DUOL shares have fallen more than 78% from their May 2025 high, and that’s before its nearly 25% fall in premarket trading today.
I’ve said before that one of the very few good things generative “AI” may do to the world is accelerating the enshittification cycle so much that it kills stuff that was already terrible and a drain on society (social media; platformization; curation algorithms…). Speaking as a linguist who speaks 4 languages and has read the literature on second language acquisition, it has always been my position that the Duolingo method is useless—it feels like you are learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours with it and gold a full tree and you’ll still get nowhere, and if you put a fraction of the time in about any other method, including doing pen-and-paper drills with old-fashioned paper-based textbooks, you’d have progressed much faster.
And old-fashioned grammar drills suck, too. It’s just that Duolingo really, really sucks.
(Methods that work better: 1) Find an intensive “conversation”-type course, or anything that is labelled as “natural” or “immersion” or “storytelling” methods; or get tandem partners; or online coaches such as in italki; failing that, join a conventional language course, the more “intensive” the better; work on these until you absorb basic grammar and vocabulary, focusing on spoken language not writing; 2) Once this bootstrap period is over, start talking to people, watching media, or reading stuf that interests you, in large quantities and every day; do not wait until you’re “good” to move into the input stage, start actually using the language for things you wanted it for, as soon as possible, which is sooner than you think; partial comprehension is fine.)
Of course I hope Duolingo dies horribly in a fire after it backstabbed its workers with the “AI memo”, but even if it didn’t, the world is better off without it.
One lesson we can get from this: Consider that overnight 25% drop in investment, which may well prove to be the coup the grâce. It was not caused by Duo losing users or enshittifying with “AI”, but by the opposite: investors mass panicked at the company setting its target revenue too low, as in a mere… 1.22 billion, rather than the 1.26 billion the investors wanted. Now the reason Duolingo is not chasing that higher goal is that they’re seeing the writing on the wall, and went into damage control mode: they’re pulling down a bit on squeezing their current paying users and trying to improve the experience of the free tier, in an attempt to reverse the bleed and bring in more customers.
In other words, Duolingo tried to slow down the slightest tiny bit on enshittification—3% less cash—and this already got swift punishment from the market gods. With capitalism, there is no long-term thinking: you’re expected to provide the richest people on Earth with infinite growth of their ever-increasing profits squeezed from customers paying every month more and more, now and forever, or you’ll be taken out and replaced by someone willing to try.
Edit : I got lots of questions like “if not Duolingo then what do you suggest?” The full answer is “literally anything else”, but I’ve cleaned up a couple of my longer answers and wrote these blog posts: 1) on comprehensive reading, 2) on tandem exchange.
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Man i love to hear the news about Duolingo and to hear a linguist’s opinion on it. I’ve always loved languages and have basically always had one that I’m studying at any given time. Of course I’ve tried Duolingo in that.
I moved to Denmark in 2024 and have been learning the language. I have a bunch of friends and acquaintances in various stages of learning it, to varying degrees of success. It’s been my running theory that Duolingo is the most antithetical to success tool you can use. It uses up effort and time for almost no result, while making you feel like you should be better because you’re now “level whatever”.
Immersion and trying and failing are so fucking good for learning, it’s insane. I’ve definitely been too hard on myself in the past comparing myself to people who have learned by living somewhere and how much better/faster they’ve learned.
It is my pleasure to inform you that the research supports your conclusions on all counts :)
I fully agree with your insight on how Duolingo sets you up for failure, and it has another trap, too—one common to all methods that are based on “diligently do these drills every day”* : You think that you should be getting somewhere because it’s so boring and it sucks so much. You did the work, right? You’re suffering, therefore you must be levelling up. Then after 4 years of doing French grammar drills on school or French vocabulary drills in Duolingo, you still can’t even ask for directions or read Le Petit Prince, and you figure it’s because you’re such a lazy loser with no discipline who should have drilled more, instead of spending all day browsing Instagram or playing Animal Crossing.
When actually what you should have done was to browse Instagram in French or play Animal Crossing in French. Perversely, real language learning—we call it “acquisition” rather than “learning”, to emphasise how it’s an instinctive, subconscious process—happens optimally when you’re in a state of flow where you don’t even notice you’re using the second language anymore, i.e. when you’re not suffering.
* There’s a very limited number of things that you do actually have to consciously drill; mostly writing systems, maybe also the phonemes at the beginning (this part is debated). Luckily, almost all writing systems in current use are very simple and you’ll get them nailed down in no time, as long as you already know the basics of the spoken language (remember, writing isn’t made for foreigners, it’s made for native speakers to represent the words they already know). The exception is if you’re learning Chinese or Japanese, in which case there’s no way out of drilling characters, forever. my degree in Japanese is from over ten years ago and I can read Japanese pretty fine these days and I’m still drilling characters. It is still the case that it’s much easier to learn the characters the way the Japanese and Chinese peoples do it, i.e. after you know the spoken language (at least to a basic degree, say A2 or so).
this is so lovely to hear! Just got to chat with my partner on what you said and it’s so exciting and affirming to hear from a linguist.
