Why Duolingo Stinks

The premise is that Duolingo stinks. It is bad. It is not effective. It has, built within it, a flaw that makes it bad at what it is meant to do, or at least, what the people who download or sign up for it believe it is meant to do. I say that latter part because the flaw may be intentional, and what the makers of the app consider to be the purpose of the app may not be what the people who download the app believe its purpose to be.

Before I elaborate, I’m not talking about how Duolingo isn’t ‘immersive’. I understand, and so does everyone presumably, that the best way to learn a language is to live amongst others who speak it, even better if they can speak your language as well. I’m looking at Duolingo on its own terms, for what it is and what it fails to be, but not what it could not conceivably be. This is not an examination of how to learn a language, because as I am about to reveal, this is something I wouldn’t know how to do, but an examination of the fundamental flaw that resides within Duolingo.

If you don't know, Duolingo is a language learning app. It started in 2011. It offers 43 languages as well as some courses on non-language topics. It is currently the most popular language learning app available. It isn't slapped together but there is a lot of research backing up various methods and approaches used by Duolingo. But let me tell you my experience.

I signed up for Duolingo in January of 2023. I took Spanish in high school, and college, and grad school. But it had been a decade since I really engaged with it. I always wanted to be able to speak another language. I was pretty decent at reading it still. I see signs or various things printed in Spanish sometimes and I try to read them, and I usually do a decent job. Writing is more challenging. My vocabulary is decent but the grammar parts and tenses I forget easily. I was always terrible at speaking and, especially, hearing it.

Currently, as of July 14, 2025, after 2 and a half years, I have a 842 day streak of taking lessons. I’ve never missed a monthly badge. I’m in the Diamond League. I have 111,996 XP. I also am pretty decent at reading it, but have a hard time writing it unless its in the present tense or the grammar is simple. I’m terrible at speaking and, especially, hearing it.

I don’t know if you picked up on this but after 2 and half year of Duolingo, and really sticking to it and being disciplined, I have made little progress in learning Spanish. To be fair, I maybe have reminded myself of things I knew from school already, but basically, this has potentially been a colossal waste of my time.

Why is this? How is it possible?

In my opinion, Duolingo is not unlike health insurance, or so many other things, but let’s focus on health insurance. The purpose of health insurance is to give you health care coverage, right? Well, yes, for you, but not for the health insurance company. The health insurance company’s purpose, like every other company that exists, is to maximize profit. The purpose, the company’s purpose, occasionally leads to suboptimal results relative to your purpose for buying it. Sometimes you don’t get the best healthcare results because it is at odds with the health insurer's desire, and need, to maximize profits.

So, while you or I may download Duolingo to learn Spanish, Duolingo’s purpose is not to teach you a language, it is to make profit. It doesn’t do that by making you bilingual, it does it by making you use Duolingo. Duolingo wants you to use Duolingo, whether you learn or not.

Duolingo is masterful at creating a sense of urgency. Duolingo is like a used car salesman living in your phone. Duolingo is like those mobile games that trick kids into spending thousands of dollars. Duolingo is a lot of analogies for bad things that take advantage of people’s psychological needs and triggers.

First, Duolingo bothers you constantly. It reminds you via emails and notifications and all kinds of nonstop harassment that you need to do a lesson or your friend did a lesson or a new friend streak began or any little possible thing you can imagine it will think worthy to bother you about. You will not forget about Duolingo.

That’s not that bad though. That’s even a little helpful, if not for the rest of what I’m about to say.

Second, Duolingo gamifies its Spanish lesson. Gamify is not a word I made up. It means, as it implies, to add game and gaming elements to a non-game context in order to increase engagement. There are streaks to maintain, you must do a lesson every day, or the careful house of meaningless cards you’ve been stacking will collapse. There are also daily goals, various ones that seem, not random, but, conspicuously chosen relative to what your immediate tasks are on your path. There are also monthly goals. There is no shortage of ever evolving targets to reach.

You are constantly in competition with other Duolingo users, and you’re graded on a curve. You’re always in a week long competition with a pool of other users to get a certain amount of points. If you’re in the lower tier, you are demoted to a lower league, and if you’re in the higher tier, you’re promoted to a higher league. There are layers upon layers upon layers of goals and targets and competitions.

Aside from working against other players, you can also work with them. You’ll have a common goal that you’ll both reach together, points or lessons or whatever else. And you’ll feel bad if you aren’t pulling your weight, motivating you to play more. You’ll also worry if you’re the only one pulling your weight, motivating you to play more.

Third, the carrots and sticks. The first 2 points kind of have built in carrots and sticks. The sticks are primarily demotions and the app pestering you. The ultimate stick, and the most ironic, is that Duo will literally stop letting you make mistakes. It will stop you from playing when you make a mistake. This will of course set you up for demotions and failing and all sorts of sticks. Unless of course you pay extra money to get some super membership that can allow you to avoid the app making it excessively difficult to play. Or, you can just cheat half the time and look up the answer by tapping the word in the app and seeing the translation. While that might not help you learn Spanish as well as taking your time and working through and learning from mistakes, at this point the gamification of Duolingo has made the lessons so miserable you just need to blast through them. You want to win and progress and avoid demotions and get your prizes and gems so Duolingo doesn’t pester you and punish you more, learning Spanish is an afterthought. You're playing the game.

