DUOL shares have fallen more than 78% from their May 2025 high, and that’s before its nearly 25% fall in premarket trading today.
I've said before that one of the very few good things generative "AI" may do to the world is accelerating the enshittification cycle so much that it kills stuff that was already terrible and a drain on society (social media; platformization; curation algorithms…). Speaking as a linguist who speaks 4 languages and has read the literature on second language acquisition, it has always been my position that the Duolingo method is useless—it feels like you are learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours with it and gold a full tree and you'll still get nowhere, and if you put a fraction of the time in about any other method, including doing pen-and-paper drills with old-fashioned paper-based textbooks, you'd have progressed much faster.
And old-fashioned grammar drills suck, too. It's just that Duolingo really, really sucks.
(Methods that work better: 1) Find an intensive "conversation"-type course, or anything that is labelled as "natural" or "immersion" or "storytelling" methods; or get tandem partners; or online coaches such as in italki; failing that, join a conventional language course, the more "intensive" the better; work on these until you absorb basic grammar and vocabulary, focusing on spoken language not writing; 2) Once this bootstrap period is over, start talking to people, watching media, or reading stuf that interests you, in large quantities and every day; do not wait until you're "good" to move into the input stage, start actually using the language for things you wanted it for, as soon as possible, which is sooner than you think; partial comprehension is fine.)
Of course I hope Duolingo dies horribly in a fire after it backstabbed its workers with the "AI memo", but even if it didn't, the world is better off without it.
One lesson we can get from this: Consider that overnight 25% drop in investment, which may well prove to be the coup the grâce. It was not caused by Duo losing users or enshittifying with "AI", but by the opposite: investors mass panicked at the company setting its target revenue too low, as in a mere… 1.22 billion, rather than the 1.26 billion the investors wanted. Now the reason Duolingo is not chasing that higher goal is that they're seeing the writing on the wall, and went into damage control mode: they're pulling down a bit on squeezing their current paying users and trying to improve the experience of the free tier, in an attempt to reverse the bleed and bring in more customers.
In other words, Duolingo tried to slow down the slightest tiny bit on enshittification—3% less cash—and this already got swift punishment from the market gods. With capitalism, there is no long-term thinking: you're expected to provide the richest people on Earth with infinite growth of their ever-increasing profits squeezed from customers paying every month more and more, now and forever, or you'll be taken out and replaced by someone willing to try.
Edit : I got lots of questions like "if not Duolingo then what do you suggest?" The full answer is "literally anything else", but I've cleaned up a couple of my longer answers and wrote these blog posts: 1) on comprehensive reading, 2) on tandem exchange.
I feel like people criticizing Duolingo for being inferior to talking with native language speakers or a traditional language class are kind of missing the point. It's like saying 10 minutes of slow walking is inferior exercise to an hour of HIIT every day. Yeah true but people actually use Duolingo. The whole point is that it is fun and doesn't feel like a chore. It's probably why so many people around the world have learned English by watching American and British TV shows. Is that an optimal learning method? No, but the best exercises are the ones you actually do.
Right, except OP and the research suggests it's not effective, even though it feels like you're doing it. So yes, 10 minutes of walking a day is interior to an hour of HIIT, obviously. And yes 10 minutes of walking a day is better than not walking in a day, for your health. But no matter how many days in a row you slowly walk 10 minutes, you'll never be able to run a marathon. It just doesn't do that.
So if everyone's goal with Duolingo was to vaguely know some words in a language they can't communicate in, and it was just a brain exercise like a crossword, then sure. No harm done.
But that's not most people's goal, and what the research shows is that for all the time people spend doing it, they could have spent that time doing something else and actually made progress towards their goals.
Right. The point I'm making though is that for the majority of Duolingo users, if you take away Duolingo you don't get something better. You get nothing.
Only on lemmy would people be cheating the demise of a language learning app, no matter how gameified.
Right, but is it a language learning app? Or is it a "play games with aggressive owl" app with a language learning theme? Because if after 365 straight days of playing games with owl you cannot use the language you've been "learning" to communicate, then you aren't learning a language. And if you're not learning the language, then what are you doing with the owl?
