Is it still worth learning languages with Duolingo?

Learning a language is hard work: you have to learn vocabulary, study grammar, repeat endlessly. And then, once you know a bit of the language, you have to start reading, listening, speaking with others. In short, it’s no joke.

In the past it was even worse. We studied from massive tomes full of rules, made especially to make you hate the language. My high‑school English book dedicated fifteen pages just to the use of the definite article “the”. I never read a single line of that book.

Luckily, there were courses with discs or tapes. In middle school I learned English with one of those, a Reader’s Digest course borrowed from an uncle. It had to be good, because in the end I could read and speak English reasonably well.

– Source: subito.it.

I didn’t do it for noble reasons, but only because I wanted to preview the original Spider‑Man and Fantastic Four comics that I found, with great effort, at a downtown newsstand.

Old times! Today there is a mountain of apps that claim to teach languages, from the classic ones like English, French or Spanish, to more exotic languages such as Finnish, Chinese, Japanese or Korean, and even niche ones like Navajo, Hawaiian or, yes, Klingon.

The most famous app is undoubtedly Duolingo, “The free, effective, and fun method to learn languages!” which has dethroned the venerable Rosetta Stone. But a quick look at the iOS App Store (or Google Play for Android users) shows dozens of alternatives, from Babbel to Lingvist, to Busuu, Memrise, Moondly, Mosalingua, …

But is it really possible to learn a language by spending a few minutes a day on a phone? And more importantly, does it still make sense to do it with Duolingo?

Four Years with Duolingo

I used Duolingo every day for four straight years to study German. I think I learned something, because I passed the A2 level exam. But, to be honest, if I started today I wouldn’t do it again.

Some lights

There’s no doubt Duolingo is cute, fun, and a pleasant daily habit. Its biggest advantage is that it doesn’t focus on grammar for its own sake, but teaches it through practical language use, putting grammatical rules in the background. In general it works, although occasionally it would be useful to dive deeper into more complex rules.

Another plus is that you can decide how much time to devote to study. I always spent little, say 10-15 minutes a day, so after four years I’m still at the beginning of level B1, and at this pace it would take another two years to finish it.¹

Finally, there’s the game-like nature of the app. As I said, Duolingo is enjoyable and even fun, which is a strong incentive to open the app every day. The challenge of maintaining your streak of consecutive lessons also helps to ensure that you study regularly.

And many shadows

But its game-like nature is also one of Duolingo’s biggest flaws. If you overdo it and get too caught up in the XP points competition with other users, a study session that should be relaxed turns into a race to collect as many points as possible and climb the global leaderboard, just like a video game.

I made that mistake myself. I used tricks and hacks of every kind, managing to reach the third place in the Diamond League, the highest and most prestigious level.

Then I came to my senses and said enough is enough: I turned off my public profile and lose all contact with friends and (especially) with the competitions. Because doing that I wasn’t learning German, I was just playing. And indeed, from that moment on, things went much smoother.

The app isn’t that great: it sometimes crashes and loses lesson progress. Other times it fails to recognise words I just pronounced, yet moves forward and writes down answers I haven’t said yet. Occasionally an advertisement won’t close, and the only way to continue is to restart the app. No wonder the developers constantly update it, mostly to fix bugs.

A major learning issue is that you can’t go back during a lesson to review a previous exercise or recall a new word. It feels like reading a Kindle book where you can’t flip back to earlier pages. I understand developers want to prevent answer changes (but it would be easy to block), yet from an educational point of view this is a terrible choice.

And there’s the limited‑effort problem: learning is rather slow. If I’d taken a traditional course I would have reached B2 in two years; with Duolingo it took almost four. That can also be seen as an advantage, because without strong motivation it’s hard to dedicate a lot of time each day to learn a language (not just this one).

But the worst flaw of Duolingo is the continuous reshuffling of the course organization. Years ago there was a total overhaul of lesson structure, causing massive confusion and a flood of criticism.

These changes keep happening: the old 20 groups (Units) of 10 lessons each can suddenly become 40 groups of 5 lessons each. A month later they might become 30 groups of 8 lessons, or 60 of 4. These periodic changes are very annoying, like having to change routes every day because of roadworks.

Even worse, the reason behind these constant modifications isn’t clear. I get that developers want to improve the code, update the UI, add new features here and there. But Duolingo is a language course, not rocket science that evolves daily. Even if there were behind it sophisticated studies on the best way to teach a language (but is that really the case?), I doubt such research progresses so quickly that it requires continual course overhauls.

