AltSci Cell

by Javantea
March 18, 2025

Duolingo has a lot of problems. I know this because I've spent 1232 days learning Portuguese, Spanish, and a little bit of Finnish and Klingon. I have a 1232 day streak and am in obsidian league. I'm hoping that the developers at Duolingo who are watching for negative sentiment find this post. Here's my duome if you want to see where I'm at.

Duolingo is for beginners. If you end up at day 400 in Duolingo, you might think that it is useful for intermediate and advanced speakers. This isn't true. The only argument that I have really accepted for why intermediate learners should accept Duolingo as a daily tool is that it's important to avoid losing ground in a language. By spending a few minutes you're able to avoid dramatic loss of vocabulary that often coincides with not using a language for weeks.

Considering this, Duolingo's hardest difficulty is too difficult. The most difficult challenge is typing in a whole sentence in the learning language from the native language. For example, translate this sentence to Spanish: My grandpa arrived here twenty years ago. This is exceedingly difficult for learners to do even with help that Duolingo gives. This is because it is a spelling challenge. 1) the help is often wrong 2) grammar 3) you can only get 5 wrong in a long time period before it costs you gems. By putting these road blocks in, learners are incentivized to memorize spelling hard words-- something that native speakers lack. We know intuitively that spelling doesn't matter, so why would Duolingo do this? Duolingo's response to this is comical: this challenge type is rare and only shows up in full strength in legendary challenges which are not necessary to unlock more content. But it still shows up in lessons. See below. Duo does a decent job at detecting spelling errors and not counting a sentence wrong, but it is bad enough that it incentivizes bad behavior.

But wait.. it gets better. Typing words is not the majority of Duolingo's challenges. Most of them are a lot easier multiple choice. Multiple choice can and often is gamed. Indeed you can do multiple choice without recall which is one of the things that creates strong memories. That's why I intentionally use recall on every multiple choice -- making my experience on Duolingo way harder but way better than those that don't have this knowledge.

Radio lessons are overpowered. Radio lessons are short and easy. They are really high quality. By getting the questions correct, you can get 30 xp. With a 2x xp boost you can get 60 xp per thing. A 15 minute 2x xp boost can get you hundreds of xp. If you just want to promote, you can do a bunch of radio lessons in a row resulting in an awful trade: time for promotion. Yes, Duolingo wants people to spend more time listening. This isn't the way to do it. With this weakness and the demotion system, a learner can be demoted repeatedly despite being in the top 4% of learners. That's right.. That's me. I'm in the top of the entire world.

Duolingo prioritizes sentences over survival. Here's a good test. You're in a restaurant and want to ask the waiter if the qpwrsjfsx is meat or gluten. Can you ask them what qpwrsjfsx is in English in the foreign language? Can you ask them how to say gluten in Spanish without them being confused? When does Duolingo teach this vital tool? It does not. It never teaches survival sentences. This oversight is pretty glaring so it's very clear that Duolingo has no intention of helping travelers survive their first day in a foreign country. While I understand the humor and have a good laugh when a person fails dramatically after spending hundreds of hours preparing for their travel, I also have done this multiple times and it feels a bit less comical.

Duolingo prioritizes sentences over words and conversation. Words are incredibly important and without words learners will find themselves woefully unprepared for a conversation. This is exactly how I felt after getting so far in the Portuguese tree and started talking with a young woman over Zoom. I don't know what she's asking. Oh boy I don't know what to say. Oh no! Oh no! Why didn't Duolingo teach me words?!

So why haven't I stopped already? I wrote an I quit blog post at 795 days, Dec 24, 2023. I didn't post it. We're now getting to see what it's like when a language learner can't stop themselves. Looking back at Busuu, Mondly, Anki, Pimsleur, community college (1 year of German), books, Rosetta Stone, and self-teaching I realize that Duolingo has far more audio content than all of them. That's a big deal. How many learners have learned a foreign language with Pimsleur? If we look back at 1232 days and accept Duo's assertion that I spend less than 10 minutes per day on ~2 lessons per day then I've only spent 12320 minutes learning (give or take you know how that goes). That's 205 hours or 5 weeks of full time work. I have no doubt lost a lot of Portuguese as a result of not using it for months since I am now focusing almost entirely on Spanish. I definitely have lost a lot of Klingon and Finnish because it's difficult to spend time on a third or fourth language.

Here's where we come to a conclusion. As an adult I'm learning foreign languages at an excellent rate -- considering how little time I am actually investing. If I went through my Portuguese book or got a Spanish book and worked through it 10 minutes per day I think I would get more out of it than Duolingo. That's right. I think that it's less effective than a book -- for intermediate learners. But how many books tell you that you're going to lose your 1232 day streak every day?

So let's think about how to solve this problem. I took it into my own hands by making an Español Podcast right here on AltSci. If you enjoy it, let me know because I won't make more episodes and improve the quality without feedback. If you prefer native speakers, you're in luck. El Rey 1360 is a music station here in Seattle. There are tons of good stations with a variety of good stuff. El Rey has a call-in show. Give it a listen because you could find something you could enjoy for years to come. I wish I had more Spanish speaking recommendations for youtube. I can actually recommend searching in Spanish. I also heartily recommend switching the audio of a show you like to the language you are learning. I also heartily recommend switching the text and audio of any game you play to the language you are learning. We'll do a Let's Play soon to show you why. I also heartily recommend Wikipedia in the language you are learning because it can turn your desire to learn into a lesson. It's written by native speakers (for the most part). Using Tienen pájaros you can listen to a difficult sentence. If the article has the built-in function Escucha este artículo, you can listen to an article spoken by a native speaker. Did you know that exists? I know that Netflix and Amazon have a lot of Spanish content and am excited to give it another try but my experience was that I got about 1 hour of learning from 1 month of subscription. Netflix and Amazon are not a language learning platform and it's very easy to understand why. I'm going to get a few DVDs from the library to test that out. I'll let you know how it goes.

Javantea out.