One thing that I have found Duolingo helpful for is kana and kanji practice in Japanese. It's better than flashcards in that it also gives you stroke order.

What is a non-opinionated critique?

I bought Rosetta Stone for a similar purpose.

They cannot give you a chart or synopsis to save their lives. They are quite weak on tenses for this reason.

Duolingo is terrible†, but proper gamification combined w/ LLMs for real conversations could be an incredible learning tool. (I might build this if no one else does.)

†It can be useful for going from absolute 0 to epsilon, just to kind of get familiar with the language, but if you're using it more than like 2 weeks, you're seriously wasting your time (vs. reading material in the target language, watching TV in target language, trying to talk w/ people in target language). Anki, too, can be a trap that feels like learning but isn't, really, in my experience.

Duolingo's marketing of "learn a language in 5 minutes a day" or whatever their similar slogan is, is bad. Duolingo won't teach you hardly anything at all in only 5 minutes a day, and even with considerably more time (30 minutes to an hour a day), on it's own it is unlikely to teach you a language. However, in combination with other learning tools like classes, immersions, comprehensible input, etc. It is a very valuable tool. I finished the German class in about 2 years, and I found it helpful, and wished that the Duoloingo German class continued further than it did.

Yeah, I agree, I don't like aspects of the league, and I think that the way they apportion XP encourages less-than-idea ways of spending your time. Basically, if you use Duolingo exactly the way they encourage you to use it, and only that way, you won't get much out of it. But if you are self directed, recognize the ways in which it is useful, and use it as another tool alongisde the rest of your learning, it's really helpful.

Like I always say to my friends & family who are complaining about Duolingo not really teaching anything: it beats doomscrolling, what else do you want?

The thing that sorta gets me about Duolingo: If it became mainstream for everyone to do what is essentially 5 minutes of anki every day (which is kinda the Duolingo pitch), language learning would be kind of a bad candidate. If you spend 2 years memorizing 400 words you still aren't close to knowing a language. But there are many situations where memorizing 400 distinct things is pretty useful: countries, capitals, recipes, history etc.

I used Duolingo a fair bit in 2015–2017 to improve my Swedish, and generally enjoyed myself. Having not touched it for most of a decade, I downloaded it earlier this year to try my hand at basic Greek and wow but it’s gone downhill. Everything is massively over the top, all subtlety has left the system, and when I stopped after a couple of days because I couldn’t deal with the intensity they sent me nagging messages for over two weeks in more and more pleading tones trying to get me to come back. I’d never use them again at this point.

Edit: just went to delete my account and they’ve got a tearful owl above the “Erase personal data” button to try to guilt-trip me into staying. https://drive-thru.duolingo.com/static/owls/sad.svg

What do you guys think about DuoBook.co?

Duolingo did a great job of encouraging me to find a real human to learn from.

It sucks balls. I learned more in one month of studying from a textbook and attending conversation classes than I did in two years using Duolingo. And its so much worse now than its ever been!

I can relate to this post - great thoughts!

I took Spanish in high school and college, so had a rudimentary understanding of verb tenses and some vocabulary. Before I walked the Camino de Santiago el Norte (45+ days in Spain), I used Duolingo to brush up on my Spanish.

It helped my reading most, my speaking a fair amount and my listening/conversation the least. I was able to ask questions, but was often flummoxed at any reply that wasn't the most basic.

I grew to hate the gamification, but was addicted to my "streak' also ... using math lessons when I didn't feel like doing a Spanish lesson. The so-called "leagues" were kind of useless since the same people weren't in the league from week to week. Any friendly competitiveness to "learn more" was lost when randomly assigned to a different group each week.

I finally abandoned the app this spring.

I'm trying Babbel now since I'm going back to Spain for a month and Patagonia next year.

Both of my parents are teachers of a European language. They both have phd's in linguistics, and rate very highly with students (who basically adore them).

All of this context to say that not once has anyone using Duolingo been able to "test out" out of the first ("101") class that they teach. Duolingo self-learners come in with a very unequal mix of vocabulary and... not much else. Unable to use declension properly [0], unaware of most rules around gender, verb tenses, etc.

I'm sure (and I should look it up) that there have been academic papers written on these quite different methods/approaches: gamified learning vs "academic" learning, immersion by moving to a country, etc.

But in my parents' experience of teaching (which spans ~40 yrs), Duolingo students pretty much all became disappointed in the app: these students thought that they had developed skills when it turns out they mostly got addicted to a game that overpromised useful learning over entertainment.

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Imho, the ugly truth is that language learning is deeply hard and requires a tremendous amount of effort and "tricks" to keep yourself interested. People who watch media with subtitles, play with AI apps (such as the YC backed https://www.issen.com/ which is quite nice), take a mix of "classic" classes, spend time in a country where the language is spoken and force themselves into situations where they "have" to speak, etc. all do much better. But it's a ton of effort.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

I have a 2000+ day streak on Duolingo, mostly learning Russian. The app has got progressively worse since I started, for a while just giving me the same lesson every single day. I of course finished the course years ago, but I keep up with my one lesson a day to keep the bird happy. I find the UI incredibly annoying, I've disabled all the sounds and animations that I can. You might ask why don't I stop? Well I want to keep up my Russian, and the one lesson a day keeps my brain ticking over.

Anecdata: my daughter, when a rising high school sophomore in 2023, used DL to skip a full year^1 and join upperclassmen in Spanish 3. She went on to take AP Spanish, earn college credit w/ her AP test score, and join the Spanish National Honors Society. She credits DL w/ giving her the confidence -- and vocabulary -- to make the leap when she did. Of course that doesn't mean critiques aren't valid, and YMMV, but it does help show that DL isn't necessarily useless, either.

1. Despite US high-school language classes generally having a (usually deserved) reputation for failing to impart real fluency, our town's language instruction is actually first-rate.

I couldn't stand Duolingo because of the gamification. I'd complete a section and then there would be four screens telling me I earned points, then another screen saying I earned a different type of points, then a screen asking to share my results, etc... Each lesson was only a couple minutes so this ends up taking a non-trivial amount of time. Also, the sentences were often times nonsensical and nothing you would use in a real conversation. However, I would sign up tomorrow if I could get rid of all the gamification nonsense. There simply aren't that many half-way decent Hindi options out there. Pimsler is by far the best, but it only has two levels and you can only do it so many times.

Duolingo app doesn't even work at all anymore; it is non-functional. The sad thing is that it used to work in the past.