You love and hate Duolingo, but I’m all in on the green owl

My colleague Megan is losing faith in Duolingo. Her recent article on why she’s considering giving up her 550+ day streak is very well reasoned, but as a 700+ day streaker, I still believe in the app. It looks like a lot of you agree, and I encourage doubters to double down.

Megan outlined six good reasons why she no longer felt the benefit of the wildly popular language learning tool. She also ran a poll for readers in her article, and the results below show the love-hate nature you have with these apps.

Do you think language learning apps really help you learn a new language?

You were fairly split, but around a third of respondents have successfully learned a lot from language learning apps. Another 25% feel they’re helpful in conjunction with other apps. The remaining 42% either felt that they’re not an effective way to learn a language or that they’re only about engagement. I’d suggest neither means they’re useless.

As someone who uses Duolingo for at least 20 minutes a day, I’m a huge advocate of this admittedly flawed learning tool. I actually do believe Megan should give up her streak, but I’ll also stick up for the nagging green owl.

Megan wasn’t denouncing the app entirely, but she was considering abandoning an epic streak. Of her six points, the first three are about how the streak was no longer incentivizing her to learn. In particular, she suggested that, for her:

• The streak made her use the app daily, but for minimal periods, sometimes under one minute.
• It incentivized her to pay for streak freezes to maintain it.
• It made her use the app less effectively, aiming to add to the streak rather than genuinely learn.

She’s absolutely right that the streak doesn’t equate to making you learn, but I’d suggest that isn’t the point of it. The streak is just to ensure you engage with the app each day. If you don’t want to do that, there’s no problem giving up the streak. A daily engagement can be too much for time-poor people, but a gentle incentive to even approach learning each day isn’t a bad idea if you want to make steady progress.

One of the first commenters on her article puts it very well:

“Think of it like an alarm for doing exercise. The alarm will tell you that it’s time to workout but what you do in the workout is completely your call.”

It’s a great analogy. You wouldn’t go and sit in the gym changing rooms each morning just to tell people you’ve been every day. On Duo, once you’ve logged in and done a quick lesson, there are other dopamine-inducing incentives to keep you on there — the league tables and the XP multipliers keep me engaged. You can’t compete in these leagues without accidentally learning a little.

Duolingo’s part of my daily routine, but if it were more convenient to do it twice per week, I’d just abandon my streak. You can still compete in the leagues. Unless you’re flaunting your streak to friends, no one cares what it is. I’m proud enough of mine to casually drop it in the opening paragraph, but none of my real-life friends care.

So use the app as it best suits you, whether that’s for five minutes each day or an hour on Sunday. It’s your servant, not your master. Forget your streak — it’s not worth the stress or a migraine.

Megan’s next two points in her piece are critiques of the app’s features and operation. The two main points she made were that updates to completed units disrupted her progress and that a lack of certain features made her frustrated with the app.

She’ll find no argument from me on these scores. Duolingo can be maddening, especially if you favor a highly methodical learning path. However, I take a simpler view. It’s nowhere near as good as classes or many textbooks, but it’s significantly better than nothing.

She’s also right about the app rarely explaining sentence structure or grammatical rules. Duolingo is great for vocabulary, but if you don’t learn grammar structures, you can be a bit lost as to why the answer is what you see translated on the screen.

I have to make an assumption here: The team behind the tool must constantly consider this, and perhaps there’s no good way for it to teach you the intricacies of grammar and keep you engaged. In other words, grammar is boring.

But this goes back to the reason you’re on the app in the first place. If you want to learn a language, you engage with it. That means looking into the grammatical structures to understand them better. There are plenty of free resources for this — ChatGPT and other AI chatbots are new and effective examples.

The Duolingo creators may seem like profit-hungry cynics, but maybe there’s method to their madness. You might not love the approach to learning or the knowledge gaps, but if the app doesn’t keep you on it, you won’t learn anything. Maybe Duo cuts out the most boring parts of the process for this reason, and that brings me to Megan’s final point.

