Duolingo

I have been a consistent user of Duolingo since 2019, both paid and unpaid subscription, completing the Italian course multiple times. While I have enjoyed the platform and its role in building foundational knowledge, I feel compelled to share some constructive feedback based on long-term use. My primary concern is the lack of progression in the… Read more

Italian course. Despite Italian being one of the earlier languages introduced on the platform (around 2014–2015), the course still caps at an A2 level. In contrast, other language - such as Spanish - offer significantly more advanced content, extending to a B2 level. After several years and repeated course completion, this lack of development is both surprising and disappointing especially given that I paid for my subscription in the first years and yet no benefit to paying except for no Ads and endless lives - where is the development into advanced levels of educational material?

As a learner aiming for continued growth, I have reached a point where repeating the same content no longer provides meaningful progress. Language learning requires depth, expansion, and increasing complexity - particularly beyond the intermediate plateau.

Additionally, recent changes to the app’s energy (lives) system have significantly impacted the learning experience. With a limited number of attempts available, it becomes difficult to complete even a single unit without losing energy even if the answers given are correct and clearly shows a money grab not a genuine interest in providing an App that provides benefits even for the free version - I am only one and a half units away from completing Italian multiple times and have no desire to pay a subscription for just one and a half units remaining. The new energy (lives) scheme creates a barrier to flow and consistency, especially for dedicated users who wish to engage in longer study sessions. It increasingly feels that meaningful use of the app now requires $$$.

Another issue lies in the use of flashcards within units. While flashcards can be effective, they are far less useful without context, hints, or consistency. In some cases - such as exercises related to passato remoto - answers appeared inconsistent or unclear, making progress unnecessarily difficult. As an English teacher, I strongly believe that context is essential for retention and understanding, particularly in a language like Italian with numerous verb conjugations and nuanced usage.

Overall, while Duolingo remains a great tool for beginners, it currently lacks the depth and progression needed for intermediate and advanced learners of Italian. After years of loyalty to the platform, I have decided to move on in search of resources that support continued growth.

Duolingo had the potential to be an exceptional long-term learning tool across all languages - not just at beginner levels but sadly now lacks all the necessary benefits of an excellent learning App.

Worse experience ever, my friend daughter was playing with this app for free using my phone, when she finished I tried to close the account because the app is for children NOT TRUE IS FOR LEARNING LANGUAGES. I clicked by mistake and they charged my… Read more

card, and when I tried to explain this to them, they denied the refund even when I proof I won't ever use it. Now I got a $149 charge for something I will never use. What a SCAM. Stay away from google play, I close all the cards I had registered with them and every product because I don't want to be scam again.

Almost as soon as I signed up for the AUD 200 annual fee, Duolingo locked up on a particular lesson. Tried restarting the phone, checking for updates, went back to previous lessons, all to no avail. Still got stuck on the same lesson. Investigated support. Zero support. No phone number, no AI chatbot, only an email address (support@duolingo.com)… Read more

that was ignored for the month or so I kept chasing up (support reference number 12606269). Best avoided. There are better ways to learn languages. Without support, this feels almost like a scam.

When I paid for the ap it worked well. It's become too expensive and run with Ai now so I stopped paying. It is a painful experience to do any lessons now. After 15 minutes I gave up and will discontinue using it after 2 years. It's so awful now.

Gradually getting worse by digging through bedrock under the grave of what duolingo was before – Increasingly terrible and full of fake engagement. To start with I have been using Duolingo for a very long time. I currently hold a 2500+ day streak. it would be longer but that one Duolingo's major recent failures lost a longer streak on me. (details to follow). I say this so you understand where I am coming from. What is good: Nothing is a… Read more

standout. It is on par with other services and often worse.

What is okay: To begin with the actual lessons are okay. Nothing to brag about and honestly anki flashcards would so the same without any of the hassle. This is just somewhat more engaging.

Now for the long list of bad things.

The app and web page both have huge connectivity issues. You may wait 5 minutes for a lessons to load. The lesson may just drop to pathway through and now you lost the progress you made, the time sensitive rewards and possibly even be penalised.

next we have the fake ladders they run. The weekly ladders are ranked by stupid coloured levels. You get int he top three (formerly top 7, 5 and 10) and you move up. You rank in the bottom 10 (previously 7,5, and 3) and you get demoted. The problem is every new week there are people who score up to 10,000 points almost right away. The ladders are getting more punitive, less rewarding and far less real.

