Does Duolingo actually work?

By Bianca Swanepoel

A photo of the duolingo intro by appshunter.io on unsplash

Most of us know Duolingo as the little green bird that notifies us when we skip a language lesson and threatens us with harm if we don’t complete our Spanish exercises.  But do any of us know if Duolingo actually works? Duolingo claims that, by dedicating just a few minutes of your day, you can become fluent one day. But do you know anyone who has successfully become fluent using Duolingo? And if not, is it the app that is flawed, or is it simply that people lose interest?

For those who are unfamiliar, Duolingo is a language learning app that can be downloaded on your phone. The app offers 43 different languages, including Spanish, Chinese, French, and even made-up languages like Klingon. Duolingo employs a gamification model, where completing each level earns you points, allowing you to progress to the next level and achieve the next language goal. It also uses a scoreboard system, with you as a player being able to compare your score with other players. When choosing a new language, you are able to set how much time you want to put in each day, starting at 3 minutes, going up to 30 minutes. The question is: Does this method work, and has anyone been successful?  

I myself had a few experiences using Duolingo. I started using it to learn French a few years ago, one of its most popular courses, other than Spanish. I got bored using it after a while and stopped. Then I started learning French formally with tutors and then at university. Because of my background with the app as well as how language is taught in a formal setting, I wondered if it was actually possible to learn a language on Duolingo. The answer to that question is twofold.

Two people learning a language by Annika Gordon on unsplash

Duolingo starts your course with learning simple words and phrases, such as “dog” and” I eat”. It focuses on memorising vocabulary. We learn these phrases without learning the grammar or the reason for how they are structured. In French, there are specific ways words are spelt depending on gender, and they have a unique type of conjugation. In university, we started with Verbs and Conjugation while intermingling vocabulary with every second class. This meant that we constantly learned how the language worked while gaining more words. When we learned a new word, we would be able to conjugate it and put it in a sentence because of the relevant structure we had already learned. This is not how Duolingo formats its lessons. In “Duolingo French”, there are multiple courses, and you only start exploring how verbs and the different conjugations work in the fourth course. 

When I started Duolingo a couple of years ago, there were only 5 chances for mistakes.  If you made that 5th mistake, you would be put in a “time out” with that being changed to 25 ‘hearts’ in the recent year. There was also an option to take a quiz to test your proficiency if you already have some skill with the language you want to learn. Duolingo would then put you ahead in the course. Since then, Duolingo has taken that out, but you can still skip ahead to the next course by doing a test if you feel like it.

The Duolingo Icon by ilgmyzin on unsplash

The biggest downfall of Duolingo is that it is limited in how it teaches a language. When I made a mistake on one of the questions, it gave me an option to find out what I did wrong. Upon pressing this option, Duolingo wanted me to get Duolingo Premium, making my interest in learning into a pay-to-win situation. Duolingo is also unable to teach full fluency when it comes to speech. The app has quizzes where you are instructed to speak into a microphone, but this is too limited. This is obviously different from when learning in a class with others, where you can speak to each other and ask questions to a teacher.

Despite the limitations of Duolingo, I did find people who were able to learn a language through the app. Most of these people didn’t use Duolingo as their only method of learning languages, but used it in conjunction with other methods, like reading novels, listening to music or attempting conversations with other people in the language you want to master. The few who I found who were able to learn a language solely using the app took multiple years and are still not fully fluent.

Learning a new skill takes time. There is no skip button, and those of us who use Duolingo in an attempt to quickly learn a language will be disappointed, but if you use Duolingo as a learning tool in conjunction with other methods, it could be a great asset. For those of us who want to only use Duolingo, it is possible, but I suggest waiting around 5 years before booking that trip to France.