Duolingo Review

Thursday, January 23rd

2025 Language Learning Program Reviews

Duolingo

• Pricing: Free basic version, with Super Duolingo available for $12.99/month
• Over 40 languages available, including both popular and less common languages
• Gamification keeps users engaged and motivates daily use
• Provides a clear, structured learning path through levels and units
• Units contain a variety of exercises, including listening, writing, speaking, and fill-in-the-blank
• Option to test out of units

Ah, Duo - that green owl that guilt-trips you with animated tears in your notifications when you miss your daily Russian lesson. His passive-aggressive methods are effective, given that Duolingo has 37 million active monthly users and 500 million total registered accounts.

Wide range of languages to choose from

Duolingo offers over 40 languages, including European languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Welsh, Danish, Greek, Esperanto, Finnish, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Ukrainian and Yiddish; Asian languages like Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese; African languages including Swahili; indigenous languages like Hawaiian and Navajo; and even fantasy languages like Klingon and High Valyrian. But stick with us to find out why, despite its obvious popularity, we don't rank Duolingo very high in our review of language learning platforms.

Freemium model

Duolingo is so popular because it's totally free - or at least, it used to be. In 2022, they introduced Super Duolingo, which, for $12.99 a month, removes ads and in-game currency barriers (like needing to pay 450 gems for a new set of lives), allows you to make unlimited mistakes, complete Personalized Practice sessions, and view a list of your tricky words. New Duolingo users might not remember a time when most of these features were free, but we do.

Sentences are increasingly AI-generated

In the same vein, a common complaint longtime users of Duolingo have is that they're constantly switching up the layout of their courses. Over the years, Duolingo has done away with checkpoints instead of end-of-unit challenges, crowns to track your progress, and a lively discussion forum where users could encourage each other and answer questions about grammar. Now, Duolingo seems to be doing away with some of their human staff. In a move that contributes to the worrying trend of AI taking away jobs, Duolingo recently laid off 10% of their human interpreters, instead adopting AI to generate new sentences, make translations, and handle reports of errors from users. (We have to wonder if the simultaneous discontinuation of the community forum, where users frequently discussed sentence accuracy, was a move to prevent users from drawing attention to errors in new sentences that are written by AI.)

Test out of units

While some of the changes to the Learning Path may have been jarring to long-time users, it's still satisfying and easy to navigate overall. While learning your chosen language, you'll progress through levels, organized into units and represented by circles with icons inside them. To see what a level will teach you, just click on it to read its title. Each unit also comes with a "guidebook” with a handful of phrases and grammar tips, but these are never as comprehensive as we would like. Duolingo lessons are a combination of listening, writing, speaking, and fill-in-the-blank exercises. Along the path, depending on the language you're learning, you'll occasionally encounter Stories, which test your reading and listening comprehension. If you're confident in your skills, you can skip levels by taking unit tests.

You have to stick to the path

Sadly, Duolingo does not allow you to jump around according to your interests and goals. We greatly prefer language learning programs that give you both options: follow a set path, or explore freely. If you've already got a basis in Chinese, for example, and you're coming to Duolingo for the first time looking to refresh your knowledge of the disjunctive case, you'd need to test out of each preceding level first - and then good luck finding the right lesson, since there's no lesson search feature and Duolingo's instruction is light on grammar.

Gamification makes it addictive

Many of Duolingo's users keep coming back day after day - even on vacation - to maintain their streaks and positions on the Leaderboard. Every time you complete a lesson, you'll earn XP and climb the ranks of other users in your League. If you make it to the top 3, you get promoted to the next League. It's not hard to understand how Duolingo's gamification can be an incredibly effective tool to help you build a daily language study habit. However, we'd argue that once you've built up that habit and laid the groundwork by learning some basic vocabulary with Duolingo, you should move onto a more thorough language learning program.

Duolingo does not teach practical sentences

To keep you using the app, Duolingo is careful not to challenge you so much that you become frustrated and the dopamine you receive from hearing the "correct answer” chimes and earning the shiny Gems dries up. It's not uncommon for users to get all the way to the end of a course and realize they can't really speak the language they've invested hundreds of hours in. Even if you're just trying to learn some basic phrases for scenarios you anticipate encountering as a tourist, Duolingo won't be of much help. When you need to ask where the bathroom is, you may find it's easier to recall the nonsense sentences favored by Duolingo, such as, "Mi mama bailaba con una rata grande.” ("My mom was dancing with a big rat.")

If you understand Duolingo's limitations, you can get some use out of it

To summarize, our standpoint on Duolingo's effectiveness as a language learning program is this: use it as a springboard to develop a new habit and gain some confidence with the look and sound of your target language, but get out while you still can. Check out some of the language learning programs at the top of our list to figure out your next steps after Duolingo.