Why it might be time to give up my 550+ day Duolingo streak

When I started using Duolingo to learn and practice foreign languages in February 2023, I never envisioned myself using the app daily. But recently, I hit my 550-day streak, meaning that I’ve used the app daily for 1.5 years.

While I’m slightly impressed by the fact that I maintained my streak for so long, I have also been considering whether it’s time to give it up for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I no longer feel like it’s teaching me what I need to know. While I always considered Duolingo one of the best Android apps for language learning, my experience is making me doubt this.

1. I no longer feel like I’m actually learning

I started pursuing my Duolingo streak as a way to make sure I didn’t drop off from learning Mandarin. I added a Duolingo widget to my phone’s home screen and enabled notifications to remind me to complete my streak.

But the streak doesn’t actually ensure that you learn anything — it’s an engagement metric, similar to a Snapchat streak or a Reddit streak. A Duolingo streak requires you to complete a single lesson to maintain it. Depending on the type of lesson you’re doing, this can be an extremely brief period spent in the app. In fact, this week I finished my lesson and exited the app within 42 seconds.

Maintaining my streak has ensured I use the app daily, not that I actually learn a new word or character. The fact that you repeat the same vocabulary across multiple lessons to memorize the words means that these small chunks of time spent in the app don’t introduce you to a new word for weeks.

If you miss a lesson, Duolingo offers you a “streak freeze” so that you don’t lose your streak. This makes the feature more forgiving if you’re having a particularly busy week or just naturally forget to do your lesson.

You get a limited number of streak freezes for free, and every now and then, these freezes refill. But you can also buy streak freezes to maintain your streak. Duolingo will often prompt you to refill these freezes to protect your streak — I’ve even gotten the prompt when I still have freezes equipped.

The app also used to give me five total freezes (instead of only two) due to being part of the Streak Society. But this number seems to have been reduced to three. You can technically earn in-game currency to buy these refills, but you can also use real-world money to buy these in-game gems.

Over time, this has made the streak feel more like a pay-to-win mechanic than an actual sign of progress or learning. Occasionally the app also doesn’t register a lesson, which costs me extra streak freezes. This, along with the prompts to refill my freezes, has soured my impression of the streak mechanic.

I used to complete multiple lessons a day when using Duolingo. But as my days got more busy and my chronic migraines got worse, I started moving towards shorter lessons to maintain my streak. Because I’m learning Mandarin, which comes with its own writing system, I have a tab for learning these Chinese characters (known as Hanzi).

I started using this tab because I was relying a lot on pinyin (the Chinese phonetic alphabet) to understand what I was reading. But eventually, these short, repetitive lessons became a way to maintain my Duolingo streak. This has greatly reduced the amount of new vocabulary that I learn over time.

It feels almost like I uncovered a Duolingo cheat. But instead of boosting XP, it just ensures I have very short lessons. But there’s another issue that contributes to my lack of diversity in lessons…

4. Updates to completed units disrupted my progress

Something that has hampered my progress on Duolingo is updates that the app makes to units you have completed. For example, while I’m on Section 2, Unit 17 of my Chinese course, the app rolled out updates to earlier units. These weren’t the occasional word or two, but entire themes and topics of conversation.

However, my units in Section 1 are still shown as completed. But when I revise these units, I find words I’ve never encountered before. This also happened to my Hanzi lessons. I was trying to align my Hanzi practice with my progress for the main lessons, but dozens of new characters were added to units I had already completed.

I don’t mind the course and lessons being updated, but I wish you could practice the new vocabulary and sentence structures in separate lessons. The fact that they’re simply folded into your completed lessons makes it really difficult to spot the gaps in my knowledge.

I really enjoyed Duolingo in the early days of using it, and I really felt like I was making progress. However, once the app started adding so much new vocabulary to older lessons, I started to feel more and more frustrated with the experience.

I tried to solve this by trying to figure out if I could reset my courses. But it turns out the only way to do this is to delete the course and then re-add it. However, doing this also erases all the XP you’ve earned from completing lessons.

I shouldn’t really care about the XP on my profile, but the gamified approach Duolingo takes to language learning makes this feel like resetting this metric would be a loss. I imagine I would feel similarly if restarting a Steam game from the beginning erased all of my unlocked achievements.

Currently, I have 27,219XP for my Chinese course. Considering lessons earn you between 20 and 40XP, erasing all of this would be a bitter pill to swallow.

But besides the gamified elements making me feel stuck where I am, I also have issues with the way Duolingo approaches its lessons. The app rarely explains sentence structure or grammatical rules. The only way to find the few grammatical lessons and rules included in a course is to select the little book icon next to a unit’s banner.

I thought Duolingo’s gamified approach would help me refresh my knowledge of Mandarin. While I studied it for two years in university, I lost a lot of my knowledge by not practicing it for years.

But when I’m only able to pick out a few words when hearing Chinese dialog on TV or my Chinese friend sends me texts that I can barely comprehend, I realize that using the app every day for 1.5 years has not given me the knowledge of the language I’d hoped for. I still haven’t reached the level of proficiency I had in university.

Even with pre-existing exposure to Mandarin, I’m miles behind where I’d like to be. The app has failed to extend my knowledge past a few greetings, questions, and phrases. But it hasn’t failed to get me to log in every day. So overall, it feels like Duolingo is geared more towards repeated engagement than actual progress.

I might consider switching to Memrise or another language-learning app to see if a different approach works better.

I still get a notification every evening to complete my Duolingo lesson for the day, but as time passes, it becomes less fulfilling. I have started looking into other ways I can learn languages and vocabulary in a more holistic way. But thanks to my growing frustration with Duolingo, the prompt to continue my streak is becoming steadily less tempting.