AI-First

A few months ago, following the current trend, Duolingo’s management put AI first, deciding to “replace the slow, manual content‑creation process with one based on artificial intelligence,” according to co‑founder and CEO Luis von Ahn.

He says it’s done out of duty, to “provide this content to our students as soon as possible”.

Hovewer, many users didn’t receive this well. Not only because, for a supposedly caring company, suddenly firing all its external collaborators is a pretty low move, ethically speaking and echoes what Elon Musk did with Twitter.

But also because it means that the production of high-quality content, perhaps slower, but also more accurate and reliable, has become secondary to the multiplication and expansion of courses and, consequently, to profit margins.

Unsurprisingly, right after the announcement the company more than doubled its course offering. And who cares if the translations are often done sloppily.

Money first, too

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, described at great length in this recent Guardian article. At first, web platforms (or the applications derived from them) treat users with white gloves, pampering them to win their trust. Then they start favoring paying customers, to the detriment of everyone else. In the end, in order to monetize more and more, they also abuse paying customers, becoming nothing more than a giant pile of… shit.

A concrete example is Cursor, hailed as the ultimate AI‑assisted coding editor, which soon turned into an octopus that devours its own (paying) customers.

What happened to Duolingo mirrors this trajectory: initially the app was free to use and free of ads, and developers promised it would stay that way forever.

Later they politely introduced a small monthly fee for extra features, not essential for learning.

Then management took over, making life harder for users who clung to the free tier, stripping essential functions like lesson review or error correction, and locking them behind a paid tier.

Finally, a few months ago they replaced the old Hearts system with a new Energy system, represented by a battery icon that drains. A true, scientifically performed scam.²

Until July, before a lesson you had up to five Hearts. Each mistake cost a Heart, which could be regained by waiting a few hours, watching an ad or, until a couple of years ago, doing a “practice” lesson.³ This meant that users who made few mistakes could do virtually unlimited lessons, with only occasional ads.

With Energy this is no longer possible. Now you have 25 Energy units, and each response (not each mistake!) consumes one unit. After a streak of correct answers you regain a few units, but never too much. At the end, you can only do two flawless lessons before needing to recharge, three if you’re lucky. Energy recharges only via ads, not by reviewing!

And if you try to redo a whole lesson group to hit the Legendary checkpoint, each question costs two Energy units, leaving you with a near‑empty battery even without errors (see image below).

It’s crystal clear that this mechanism is a strong push toward the paid Super Duolingo and the newer Duolingo Max plans where, going against all the laws of physics, Energy (or the number of Hearts) is unlimited. Moreover, although paid plans do remove ads, even Super Duolingo still forces you to watch ads promoting Duolingo Max.

How Much Does Super Duolingo Cost?

Good question, given that it’s very difficult to find out how much Super Duolingo or Duolingo Max cost. If you go to the website, you’ll only find a very nice page but, unlike any other paid service, there are no prices listed.

The only way to find out is to start the free trial week. After onboarding and the first dull lesson, the screen reveals that Super Duolingo costs €10.99 per month. Paying annually drops it to €6.25 per month (€75 per year). The annual Family plan costs €8.84 per month (€106 per year) and can be shared with up to five other people.

Prices in dollars are similar: the base Super Duolingo plan costs $12.99/month, or $6.99/month if billed yearly (for a total of $83.88/year). The Family plan is $9.99/month (i.e $119.88/year).

Duolingo Max is even less transparent, but estimates put it around $30/month or $168/year. In my view, Duolingo Max isn’t worth it compared to Super Duolingo, it only adds a few extra feature: help on errors and the ability to chat with an artificial avatar, which feels far more awkward than talking to a real teacher (I have tried it myself).

At first glance, the annula Super Duolingo plan looks very affordable, and the Family plan is even more so, even if shared with only one other user. There are often discount offers as well. But price isn’t the only factor to consider.

Does Duolingo still make sense?

When Duolingo launched in 2011, the developers solemnly promised it would stay free and ad‑free, forever. Nothing lasts forever on the web, but it’s also true that these promises helped to build an active community of users who made Duolingo grow and flourish. Breaking these promises is like slapping in the face those who trusted you.