I studied japanese on my own for almost a decade. Lots of kanji studying, mostly. My spoken japanese is not great at all, and I constantly feel like I should be way better than I am. It’s been a huge pain point for years for me. Meanwhile I learned Spanish (maybe B1+/B2) growing up, working with a lot of Spanish speakers, having Spanish speaking friends. So very little real studying and I don’t know a damn think about grammer or rules. But I recently had to use it for a few weeks in Spain and it was fine. I’m sure I made a million mistakes but I was understood and could understand.
Small self flattery ahead, be warned.
Now learning Danish, i basically got off the plane and was like “okay someone teach me how to order a beer”. I have been mostly just talking and listening and it’s going so freaking well. A year and a half in and I’m easily B1+ or B2 (confirmed B1 in school but ahead of the curve by a lot). I work in danish(well danglish), can play a board game or drink in all danish and it’s fine (albeit a bit of a cognitive load). I can’t believe the difference in the learning styles.
Needless to say I deleted Duolingo a while back and am happy about it
My own Japanese only left the Endless Intermediate Tarpit once I stopped spending all my time trying to drill every single kanji ever and/or optimising the theoretically perfect kanji reading learning order, and started reading stories in large quantities for fun. Since kanji is such a barrier for reading, that meant teenage-level manga with sō-furigana, children novels, and eventually light novels/YA. The alternative is talking a lot with Japanese speakers. In either case the keyword is a lot; it can be tricky to find teen stuff that’s interesting for adults, but luckily a lot of manga is very bingeable (the first one I read in Japanese, Hagane no Renkinjutsu-shi, I did compulsively in one go, all 18 volumes one after the other).
After you have a good handling of the grammar and already know the words of the language, then kanji drills become much more approachable. That’s how Japanese people do it, after all; they’re already fluent speakers of Japanese when they start learning kanji. Thus the existence of material with sō-furigana, and the way furigana are only gradually dropped stage by stage until adult-level material.
I spent an embarrassingly long time spinning gears in the cycle of doing drills, then getting bored and abandoning the drills, then feeling guilty and trying to push myself to go back to the drills—before realising I had long reached the level of “can more or less understand manga with furigana” and was wasting time.
Godt gået!!
deleted by creator
@mirrorwitch
For me, learning the grammar is faster with a bit of book learning. Deriving it all completely from everyday use takes way more effort.Book learning definitely can’t stand alone but it really helps.
@frank
My personal pet peeve about Duolingo;”: it doesn’t teach you a new language, it teaches you to translate to your main language. That’s absolutely not how you want to learn a language! You want the target language to stand on its own, not be piece-by-piece translated back at any interaction.
I can magnanimously appreciate Duolingo for the purpose of giving a rough base of a new language, maybe even a little but of vocabulary. I hate everything else about it.
When you first start translation is useful. However you need to get beyond that fast if you are to actually learn.
I’ve spent many, many hours trying to learn French in Duolingo with very poor results. I’d always figured it was because I didn’t have anyone to practice it on, and perhaps that is exactly why?
I am 900+ days streak on Russian->German and I feel that it went down massively since I began doing it 5 years ago.
They been forcing daily tasks to call Lily since last year and that shit is fucking annoying. The dialogue is basically weak an half the time it is just not working. Also, they probably used my voice for AI training without asking me ofc, so fuck that. I stopped doing calls in a week.
Then they came up with podcasts. Good idea imo. But they did it weirldy. Character, say Lucy, would talk in Russian while person on the call would talk in German. It would made much more fucking sense if they made it entirely German. At the very least podcasts were decently written that felt that it was written by a human.
Now, they did change podcasts to be in full German. But they also destroyed stories that previously been written really well and podcasts too. Stories and podcasts now are entirely AI generated and they fucking suck donkey balls. Not engaging, overstretched. Character interaction that was previously established is gone. side characters that appear only in certain stories are replaced by a narrator. This could be so super cool if done right. Calls, podcasts and stories could be the driving feature. Instead it feels dry and stupid. And doesnt even teach you much.
All said, I use cracked Duo MAX and paid them 0 cent over these years.
I want all the AI slop adopters to suffer and be ruined.
I haven’t found a good alternative for getting better at French or learning Spanish from scratch, but I haven’t tried very hard. Maybe I should replay expedition 33 in French…
I also bought into the Duolingo hype in the early days, watched it enshittified into oblivion, and not shedding a tear for investors punishing it, even if it’s for the wrong reasons.
I’m now doing comprehensible input (reading + videos) and flash cards in my target language. Even though some people poo poo flash cards, I find it a good complement for CI (when I encounter a word from flash cards in the “wild”, it does click better). I definitely need to work on speaking ability.
Any specific recommendations for alternatives?
Learning new languages is overrated and unnecessary, as it is clear that emojis will be the language of the future.
🤡🤡
Future? or past. Egypt would like to have a word.
Clearly then emojis are made by aliens.
I quit on my 888th day. No grammar lessons, most languages are only translated into English which isn’t even my native language, so I need to translate everything twice, sometimes there are “new words” I’ve already learned weeks ago, sometimes there are actual new words I need to translate I’ve never heard before. For months now there is randomly no voice over when you use a word in your target language. Exercises repeat over and over. It wasn’t a great platform to begin with but it has gotten so bad that it just feels like a waste of time.
