Duolingo Review

Friday, June 20th

2025 Chinese Lesson Reviews

Duolingo

• Free to use
• Useful for building good study habits and acquiring basic vocabulary
• Step-by-step learning path with progress tracking
• Gamified learning that's addictive and encourages daily practice
• Competitive leaderboard
• Easy to switch between learning different languages
• Lessons for learning Pinyin (Chinese phonetics) and Chinese characters
• Practice lessons to improve pronunciation and understand tones
• Provides stroke order practice for writing Hanzi (Chinese characters)

In 2009, a professor Luis von Ahn from Carnegie Mellon University and his student, Severin Hacker, came up with the idea for Duolingo. After selling his second company, reCAPTCHA, to Google, Von Ahn wanted to do something related to education. He grew up in Guatemala, where it was costly for people to learn English. Hacker, who is now the CTO of Duolingo, wanted to offer free education to change the world. For his work in language learning and tech, Von Ahn is honored in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Today, everyone knows the platform affectionately referred to as "the Bird App,” and memes about it abound.

Over 2,500 word exercises

Duolingo promises that you can learn to speak confidently with their 2,500+ fun exercises. It also says it can give you a vocabulary of 1,900+ useful words and phrases. It uses reminders and challenges to help you develop good habits. You can start learning from the beginning or answer some questions to skip ahead if you know some basics. But is Duolingo the most effective way to learn Chinese? Let's find out.

Get to know Duolingo characters

One of the defining features of Duolingo is its fun and engaging characters. As you progress through stories and lessons, you get to know these characters, each with a unique personality, voice, and cartoon depiction. Take Lily, for example; she's a main character known for her introverted, unenthused, and deadpan goth teen demeanor, yet she secretly cares a lot. An official bio on Duolingo's wiki page describes Lily's emotional level (a -4) and an unamused expression that seems to tell people to stay away. Her bio even hints at her music taste, possibly featuring Girl in Red on her playlist, alongside a quip about hair dye being her chosen alternative to therapy. Unfortunately, there are no Duolingo Stories for Chinese yet, so you won't see as much of these characters as learners of other languages might.

Use the Guidebook to get your bearings

Duolingo's home screen is set up as a step-by-step path. Each circle on the path represents a level. When you click on a level, you start a lesson. Each level consists of about five lessons, and a ring around the circle shows your lesson progress. Your learning journey is divided into units that introduce new concepts. At the beginning of each unit, there's a Guidebook filled with grammar tips and useful phrases that can be accessed anytime. For example, the Guidebook for the first lesson includes an explanation of how "ne” is used to form questions.

Addictive gamified language learning

Duolingo falls into the gamified language learning app category, and it's addictive - some of its most committed users have built up a streak of hundreds or even thousands of days. As you go through your lessons, you earn XP for every activity you complete. You start off with five hearts, and every time you make a mistake in a lesson, you lose one. But don't worry, if you get something wrong, you'll have a chance to try again at the end of your session. This way, you learn from your mistakes and get better as you go.

Fight your way to the top

The leaderboard is where the competition heats up. You earn XP to climb up ranks in your league, from Bronze all the way to Diamond. Every week, the leaderboard resets, and if you're one of the top performers, you'll move up to a higher league. If you're at the bottom, you might move down. Keeping up with your lessons every day increases your streak - shown by a little flame icon. The longer your streak, the more you'll want to keep it going.

Silly sentences won't help you in real life

But will maintaining a really long streak on Duolingo translate to fluency in Chinese? Duolingo's critics say no. They acknowledge that Duolingo makes learning fun and can help you build a daily study habit, but argue that the phrases it teaches are often silly and not very useful for real-life conversations. Duolingo defends these quirky sentences as being intentionally memorable, serving as "grammatical anchors” to help you remember grammar rules. However, critics counter that immersing yourself in meaningful content and engaging in regular conversations are far more effective ways to grasp those grammar patterns than repeating odd, out-of-context sentences. For instance, imagine you're meeting a native speaker and need to ask for directions to the nearest subway station. But all you have memorized is something like "The duck enjoys reading detective novels." In that moment, you're not going to be thankful for memorizing that grammar pattern. Instead, you'll be wishing you had learned something practical, such as "Qingwen, zuijin de ditiezhan zai nali?" (Excuse me, where is the nearest subway station?).

A free springboard for good study habits

Even with its drawbacks, Duolingo can be a great starting point for your Chinese learning journey. It's fun, game-like features can grab your attention and keep you coming back, which is especially good if you're not usually into learning languages or if you find it hard to stay focused. We think it's a great way to start building the habit of daily study and acquiring a basic vocabulary, which you can then use as a springboard into more rigorous Chinese study methods. One of the best things about Duolingo is that it's free. You can learn Chinese, and even jump between this and other languages, without spending a dime. It's super easy to switch from learning Chinese to picking up another language or using your second language as a base to learn a third.

Learn Pinyin and tone differentiation

Duolingo recently added exercises for learning Pinyin and Chinese characters. The Pinyin section is laid out similar to a glossary, with sections for Tones, Initials (sounds at the beginnings of syllables), and Finals (sounds at the ends of syllables). You can come back to reference these at any time, and you can also run through Pinyin practice lessons. For example, the first lesson will teach you how to differentiate between the first tone, mā, and the second tone, ma, by playing two clips, then asking you if they're the same sound or different. You'll be able to see your progress on each tone, initial, and final on that glossary page.

Learn stroke order of Hanzi

It's pretty much the same deal for Hanzi practice, except that characters are divided up into sections and units like "Shop for clothes, discuss birthday plans”. Clicking a character on the glossary shows its animation in proper stroke order, and Hanzi practice includes tracing exercises. Nice!

AI speech doesn't perfectly replicate native speaker pronunciation

Before you get started with Duolingo for Chinese, there are just a few more bugs you should be aware of. A minor issue some learners encounter is the choppiness of the AI voices, particularly when characters (like Lily) are speaking. An AI voice model trained on the speech sounds of a speaker of a language other than Chinese won't be able to replicate a native Chinese speaker's pronunciation, which may be a bit of a setback when you're trying to grasp the nuanced tones of Chinese.

Some accuracy issues

One user of Duolingo to learn Chinese has reported frustrating mistakes in pronunciation, saying that the app sometimes matches Chinese characters with the wrong sounds. For example, the Chinese word pronounced like "le", is voiced as "liao" instead. The Chinese word typically said as "mei", is pronounced "mo". These mistakes can make learning harder, especially when you're translating or building sentences.

We're not jumping on the hate-train

So, to sum up, we think Duolingo is a decent option for learners new to Chinese. While the criticisms from those who love to hate the Bird App are valid, we think there are still benefits to using it - especially since it's totally free. Our recommendation would be to use Duolingo to establish a daily study habit, build up a basic Chinese vocabulary and get familiar with tones and stroke order, and then switch to one of our higher-rated Chinese learning websites or apps for more advanced study - might we recommend one-on-one lessons with a tutor?