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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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.
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.
What do you think of Rosetta Stone? I liked it’s pseudo immersion, and have debated on trying again.
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 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 used Duolingo when I visited Crete and found it totally useless.
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.
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
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 force yourself) 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 tried them out years ago. I had taken a bit of German in high school and liked it so I figured I’d give it a shot.
I didn’t love the gamification aspect. That’s something that applies to a LOT of modern software. I always hated gold stars and stickers as a child in school. I hated the stupid programs my various employers had to encourage coworkers to compliment each other - it’s all a tactic to generate positive emotions and avoid paying people more. And most of all, I saw the rise of mobile games and micro-transactions and skinner boxes. The way some people just go nuts and put hours into games they otherwise wouldn’t just to get some digital “trophy” or “achievement”. Duolingo had a decent amount of that.
I stopped because of privacy concerns. I forget the details now, but I think maybe they were found to be harvesting a lot of data from phones that they were not disclosing. Either that or they pushed out a mandatory terms and conditions update that just said they would be harvesting all of the data? So I uninstalled.
I watched my girlfriend use it last year and it’s so much worse. They have leaned so heavily into “dailies” and “streaks”. It’s like the shittiest mmorpg you’ve ever seen.
I recently started Busuu, and while it feels BETTER it still has a lot of the same stuff. A lot of encouragement to engage in, like, social and community aspects. To get streaks. Idk maybe I would be better off just finding books or something.
Busuu’s not bad: I made it through the first Mandarin course, with the occasional forced social aspect of “write something for the Community to review”. The second Mandarin course is much less polished though, I gave up on that a couple days in after I ran into all kinds of new words that aren’t introduced before their use.
I absolutely loath the “write something for the Community to review” aspect. There should 100% be a way to turn that off.
And make my profile completely private. I don’t want anyone else to be able to see my progress or even know that I’m using the app at all.
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 feel like people criticizing Duolingo for being inferior to talking with native language speakers or a traditional language class are kind of missing the point. It’s like saying 10 minutes of slow walking is inferior exercise to an hour of HIIT every day. Yeah true but people actually use Duolingo. The whole point is that it is fun and doesn’t feel like a chore. It’s probably why so many people around the world have learned English by watching American and British TV shows. Is that an optimal learning method? No, but the best exercises are the ones you actually do.
Right, except OP and the research suggests it’s not effective, even though it feels like you’re doing it. So yes, 10 minutes of walking a day is interior to an hour of HIIT, obviously. And yes 10 minutes of walking a day is better than not walking in a day, for your health. But no matter how many days in a row you slowly walk 10 minutes, you’ll never be able to run a marathon. It just doesn’t do that.
So if everyone’s goal with Duolingo was to vaguely know some words in a language they can’t communicate in, and it was just a brain exercise like a crossword, then sure. No harm done.
But that’s not most people’s goal, and what the research shows is that for all the time people spend doing it, they could have spent that time doing something else and actually made progress towards their goals.
Right. The point I’m making though is that for the majority of Duolingo users, if you take away Duolingo you don’t get something better. You get nothing.
Only on lemmy would people be cheating the demise of a language learning app, no matter how gameified.
Right, but is it a language learning app? Or is it a “play games with aggressive owl” app with a language learning theme? Because if after 365 straight days of playing games with owl you cannot use the language you’ve been “learning” to communicate, then you aren’t learning a language. And if you’re not learning the language, then what are you doing with the owl?
You absolutely will learn with Duolingo, the “games” are literally saying, reading, and writing things in a foreign language. There’s nothing else to it.
my lemmy client is a humanities app because on it i learn how dedicated people are to completely missing the entire point
Thanks, I just woke my partner because I burst out laughing. Comment of the week for me.
I also feel like a lot of the critisism of Duo really, I dunno, miss the purpose? Of Duo entirely. Or just language learning.
Especially as someone who isn’t young.
Duo is not going to make anyone fluent. No single program or method will. It also isn’t, for most people, something that will make you educated in a language in a day or a week or a year, or probably ten. Nothing short of total immersial will do that.
It also feelslike, based on how critics talk, like they go into Duo trying to learn with a method of like, “Manzana is Apple, Hola is Hello” etc. Instead of doing with a mindset of “Manzana is a round red fruit” and “Hola is a friendly greeting.”
Basically complaints feel like they come from someone who just, expected way more out of it than its trying to do.
Also, lesrning to speak a lamguage with any app really is not going to work, once again, it needs immersion. But that that does not make the app bad.
That said, I have used Duo for mamy years now, across several languages, Spanish, Norwegian, Japanese, and I tried the math, chess and music. Its honestly, not as good as it used to be, but I blame the stupid hearts/energy for that. For a while Inwas using the “fake classroom” trick to get unlimited play, but they stopped that with the update in mid 2025. This biggest problem with these energy systems is that they punish mistakes. For learning lamguage, mistakes are going to happen, a lot, and punishing mistakes is very bad for progress. At some point, just as you might be stumbling but “getting it”, suddenky, you can’t try anymore, because you run out of energy.
I also hate how it punishes using, gramatically weird but correct phrasing (in English), that more closely matches the structure of the target language. Because its helpful for learning the struxture of the target lamguage to do the answer in a similar gramatic structure in your known language.
Also, they are really bad about using sysnonyms for some words when more nuanced translations would be better. The one really easy one is translating “Me Llamo Ramen” to “My name is Ramen”. When its actually “I am called Ramen”. Or probably better, “They call me Ramen”. " Me nombre es Ramen" would be “My name is Ramen”. It seems “nitpicky” but later llamo is used in relation to call/calling, and being consistent would be better for learning. Also, based on my anectodotal moments, a lot of non English use the “I am called…” structure of speaking.
Duo is not going to make anyone fluent. No single program or method will. It also isn’t, for most people, something that will make you educated in a language in a day or a week or a year, or probably ten. Nothing short of total immersial will do that.
That’s just patently untrue. School systems in most non-English speaking countries spit out fluent English speakers after a time investment of fewer than 4hrs/week, for a maximum of 8-9 years.
Children learn things way waybeasier than adults.
Don’t get me started on their translation of gustar as “to like”, which is just totally backwards.
(In Spanish, you don’t say “I like it”; you say “It pleases me.” Instead of “I love it”, you say “it enchants me”.)
Duo is not going to make anyone fluent
One of my friends has 2500 day streak in German. He doesn’t live in Germany and I am pretty sure he has no one to talk to in German either. He barely speaks it. I couldn’t strike a conversation with him.
I’d apply similar situation to me. I haven’t been talking much in my motherland language for over 10 years. (my mother tongue is another language) Even if I understand everything perfectly, I am insanely rusty on speaking it and use wrong word forms all the time. Practice is much more important than just plain learning words and rules imo.
Oh yeah. Its been a while since I had the whole like/love etc words but if I recall they pushed gustar (probably) aslike, but later uzed it in way that suggested like, “I love it more than anything.”
Like maybe don’t imply it means simply “like”.
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 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.
Fun fact I learned about Duolingo: They don’t have a cybersecurity team
I’m honestly shocked they haven’t gotten hacked more
Hard to know if there has been a hack if no one is looking for it.
