Looking back at my 2022 post on Duolingo—the one where I review the app as if it were a video game—I feel like it was probably far too favorable overall. The other Kelleher Brothers told me as much at the time, expressing their disappointment in the app as a real learning tool. Contrasting my enthusiasm, my brothers were almost completely unimpressed with Duolingo, and they were a bit baffled by the app’s immense popularity. While I found some fun in “beating” Duolingo like a video game—conquering its leaderboards to collect its most challenging achievements—my brothers mainly bristled at having their time wasted with ineffective lessons and a severe lack of educational resources.

And after giving it more consideration, I have to concede that my brothers were right about Duolingo. It really kinda sucks.

You see, Duolingo doesn’t actually teach you to speak a foreign language, not really. In fact, they almost go out of their way to avoid giving you any useful educational info, such as any explanation on how a language’s grammar is supposed to work. If achieving mastery of a language were the app’s main objective, there would be a lot more educational content to teach you key points directly. Instead, the app pretends that you will magically come to understand all aspects of a foreign language simply by playing through their conveyor belt of “lessons”—apparently just absorbing everything (grammar, vocabulary, conjugation, etc.) through osmosis. Now this probably goes without saying, but that doesn’t work.

You are never going to learn a language by using this app—or any app, really—for 10 minutes a day. Even if you diligently stuck to it everyday for years. Staring at your phone is a far cry from the immersion of actually being in a foreign country. Despite what the language app people might tell you, that’s a pipe dream, it’s never going to happen.

There’s one thing Duolingo is clearly designed for though, and that’s keeping you on Duolingo. They have thoroughly gamified the learning process to the greatest extent possible specifically for this purpose. The gamification goes way beyond the point where the game elements might help you progress in learning a language. Instead of keeping users motivated to learn, Duolingo’s methods appear much more interested in keeping you engaged with Doulingo; keeping your eyeballs on their app for as long as possible.

Now perhaps more time on the app could result in you learning (and retaining) knowledge of your chosen language—surely that’s what Duolingo themselves would say. However, that’s more a matter of faith than a foregone conclusion. Again, the app isn’t interested in telling you how grammar works, or pointing out specific linguistic exceptions that tend to trip up new speakers, or anything of the sort. No, it just wants you to play through lesson after lesson after lesson and pick up every point and linguistic nuance by yourself.

Obviously, if you used the same amount of time spent with this app taking a real language class, like at a university or community college, you’d have a much better outcome. But one key element there that Duolingo seems to constantly disregard is the benefits of communicating with other actual people. More on that in a minute.

Here’s a minor criticism, but something that really bothered me an awful lot. Historically Duolingo has had the flashiest language app out there, with a growing cast of colorful cartoon characters and impressively varied animations. The production value of the app always seemed to be pretty high. And I appreciated that the cartoon characters all had their own personalities and a voice to match. Also Duo (the owl) is a cute mascot. But at some point, the app no longer allowed users to upload their own photo for their profile picture. Instead, they forced you to create a cartoon avatar for your profile, a generic cartoon person “customized” in their house style. Think Miis on Nintendo Wii; although a closer analogue has to be Facebook’s horrible Metaverse avatars, because these things are horribly generic.

Forcing the use of generic Duolingo avatars for profile pictures bothered me for a couple reasons. First because the profile picture I had been using was a pixel art self-portrait, a cartoon image which I had made myself. Instead of letting me use my own (better) cartoon avatar, I was forced to use theirs or have no profile image at all. Second, because I’m a boring white guy with an unremarkable haircut, my Duolingo avatar would basically look like the default avatar with no changes, no points of differentiation at all. A dreadfully boring avatar is bad, but one that looks like every other Japanophile nerd on the app is even worse. I refused.

The way they forced these generic cartoon avatars on their users almost seemed like a signal of where Duolingo was headed. Because making real human users appear indistinguishable from your fictional cartoon characters—all of whom have their personalities and voices—is pretty dehumanizing. It felt like what Duolingo really wanted to do was blur the line between interacting with humans and interacting with bots…which as it turns out, of course, was exactly what they wanted to do.

Back in April Duolingo announced that it planned to be an “AI-first” company and, as part of that initiative, they would fire all of their contract workers and just replace them with AI. As a longtime Duolingo user and fan of the company, I have to say that move was a huge misstep. Replacing workers with AI is not only morally reprehensible in my view, it’s also completely backwards from Duolingo’s supposed goal of teaching people to learn foreign languages.

You see, language is probably the most human thing imaginable. The ability to communicate and collaborate is basically our species’ super power. As alluded to earlier, a key aspect of language—one that Duolingo as a company doesn’t appear to grasp—is that the point of it all is the communication of ideas between human beings. The idea that you can simply cut humans out of the process (in order to scale faster and maximize your profits, of course) is just kind of ridiculous.

Since the pandemic times of 2020, I had been maintaining my Duolingo streak studying Japanese. Sure, it became clear to me at some point that I definitely wasn’t learning more of the language. Even by my own extremely low bar of merely helping me remember some of the Japanese I’d learned previously, the app wasn’t really doing it for me. Still, day in and day out, I reflexively pulled up Duolingo on my phone, dutifully completed one lesson, and promptly closed the app; just keeping that precious streak alive. If I missed a day here or there, no problem; I had extra Streak Freeze items to keep it going, plus like 18,000 gems (Duolingo’s in-app currency) to burn through. I felt confident I could keep my streak going indefinitely, even through apathy and sheer inertia.

Even got a couple extra days on there for good measure.

In May I heard about Duolingo’s “AI-first company” announcements, and this coincided with my steak officially hitting the 5-year mark. Now I was already feeling dissatisfied with Duolingo, the app’s lessons felt lackluster at best, but this big AI move was the last straw for me. There was no way I was going to continue using an app when we know how much the people running it truly suck. (Same goes for you, Spotify.)

So once my streak hit 5 years, that was it. I deleted the app.

Since dropping Duolingo, I started looking at other language learning apps, and there are plenty of options to choose from. Many of them do not have free options, of course, which was the biggest appeal of our green owl friend, but almost all of them at least have free trial versions. For me, the best alternative app for learning Japanese that I’ve found is Busuu.

Something I immediately noticed upon starting a Japanese lesson with Busuu was that the app started by teaching me some aspect of the language’s grammar. Well, look at that, I thought, they’re trying to actually teach people this language! What a novel concept.