myself on a word I've forgotten or look one up I haven't encountered yet.
I learned it entirely through Duolingo, 15 minutes at a time, for over 730 days. That rounds out to about 183 hours of equivalent classroom instruction, or 37 school weeks, assuming 5 hours of instruction per week. That's slightly more than two average semesters; in other words, two years of daily Duolingo is roughly equivalent to one year of formal Spanish education.
My current Duolingo score is supposedly equivalent to the CEFR B1, which is described as "understand[ing] familiar matters in work, school, leisure, etc." but not quite "a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party." This sounds about right to me, so I have no reason to doubt it.
The sources I can find suggest that you would need 380-420 hours in a standard classroom setting (including homework and study) to reach B1 proficiency. For me to have reached it in, let's generously estimate, a mere 200 hours therefore seems extraordinary. It's possible I'm just that gifted and can learn languages that quickly, but in reality it's probably that Duolingo's teaching model is, in fact, extremely effective.
But it will probably take you longer. I started learning in January of 2023 and only recently began to feel like I had a large enough vocabulary to hold a conversation. If you studied hard, you could probably cram an equivalent level of understanding into one school year. But I don't go to school, and don't have the time or attention span to spend two straight hours learning a language I'm not actually using for anything in a dry classroom setting and putting aside hours of my free time to do homework. (I probably have ADHD.)
I can, however, work fifteen minutes of study into my daily schedule, and achieve the same result over a longer period of time, which is fine because I don't really have anyone to speak Spanish to anyway. This is fine.
That is what Duolingo is for; learning a language in manageable chunks over a longer period of time. It is not for people who want to devote themselves to a language and rapidly advance in it. It's for people who just want to passively absorb it, and eventually, at some point in the future, they'll be able to understand it. You took 5 to 7 years to become fluent in your first language. Unless you have a specific reason, why rush it?
The Caveats
Okay, that's all fine and dandy, but can you become fluent in a language with Duolingo or not?
No.
But you can't become fluent in a classroom either. True fluency in a language requires you to be immersed in it. You have to have an actual reason to know it, or your brain is just not going to retain it.
When it comes to language, your skull is like a sieve, and all the knowledge is constantly sifting through it like grains of sand. Using the language adds more sand on top. The more you use it, the more sand you have sloshing around in your head, because you're adding it faster than it can be sifted out. This terrible simile basically means that unless you are surrounded by native speakers, who speak to you in the language you're learning, you're just not going to retain it well enough to become fluent.
Does this mean Duolingo is washed3? Of course not. Duolingo is not a language immersion app. Duolingo never promised you that it would make you fluent. Becoming fluent is not what Duolingo is for. It created a foundational understanding of Spanish that I could expand on if I wanted to by joining a community where I'm regularly put through my paces in natural conversation, such as by moving to a Spanish-speaking country.
El final del camino
Is Duolingo a waste of your time? Absolutely not. If you keep using it, will you learn the language? Without a doubt, yes.4 I honestly do not understand what logic the people claiming this is not the case are operating under. How exactly does one assert that progressively practicing more and more complex sentences in a language will not teach you that language? What do you think learning is, exactly?
I strongly suspect that people who criticize it are compensating for their own failures, projecting their lack of commitment as a shortcoming of the app. Most of these people will not be learning their language of choice through any other available means. They're just lashing out about an insecurity, and they'd like to drag you down with them.
You could, for example, certainly pass a language proficiency exam to acquire a visa and move overseas by using Duolingo. I myself may do just that one day, as I've since switched over to Mandarin. 我们去北京吧！
- There are some actual grammar lessons, but they usually come after you've already been introduced to it for a while. ↩︎
- "I can now speak Spanish at an intermediate level, when two years ago, I couldn't." ↩︎
- Taken to the cleaners, one might say. ↩︎
- I should clarify here that you do need to put forth a minimum level of effort. Duolingo gives the "15 minutes" benchmark for a reason. Doing one lesson a day will not really get you anywhere, and many people just keep their streak by doing a review lesson every day. Those people obviously aren't learning anything. ↩︎
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