But the carrots, the carrots are … things that help you avoid the sticks. You can get various items that allow you to extend the timed games when time runs out or freeze a streak when you miss a day or allow you to make a mistake without turning off your lesson. You can also get gems, which you can use to buy those items I had previously described.

The last thing, the most evil thing, is laced throughout the first three, it’s the timed parts. I don’t mean the daily or weekly or monthly or yearly goals or contests or whatever else. I’m referring to those elements of Duolingo that are timed in minutes or seconds. Those things force you to, not try to learn Spanish, but beat the clock. In order to beat the clock, you will find yourself looking only at the elements you need to in order to answer the question. If they ask you to fill in a gap and present you with choices to fill it, different genders or plural and singular, rather than reading everything in the Spanish sentence they provide, you may just see that it is male gendered and singular. If all you need to answer is whether the sentence is present or past tense, then you’ll look at that, and ignore, thus failing to learn from, the actual sentence. You’ll even click the words to see the translation, because you have to or you’ll get punished.

Let’s slap all this together. Sometimes, when you have a busy day and you don’t want a pile of sticks dropped on you by Duolingo you log in to do your lesson. But you can’t just do a lesson. You need to complete multiple lessons because your friend quest is ending and your friend wasn’t keeping up and you’ve got to push it over yourself, or else you might not meet your monthly goal. Furthermore, the weekly challenge is done today and you’re in the demotion zone, so you need points.

So you look to your daily goals, because completing one will give you bonus points for 10 minutes, so you pick the easiest of the 3, and then once you do that, you’ll start getting bonus points for every lesson, which will allow you to complete the other 2 daily goals, which will allow you to get another 10 minutes where you can get bonus points.

The easiest goal is to get a certain number of points, which you can arrive to quickest by doing the timed challenges. Those aren’t lessons of course so they won’t count toward your friend quest, so you’ll still have to get lessons too. With all that ahead of you, you are going to blast through the timed challenges, not that you had a choice.

The timed challenge is a matching game, so you match words. When they match they disappear and are replaced with new words. At a certain point, you stop matching the words though and have picked up on the pattern for where the words that match disappear. You can play it at a pace where they spaces that match will be filled in, it doesn’t matter with what specifically, but whatever it is will match, so you’ll tap them. Every once in a while you’ll goof up the pacing and mismatch two words you haven’t looked at and don’t understand. But adjust and plow forward, because that’s all there is time do as the 2 minute clock ticks down in the corner.

So you waste enough time doing that to start getting your bonus points. One of the other daily goal things is to do 3 lessons with a minimum grade. Now you’ve got 10 minutes to get bonus points, you can maybe get that done in 10 minutes if you blast through your lessons too fast to learn anything from them, but then you’ll be able to get another 10 minutes of bonus points.

Here come the lessons, you can’t do 3 in 10 minutes if you actually learn. You highlight words to get the answers. You match sounds with spellings, without learning what the words are saying. You need to fill in a noun in a second sentence in a pair, so you look at the noun in the first sentence to see what noun would make sense with it, rather than reading the sentences. When you get something wrong you just remember the answer so when it pops up at the end you can just pick the right one. And sometimes, getting it wrong fast and then right fast because you memorized what you got wrong is faster than taking the time to understand and get it right the first time. It’s a memory game, but you’re not memorizing Spanish.

You can’t stay in the diamond league without points and you can’t get enough points without bonus points. You need to force yourself to complete more lessons while you still have bonus points, and that will contribute to your monthly challenge, let you catch up on your friend quest, and keep you out of the demotion zone. Plus, if you finish your third daily lesson then you will like get triple bonus points tomorrow, but only for 10 minutes, but you’ll be able to extend it if you blah blah blah and don’t learn Spanish.

The third daily challenge is to speak in a certain amount of lessons, you can’t in the timed challenges so you have to do the regular lessons. So you sigh, and do them, as fast as you can. You're tired of it and want to get it over with at this point. You play enough to get the speaking tasks to pop up in the lessons. It doesn’t understand you if you speak at regular volume, so you have to scream. Your cat leaves the room.

After half an hour, you’ve learned nothing, despite having been successful at the game.

But, why not ignore the game? Don’t pay anything, don’t rush through the lessons, ignore the bonus points and the challenges and the friend quests and whatever else. Sure, you can do that, but then you move at a snails pace. You can either play the game and go too fast to learn, or you can ignore the game and in 2 years you’ll be saying, “Donde esta la biblioteca?”

So, that’s my experience with Duolingo. Your mileage may vary. For what it’s worth, I do think Duolingo has maybe incrementally made me better at Spanish or at least served as somewhat of a fresher. But the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. The time you spend on Duolingo if you try to give it your all, is not worth it, but then if you don’t give it your all in order to not waste your time, well then you’re not giving it your all so it isn’t worth it. The reason for this is the gamification of the Duolingo app, which is there because, even though you’re there to learn a language, Duolingo is there to keep you on Duolingo.

Let me know your experience with Duolingo or if you’ve found a better alternative

by Zack Goncz