I can’t comment on its effectiveness, but I’ve enjoyed listening to free Language Transfer lessons. The idea being that there’s probably words you already mostly know because of shared language history.
I know several people who are trying to learn new languages for either fun or actually following courses and it is noticable how less engaged with the language people are who use duolingo. Dont think any Duolingo main ever dropped an interesting language factoid on me.
I started using duolingo for japanese in maybe 2022 and quit in maybe 2024. I did 4 years of Japanese in high school and so I had a vague memory of grammar and some vocab. Duo didn’t really improve my situation; I think all i got out of duolingo was frustration.
Also, I can’t speak to other examples of it, but the gamification was ass. Games are usually trying to be fun.
Also used for practicing my Japanese, I would say the usefulness was definitely not 0, if nothing else with the correct settings it was daily practice for the Japanese scripts (kana/kanji).
And it’s best It would definitely not bring you even to reading fluency, and was only good if you were supplementing your study with other language acquisition forms (like for example, in my case, living in Japan).
The examples were often stilted, and the accepted answers overly rigid, for sentences which weren’t necessarily realistic.
I think some of the worst aspects of the gamification were:
- Choosing easy exercises as a safe source of points, to not lose the streak. (perverse incentive)
- Essentially by setting a target, encouraging to only meet a daily points streak, and not necessarily go further for a given day. (perverse incentive)
- Tile matching to english, again with overly rigid accepted answer. (trying unhelpfully hard to map Japanese to english)
Let my streak/subscription lapse when it stopped being useful (got better reading exercise elsewhere), and uninstalled when they introduced AI shit.
I did the Spanish-from-English course, which I understand was the best course on Duolingo, from start to finish over 2 years. I also skimmed the English-from-Spanish course.
I got good enough to pick my way slowly through Salvadoran newspaper articles, which is basically what I wanted. (This also teaches me more words.) I need to ping my Spanish-speaking friends to teach me how to fucking speak it though, Duolingo didn’t teach me shit.
(The tabloid newspapers are easy. The pompous newspapers write in a fancy tone which ~nobody in .sv uses. I really wanna read El Faro in Spanish, but it writes in high-level sarcastic and pissed-off. Still a subscriber tho. Guess I gotta git gud!)
.sv Twitter was easy, cos it turns out shitposting is the universal human tongue.
I understand Spanish-from-English in particular has decayed badly in the AI era. Apparently it randomly started teaching someone “vosotros” which was never previously introduced. Pretty sure it still doesn’t teach “vos”, which is annoying (.sv uses vos).
Its main advantage was that I did it at all - the gamification tickled my brain just right - and I did in fact learn anything from it.
I was a paying customer, but my subscription finished a few months after the AI memo, so adios.
Fuck that stupid owl, I never liked it
If you don’t mind me asking, what are your thoughts on Mango Languages?
I’ve been trying to use it and it definently works better than doulingo ever did.
My typical routine was a couple of lessons in Mango (I usually wrote my answers on paper first then typed them), an instructional podcast (coffee break series), then followed by 30 minutes of listening practice (peppa pig lol).
I fell out of the routine for personal reasons, but it felt like it was working well enough
I haven’t used it but from reading a description my first impression is:
Better than Duolingo (low bar):
- Native speaker conversations
- A bit more context
- Phonetic spelling
- Voice recording for comparison
Still bad:
- Gamified
- Extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic
- Tries to replace human interaction with #engagement
- Artificial (“bite-sized”) content
- Artificial context switching
- Universalised organisation by topics “useful in real life”, rather than individualised, free voluntary reading
I suspect your podcast and Peppa Pig routines (both good calls, as long as stuff like Coffee Break is interesting enough for you that it holds your attention without having to push yourself to do it) were doing much more of the job than the app, and if you replaced Mango by anything that involves other human beings in the loop rather than streaks and achievements, you would both have progressed more and felt much less bored by it. (For a longer discussion as to why, see the blog posts I just edited into the OP.) If you’re ever going to try something like this routine again, try comparing the Mango app to a fully offline textbook+paper notebook practice, or even better, an online penpal or language coach. Do a couple weeks each and see how it feels.
Is Mango gamified? I only used the online version not the app and there was nothing pushing streaks or anything like that. But this was nearly a year ago so they could have changed a bit. I also did a full chapter at a time as opposed to a single lesson, but I can see the “small bites” arguement. I did really like the recording option to practice pronunciation.
Overall, I see what you are saying though.
I’ll be living in my target language country and taking classroom lessons next semester. I actually was already living there last semester, but fell off my lessons entirely. I was basically focused on language “survival” skills instead of learning more if that makes any sense.
Yeah recording oneself and comparing one’s pronunciation to a model is a good practice, and I recommend it for everyone at beginner stages. That’s a good feature to have in an app like that. (Of course one can also just use the builtin android voice recorder or
sox(1)or anything.)
I used Duolingo when I visited Crete and found it totally useless.