You absolutely will learn with Duolingo, the "games" are literally saying, reading, and writing things in a foreign language. There's nothing else to it.
my lemmy client is a humanities app because on it i learn how dedicated people are to completely missing the entire point
Thanks, I just woke my partner because I burst out laughing. Comment of the week for me.
I also feel like a lot of the critisism of Duo really, I dunno, miss the purpose? Of Duo entirely. Or just language learning.
Especially as someone who isn't young.
Duo is not going to make anyone fluent. No single program or method will. It also isn't, for most people, something that will make you educated in a language in a day or a week or a year, or probably ten. Nothing short of total immersial will do that.
It also feelslike, based on how critics talk, like they go into Duo trying to learn with a method of like, "Manzana is Apple, Hola is Hello" etc. Instead of doing with a mindset of "Manzana is a round red fruit" and "Hola is a friendly greeting."
Basically complaints feel like they come from someone who just, expected way more out of it than its trying to do.
Also, lesrning to speak a lamguage with any app really is not going to work, once again, it needs immersion. But that that does not make the app bad.
That said, I have used Duo for mamy years now, across several languages, Spanish, Norwegian, Japanese, and I tried the math, chess and music. Its honestly, not as good as it used to be, but I blame the stupid hearts/energy for that. For a while Inwas using the "fake classroom" trick to get unlimited play, but they stopped that with the update in mid 2025. This biggest problem with these energy systems is that they punish mistakes. For learning lamguage, mistakes are going to happen, a lot, and punishing mistakes is very bad for progress. At some point, just as you might be stumbling but "getting it", suddenky, you can't try anymore, because you run out of energy.
I also hate how it punishes using, gramatically weird but correct phrasing (in English), that more closely matches the structure of the target language. Because its helpful for learning the struxture of the target lamguage to do the answer in a similar gramatic structure in your known language.
Also, they are really bad about using sysnonyms for some words when more nuanced translations would be better. The one really easy one is translating "Me Llamo Ramen" to "My name is Ramen". When its actually "I am called Ramen". Or probably better, "They call me Ramen". " Me nombre es Ramen" would be "My name is Ramen". It seems "nitpicky" but later llamo is used in relation to call/calling, and being consistent would be better for learning. Also, based on my anectodotal moments, a lot of non English use the "I am called...." structure of speaking.
Don't get me started on their translation of gustar as "to like", which is just totally backwards.
(In Spanish, you don't say "I like it"; you say "It pleases me." Instead of "I love it", you say "it enchants me".)
One of my friends has 2500 day streak in German. He doesn't live in Germany and I am pretty sure he has no one to talk to in German either. He barely speaks it. I couldn't strike a conversation with him.
I'd apply similar situation to me. I haven't been talking much in my motherland language for over 10 years. (my mother tongue is another language) Even if I understand everything perfectly, I am insanely rusty on speaking it and use wrong word forms all the time. Practice is much more important than just plain learning words and rules imo.
Oh yeah. Its been a while since I had the whole like/love etc words but if I recall they pushed gustar (probably) aslike, but later uzed it in way that suggested like, "I love it more than anything."
Like maybe don't imply it means simply "like".
That's just patently untrue. School systems in most non-English speaking countries spit out fluent English speakers after a time investment of fewer than 4hrs/week, for a maximum of 8-9 years.
Children learn things way waybeasier than adults.
Definitely, but not categorically different.
Also I just re-read my comment and realized it could sound like I'm trying to defend Duolingo. I'm not. It's shit. My issue was with the "only total immersion" aspect. While no doubt immersion can help boost your learning and motivation, it also seems to have turned into a buzzword used by (a subset of) (mainly the English-native) language learning community, to the point where I'm now weary of people using the word because far too often it's not used as "you should actually use the new language!" and instead as "textbooks and grammar studying are useless, just watch anime 8hr/day until you are fluent".
Sorry if I projected that frustration on your original comment. The above is just the abstract of a rant I've been itching to write for a while 😄