This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a few years, as I’ve grown more dissatisfied with Duolingo. Then a friend posted that they ran out of hearts during a lesson, the only way forward was to subscribe, causing them to lose their hard-earned streak, and they’re quitting.
I’ve been using Duolingo to learn German on and off for over a decade now. A few years ago when the pandemic started* I made Duolingo part of a routine that I’ve been streaming most days on Twitch. My streak is now at 1768 days.
When Duolingo first started over a decade ago, it was a language learning business with a focus on free education and courses made by people. Even today the three most important words on the Duolingo homepage when you’re logged out are “free. fun. effective” This mantra is repeated a few times on the page.
Over time the name Duolingo has become synonymous with language learning, but I believe it has now gone too far into a focus on profits, and away from their original goals. I’ll spell out a few reasons why.
Duolingo’s entire game and marketing focus on streaks of daily learning can help form a good habit, but losing a streak for unavoidable reasons is why some people stop learning. People have to be encouraged to not let losing the streak end learning.
Learning doesn’t happen without mistakes and Duolingo now makes it more difficult to learn without a subscription. Duolingo has long had “hearts” that you lose like a video game character’s health when you make a mistake. The change now is that users can’t earn more hearts by practicing their target language.
When you make a mistake and run out of hearts, Duolingo makes this experience frustrating and robs users of fun by forcing them to give up progress on a lesson and start over, or subscribe to Duolingo for unlimited hearts.
I believe this is the worst part of the modern Duolingo experience for free users, but there are plenty of other annoying details of the modern version of Duolingo.
Even if you have been a Super Duolingo subscriber, they are now pushing Plus subscribers to use modern AI slop at another, more expensive subscription tier, Duolingo Max. I subscribe to the Super Duolingo family plan for $120 a year which is a lot for us, but somehow isn’t enough for Duolingo. The company has become extremely pushy to get subscribers to upgrade to their $240 Duolingo Max subscription for families. Buttons are being replaced on the primary menu for Duolingo to buttons that have no function for Super Duolingo users, they just launch into ads for Duolingo Max.
Duolingo got rid of their built-in forums for each lesson that let users help other users ask questions and understand tricky bits of their target language. One of the features of Duolingo Max is an AI slop explanation for why your answer to a Duolingo lesson was wrong. Here the Duolingo company has exchanged real answers from real people for slop answers that are helping to incinerate our planet through thermally inefficient computing resources at a higher cost.
The web version of Duolingo gives users far fewer experience points while still pushing people to compete on the same leaderboards with iOS and Android Duolingo app users who receive far more experience points for the same lessons. When I look at my next lesson on the Duolingo website, it is offering me 10 experience points, the same lesson on the mobile app is offering 35.
At the start of 2024 Duolingo fired about 10% of their workforce in order to focus on AI. I’ve seen reports that they’ve also cut their support team down to just one full-time worker though they may have some contractors supporting that role.
There are good things that Duolingo has done. The mostly adorable characters that act out and speak in the lessons are extremely helpful for some types of lessons. Duolingo recently added music and math lessons that could be very valuable. They haven’t started to crack down yet on people sharing their family accounts with others outside of their households like so many other companies have. However, I have moved more of my language learning to other tools and resources.
Especially for learning German, I’ve found that I am more effective at learning when I hear real voices instead of text-to-speech generated voices and especially when I can see actual human faces speaking the words I’m having the most difficulty pronouncing.
For all of these reasons, but especially because I see Duolingo having diverged so much from their core values of “free. fun. effective.” at this point I don’t value Duolingo as much in 2025 as I now value tools like Seedlang that use real people in video lessons giving me a more effective experience in learning German. When I meet people who are interested in learning a language I’m also much less likely to recommend Duolingo to them because I know how easy it is to lose a streak for free users, get disappointed, and give up learning entirely just like my friend’s post that caused me to write this.
It is extremely unfortunate that Duolingo have squandered their success. I hope that the company changes, there is still a great deal of value in a gamified learning experience with cute characters that rewards learning at your own pace. They could even eliminate the free tier and just require a subscription after a certain amount of progress in a course. In my opinion that would at least be a more honest experience than frustrating users with broken streaks and lost hearts. What kind of a teacher puts these roadblocks in the path of learning? Not a very good one.
*Did you know that tens of thousands of people are still dying of COVID every year? It’d be good if you continued to mask up and avoid spreading this disease.
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