The value of Duolingo lay mainly in its community of users, people who spread the app by word‑of‑mouth, contributed improvements, and kept the forum discussions lively. In short, that made it feel like a living thing rather than a mere product. Duolingo’s management is tossing all of that away in the name of a god called money. For example, the forums were brutally shut down because they offered free help to users, help that is now available only with the top‑tier plan, Duolingo Max.

But Duolingo hasn’t only betrayed the original spirit by becoming an also paid product. It has also rendered the much‑boasted free forever plan almost unusable, a plan that is now clogged with ads and has been stripped of many essential features that are available only in the Super and Max tiers.

I can perfectly understand that the creators of an app need money to run the infrastructure, pay developers, and so on. But then they have to choose. They can choose to offer a free app with fewer features than the paid one. Or they can offer a fully functional free app supported by advertising, while the paid version is ad‑free.

But they can’t do both at the same time: remove lots of useful language‑learning features and simultaneously fill the app with ads. And, as if that were not enough, let the quality of the courses drop.

Because there’s no doubt that, after all the changes of recent years, the quality of Duolingo’s language courses has also declined.

There’s less variety in the sentences you’re asked to translate, and the translations become increasingly literal, word‑for‑word, probably because there’s no longer any human inserting less mechanical alternatives into the solution database. The pool of words available in translation exercises is smaller, so you often end up merely arranging them in the correct order without having to choose between similar terms. Even the short stories are always the same; it’s been months since I was offered a new story to read.

The new course structure also contributes to this qualitative decay. When I started, four years ago, the courses were organized in a more traditional way, with lessons focused on clearly defined topics (Skills), ranging from basic concepts to food, animals, travel, and so on. The Skills were laid out in parallel tracks, so on any given day you could decide to do a lesson on plurals and another on food, and the next day focus on animals.

– Fonte: Duolingo Wiki.

Once you finished a Skill, a numeric crown icon gave a visual cue that you needed to revisit that Skill periodically, reinforcing your grasp of the topic.

All of that vanished in 2022 with the introduction of the Path in place of Skills. The Path arranges instruction linearly, forcing you to finish a given set of lessons (in purple in the image below) before moving on to the next set (light‑gray, indicating it’s still locked). Nothing prevents you from going back in the Path and repeating one or more lessons, But there’s also no incentive to do so, as there was with the old crown system.

The current linear Path resembles game levels, where you are required to finish a given level before unlocking the next. Clearly, this approach prioritises gamification over the pedagogical purpose of the app.

If that weren’t enough, the very lessons now feel far more mechanical and repetitive than before. I can’t say for certain whether a traditional course like the German one I’m following has already been poisoned by AI‑generated content, but that’s the impression I get. I dare not imagine what’s happening in the newer, less‑popular courses (and I was hoping to learn Hawaiian… 🤣).

Lastly, there’s the cost‑benefit ratio. In four years on Duolingo I completed the A1 and A2 levels, let’s say I spent roughly two years on each level. I always used the free plan because, making few mistakes, the five Hearts available were more than enough. And even when I occasionally lost all my Hearts, I could recover them with a quick review lesson, which never hurts.

Today I couldn’t do the same, unless I’m willing to waste a lot of time watching endless ads, which distracts and kills the desire to do a lesson.

The alternative would be to switch to the Super Duolingo plan, which in my usage scenario would mean spending about €150 for each new language level. That’s not a huge amount of money if you consider that a traditional online course can cost three or four times as much. But it’s a lot when you factor in that the aggressive gamification of recent years, combined with pervasive AI, has turned Duolingo from a program for learning languages into a language‑based game. And for a game like that, €150 is a high price to pay.

Conclusions

If learning a language is just a hobby or a distraction, using Duolingo for free can still work. But if you’re serious, paying for Super Duolingo makes little sense.

Luckily, there are several better alternatives, check out the reviews on this specialized site for more information. Personally, I would choose Rosetta Stone, which teaches languages intuitively, like a child learns its mother tongue.

Rosetta Stone does cost more than Super Duolingo, but it uses a solid method and has a transparent pricing structure). Also, frequent promotions often let you buy perpetual access to all courses for just a bit more than two years of Super Duolingo.

Currently I’m taking a traditional online course at the B1 level with a handsome, native-speaking human teacher, an e-learning platform, and useful interaction with my classmates, and I don’t have time for anything else. Once that course finishes, I’ll probably give Rosetta Stone a try.

In the meantime I’ll keep spending a few minutes a day on Duolingo, more out of habit and to review what I’ve learnt than to learn new material. Four years together aren’t easily forgotten!