You got me. I won’t deny it any longer. The rumors are true. I am the one who killed the Duolingo owl. It threatened to end my friend streak one too many times and I lost it. I repeatedly slammed its head into the diamond tournament trophy. All jokes aside, the Duolingo marketing team is pretty good at what they do. Almost good enough to make you forget that they’re replacing their translators with AI. Almost. But despite that, I’ve still been using the app in my slow journey to learn Japanese.
I wrote about my first steps into language learning in March of 2023, and I’m happy to announce that I never stopped. I’m still learning Japanese and I’m much further into the course than I was back then. But having now spent 2.5 years on this app, you would think I’d be fluent right? Well, not quite. Let me tell you what I think about Duolingo and the way it motivates you to learn after this time. I have good things to say and bad things to say, so judge for yourself what you think at the end.
For starters, I do think that the gamification ideas behind Duolingo are smart to an extent. Having a streak for one is a great way to keep you doing at least a little bit each day so that you don’t fall out of practice completely. Seeing your friends’ progress is nice and doing weekly quests with them also motivates you. For me this means that I probably would have quit many months ago if those things weren’t there. My streak is at almost 900 days and I’m never doing that from scratch again so I might as well keep at it, right?
That does immediately bring me to a downside of the system. Because I feel like my priority is to get enough done to get my streak, my friends quest or the amount of exp I need to stay in the top tournament, I end up focusing much more on grinding exp than on actually being an efficient learner. There are so many things to keep up with. Streaks aside, there are daily quests, weekly quests, leaderboards and exp bonuses. It feels like you’re failing if you don’t keep up with all of them – at least to me.
So what does that mean for my language learning journey after a little over 2 years. Well, again it’s complicated. I do genuinely think that doing Duolingo for this long – at a very casual pace – will make for a very great layer of groundwork in case I do end up properly studying the language at some point. I can mostly read Hiragana now, although some of the similar looking characters still trip me up at times. I can also understand what is being said without having to use any English characters. My vocabulary has been steadily increasing as well and I’m slowly starting to be able to read a little bit of both Katakana and Kanji, although I still have a long way to go.
Now over the span of 2 years, that’s not a lot of progress. You would hope that two years of language learning gets you somewhere proper. But on the other hand, there is also very limited language learning on an app on your phone. You are much more focused on the aforementioned quests and streaks and although that feels like you’re wasting your time on some days, if I compare the amount of Japanese I know now to two years ago, when I was only a few months into learning, it’s increased a lot. I would even dare to say that my Japanese is probably better than both my French and German at this point, and I did that for like 4 years back in high school. To make a long story short, if you want to dip your toes into a language and need something to keep you from getting distracted, then I’d still say that an app like Duolingo is a good place to start. If you want to use it to properly learn the language though, you’ll have to put in a lot more time and proper effort than I have, and even then I think it’s probably better to just buy a proper language learning book and actually study it. But hey, it gives you something to do on the toilet, am I right? Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 