Understand, to get 20 points (the maximum allowed with every buff) you need as little but often more than 1 minute. That means if you got a perfect score in every lesson and had buffs to multiply your rewards the entire time it would take 8.33 hours or 500 minutes. The problem with this is that buffs typically only last for about 20 minutes or less and you get them once a day. Also any error will lead to less than 20 points being awarded. That means you would need to not just get perfect lessons for 8+ hours straight but also miraculously get extra rewards in the same time to keep your score multiplier and you still need to time travel in order to make that happen in under 1 hour. Obviously the players are cheating or more likely Duolingo has fake first place winners and similar to 'encourage' you buy their premium packages.

The problem and reason why I have never purchased a Duolingo plus (and now super along with other tiers) package is down the failures. Everything in these packages that used to be free. They have literally stripped away parts of the app and put them behind a paywall. It is an incredibly scummy move on par with EA loot boxes.

This is something that rosseta stone when they purchased Duolingo said they would not do. They lied.

Examples of this behaviour include: providing only 5 hearts for the whole day not per a lesson and before that there were no hearts. Also you can't recover hearts easily, they take longer and are easier to lose because of errors that duolingo causes. removing spoken lessons removing listening lessons The attempt to push people to spend the poorly balanced 'gem' rewards by creating nonsense and forced 'purchases'

Considering they now offer 2 or more paid tiers this is just unacceptable. More so with the matter bugs described later.

There is also reliability problems. For nearly a year Duolingo just did not have a good connection. it did not matter if you WiFi, Ethernet, laptop, PC, phone, tablet or smoke signals. You just could not get lessons to load. It took forever for Duolingo to make the webpage or app usable.

This is not surprising since Duolingo seems to not fix any spelling or language or user issues. they have a report function but it looks more like screaming into the void.

The claims of AI powered learning are just deceptive and misleading.

Further to all of this is the next major issue. Duolingo is run using ads. that would be fine but at one point every ad was a scam. Duolingo literally served scams to people trying to learn a language. A group who would arguably be very vulnerable to scams.

On top of being largely scams the ads also take longer than the lessons on a regular basis. That is I spend more time waiting for the ad to reach a point where I can click out than I do learning the language in a lesson. Ironically the sheer fact that Duolingo runs a scam ad then an ad before their own paid subscription ad means it is twice as annoying. 1 because I now refuse to buy a subscriptions but 2 because i get 2 adds before I can go onto learn again. This happens after every lesson.

A good example is that if you have an account but complete lessons on your phone 1 day and computer the next it will treat your account like the second day is the result of having missed the first day on your phone. This remains unfixed more than a year later.

On the topic of losing progress. If the app updates and a new lesson is introduced Duolingo does not tell you. instead you just lose your completion of a language. This has been true of Spanish, french, Italian, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Russian and Japaneses so far. So there may be exceptions but not enough to mitigate this issue.

Update as of approximately September 2025.

Duolingo has changed the hearts, lives, mistakes feature form making 5 mistakes of any kind in a day to now being effectively time limited number of lessons. This is described by Duolingo as 'energy". Which is somehow an even worse system than what already existed. The energy system allows you spend 1 energy point per a question. This means the 25 energy that Duolingo gives each day is enough for almost exactly 2.5 lessons. Not enough to complete a full 3rd lesson so you have to "spend" your lingots or whatever the in app currency is to continue or give up halfway through a lesson. This is the sunk cost fallacy used by predatory in game purchases, loot boxes and so on. The worst example of this is the similar sort of predatory pricing used by Diablo online. Remembering that prior to this change you were only limited by the number mistakes you made before running out of hearts, lives or whatever you wish to call it. This means you could complete whatever or however many lessons you felt comfortable or were wiling to do if you were able to do so with up to 4 mistakes and once you made 5 you would need to spend those same lingots. Now you can or learn on Duolingo for about 2 minutes before they say that is enough learning for you. This really undermines their whole worlds biggest community of language learners spiel.

Further it creates big issues with the already highly questionable structure of Duolingo. I previously felt they were monetising it extremely. So much so that they took away free features and sold them back as paid features. That was predatory but it could maybe be justified in a twisted way. This change is now taking Duolingo and turning it into something like a gacha game. The sort of game where once you pass the initial tutorial you need to pay real world money to make any progress without waiting days or weeks. I am now also very concerned about the claims by Duolingo that you can study 15 minutes a day. That you can learn as much on Duolingo as the equivalent of a semester at university. And other such statements. The reasons I believe these claims are now misleading is that you can't study for 15 minutes a day. therefore you can't get that level of "education" any more.

Ultimately Duolingo is trying to get blood from a stone by bleeding the users who are holding the stone of an joy they might have had and any money they might spend. Considering I am now 2500+ days into Duolingo I feel shame at inadvertently supporting Duolingo both now and in the past.