Like many people, Megan feels that Duolingo is more about engagement than learning. This is a well-founded criticism. Like almost every app, Duolingo’s main aim is to get you to stay on it, whether you’re learning or not.

I see this, but I don’t care. I admit that I’m a bit addicted to the colors, noises, and league tables. As being addicted to apps goes, getting hooked on a learning app isn’t a bad place to be in my eyes. I’m equally addicted to the dumpster-fire social media site now known as X, and that’s not teaching me anything. It just makes me angry.

Duolingo’s engagement mechanisms are very clever. If you want to do well in the leagues, you need to log on twice a day for double XP. If you want to do really well, you need to grab the triple XP bonus. In the screenshot above, that meant I needed to do seven lessons in a day to read the next story on my path. I might roll my eyes, but then I take a breath and do more practice than I was planning to do.

Megan hoped to have learned more after building her streak for 18 months. Hope is good, but so is expectation management. I don’t hope that Duolingo will make me a fluent Spanish speaker; I only hope that I end each day having either learned or practiced a tiny bit of Spanish. If I’m not moving backwards on a day I haven’t left the house to practice with real people, that’s a win in my book.

And it works for me. I’m an intermediate speaker, and one of my biggest problems is understanding. I can convey what I want to say in fairly basic Spanish, but the answer that comes back from native speakers can bamboozle me. However, I’m increasingly picking up an extra word or two I learned on the app in the responses from Spanish speakers I meet. That can be the difference between getting the gist of the sentence and feeling lost. Duo is working.

Given Duolingo’s glaring flaws, it’s easy to overlook the app’s benefits. Here are the other reasons I like it.

Slow progress is progress

We’ve touched on this already, but once you accept that Duolingo won’t teach you a language overnight, you can see gradual improvement. Using it for 15 minutes in the morning makes you feel like you’ve achieved something, especially if you do it as part of your daily routine. It might be different if you need to learn a language for a specific trip in a few months, but if your goal is to end the day a little bit better than you started it, it does the job.

It’s cheaper than lessons

While we lament the app or the motives of its creators, let’s at least give it credit as a value-for-money resource. Many people use the free version of Duolingo, but I upgraded to the paid version so I could skip the ads and not run out of lives. It works out to about $8 per month in Mexico. Of course, it’s not as good as a tutor or a group class, but I often use it for 12 hours per month or more. How much tuition per month would the same money buy me? Much less than one hour, for sure.

As much as you want, when you want

Duo is also much more flexible than fixed classes. I use it for five minutes on some days and almost an hour on others. I decide the time I’m going to do it, and how much time I’m in the mood to spend on the app. I also usually do it fairly early in the morning, before most classes would even start. Besides, I’m a fairly introverted person. I’m terrified of making mistakes when I speak Spanish to other people, so learning on my own is preferable, however slow my progress.

It’s not entirely anti-social

Connecting with others isn’t what brings people to Duolingo, but it can be a fringe benefit. My 11-year-old niece is thousands of miles away, and we struggle to find common conversational ground when we’re in the same room. But as one of my Duolingo friends, we do quests together, drop encouraging messages, and send XP boosts. I’m not a cool uncle, so I like having this small family link.

I totally get people’s frustration with the app. I’m lucky enough to have time to commit to it, but everyone is different, and if you’re short on time to learn, the eccentricities of Duolingo might be enough to put you off. I’m not always in the mood to extend my streak, and I admit to occasionally using the cheat I accidentally found, but only as a last resort. As the school teachers used to tell me, “You’re only cheating yourself.”

I hope Megan finds a better app or learning tool for her situation, and she should definitely bail on her streak. Duolingo won’t get you fluent, and you don’t need a little green owl harassing you. However, for me, inching closer each day to understanding a native speaker without panicking is worth the harassment.