Against Duolingo
Fighting the epidemic of unseriousness
When I first started dating my now fiancée, I knew I needed to learn Spanish because:
She speaks Spanish with her family and many of her friends. Not knowing Spanish would mean missing out on a significant number of conversations across our life.
How can you fully understand and connect with someone if you don’t know at least some of their native language?
Like many, I immediately started THE modern way to learn a language: Duolingo. After doing hundreds of lessons and building up a healthy streak (maybe a year, I forget), I reflected on what I learned: functionally nothing.
Being a part of Spanish conversations revealed I didn’t actually know any Spanish. Duolingo tricked me like it has with many other people. You feel like you are learning a language, but when actually go to speak it, you are only slightly better off. This is a problem.
Duolingo doesn’t care if you learn a language
Luis Von Ahn, the founder and CEO of Duolingo, in an interview with the Verge, revealed the company’s priorities:
Do you think that there’s a conflict between gamification and engagement — the things that you’re historically successful at — and education?
Yes, there is.
How do you manage that conflict?
Very easily. Always go with engagement.
Really?
Yes.
I mean, presumably, you’ve heard both sides of the argument. Why have you made this decision?
I’ll give you many arguments, but the one that works the most is this: It doesn’t matter how effective you are. You can’t teach somebody who’s not there.
When the CEO of the company says that he does not care about you learning a language, you should listen to him. A similarly concerning sign is how much they talk about building an engaging product rather than helping people learn a language.
Instead of thinking of Duolingo as a language learning app, you should think about it as a game. It’s like crosswords or Wordle. It requires you to use your brain a bit, but it mostly focuses on fun. The seriousness required for you to learn a language is not there.
I don’t blame them for this. Their incentives as a business are misaligned with you. Like a dating app, they make money by ensuring you make progress but don’t succeed in your ultimate goal. If they were churning out fluent speakers, they’d have many fewer power users willing to pay for their product.
What language learning requires
It is only after trying other methods of language learning I realized how much Duolingo lets you down. The requirements to learn a language are nearly the opposite of what Duolingo provides.
It takes a lot of time
Duolingo is meant to be completed in 5 minute chunks. I often found myself repeatedly doing the bare minimum before bed to keep my streak.
In reality, it takes hundreds of hours (at a minimum) to learn a language. At 5 minutes a day, a year of Duolingo only nets you 30 hours of language learning time. Even over the course of years, this is not nearly enough to learn a language.
As an opposite example, take Isaak Freeman learning Chinese. He did 1500 hours of practice in less than a year.1 This is ~4 hours a day on average.
Duolingo may claim it is about “quality” of hours, but others have tested this too. Take the story of Steven Sacco, a retired language professor:
Intrigued by Duolingo’s “34 hours” claim, he put it to the test, studying Swedish on the app for a total of 300 hours. (Most introductory university Swedish courses amount to 150 or so hours of coursework, he reasoned; 300 would be more than safe.) He then convinced the professor of UCLA’s Elementary Swedish course to let him take the final exam. He got an F.
You need to push your limits
Duolingo is meant to be engaging and not feel like work. They know if it feels hard, you will quit. This means you can’t really fail on Duolingo.
In real life, you can definitely fail. That is the whole point. Someone speaks to you in another language, you forget the words, and choke up. You derail an entire conversation trying to contribute. You use the wrong word or verb tense and people laugh at you. This is what reality looks like.
Von Ahn recognizes this and says:
The other thing is, somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of language learners don’t want to talk to another human. They may tell you they do, but they don’t. It’s because when you’re learning a language, you’re pretty shy about it, and only the extreme extroverts are okay talking to a stranger on video in a language that they’re not very good at. The majority of people won’t do it.
To learn a language is both knowing the words and being able to use them. At best, Duolingo only teaches you one of these. You’ll eventually need to do the second, and being able to do that is a muscle.
It requires a lot of input
The theory of language learning I’ve come around to is comprehensible input. The summary is “that linguistic competence is only advanced when language is subconsciously acquired, and that conscious learning cannot be used as a source of spontaneous language production.” You should be working at the edge of your competency to learn new things.
Duolingo almost never overwhelms you with new words. It seemed like I was learning the word for apple for months. You spend a huge amount of time reviewing past words rather than pushing the limits of your comprehension (again, because this is hard).
Even if Duolingo teaches you a language, it does it at way too slow a rate.
Duolingo isn’t real
This is one of the most common complaints about Duolingo: that it doesn’t reflect how people talk in real life. For example, I’ve basically never heard someone say “adios” in Spanish, “nos vemos” or “chao,” sure. Even if Duolingo wanted to teach you “nos vemos,” it doesn’t translate well into English (“we see each other”).
Like many language learning courses, Duolingo starts from the start, teaching you how to greet people, introduce yourself, and common words. Unfortunately, a majority of conversations do not start from the start. They are made of “the middle parts” and all the verbs and different conjugations that come with it.
One of my favourite language learning experiences so far was an audio course called Language Transfer. What made it special was that it focused on the ability to recall a language, rather than memorize it. It did this by providing memory hooks, like voyage → I go → “voy,” and context on the linguistics of a language. Duolingo rarely, if ever, does this.
Language Transfer also focused on the important part of learning a language, listening and speaking. This is, again, the opposite of Duolingo. You may think you are learning how to listen, but Duolingo is so far off from real listening experiences that it is worthless.
If not Duolingo, then what?
Now when I meet people who use Duolingo, I try to convince them of one thing: stop using it. I realize this is sort of a social faux pas, live and let live or whatever, but I (obviously) feel strongly about this (enough to write a long blog post).
Duolingo is a part of an epidemic of unseriousness. When I think of a Duolingo learner, I think of a 20 something who likes to travel and does Duolingo on their way to work in an effort to become a more worldly person. “Una cerveza por favor” type stuff. Never works unfortunately.
No matter how long a streak someone has had, I’ve never met anyone who’s said Duolingo has taught them a language.2 If this isn’t proof, I don’t know what is.
This would be fine in isolation, but Duolingo might be the single most popular way to learn a language in the world.
A fun fact: there are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the US than in all US high schools combined. This is true in most countries in the world. We teach languages to more people than the public school systems.
There are multiple reasons why this is a big problem:
All this unseriousness is bad for your soul. It weighs you down. You have to, sort of embarrassingly, repeatedly say “I’m learning a language, but I only know a little.” You are admitting to other people you are not serious. This is demotivating and has knock on effects for the rest of your life.
I don’t know if you read the news, but AI is coming. AI will be (is) good at doing a lot of things humans are, especially when people are unserious about it.3 The AI world will reward people who do more than “just show up” because AI is really good at “just showing up.”
The solution to these problems: Be serious.4 Life is short. If you want to learn a language, put in the effort to actually do it. If you don’t, be honest with yourself and do something else.
It is also less than half of the 4,000 hours it is estimated you need for intermediate fluency in Mandarin Chinese.
My fiancée spent 8 years doing French on Duolingo. She’ll admit she’s nowhere near fluent.
For example, ChatGPT Voice is a pretty good language tutor with infinite patience.
In part, this entire post is a message to myself. I’m nowhere near fluent in Spanish even though I have been “learning” for 3ish years.