The Promise of Duolingo

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The Promise of Duolingo

ReportingEssay

Imogen West-Knights

The language-learning app won’t make you fluent, but maybe that’s not the point.

NOVEMBER 21, 2024

https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/issue-22/duolingo-language-learning-fluency

There was a time in my life where I was spending hours every day on Duolingo. I was about to move to Sweden, a country I’d never even visited, and those hours on the app learning Swedish were a means of convincing myself that I had some degree of control over what would happen when I began my new life abroad. If I could understand what was going on at the post office, that was at least one thing I wouldn’t have to worry about.

Swedish was the fourth language I learned on Duolingo. First was French, because I felt guilty about letting what I had learned at school lapse, then a bit of German out of curiosity, then Irish, for love. I had a boyfriend who spoke the language, and we thought it would be fun if we could talk about strangers in public in Irish, which is a particularly great secret code because it’s almost impossible for speakers of anything other than Celtic languages to guess what the words mean. I have always been interested in where words come from and how languages work. But there was something about Duolingo that made it compulsive: the friendly, bright green owl, the promise of learning a language almost by osmosis, without really working at it. You complete short lessons on a colorful, user-friendly platform on your phone and progress gradually up through levels, encountering more complex grammar and vocabulary, and gaining experience points and gems as you go. If you make too many mistakes in a lesson, you lose all your “lives” and have to stop playing, unless you use your gems to buy more.

I could read an article in a magazine, but then would lose my nerve trying to order a coffee. All those hours on Duolingo had given me a huge vocabulary but left me more or less mute.

When I arrived in Sweden, all fired up to put my new language skills to use, I had a rude awakening. I could not speak Swedish. I could sit at dinner and listen to people speaking in Swedish, and then contribute in English to the conversation, but if I had been called upon to do so in Swedish, I would have been lost. I could read an article in a magazine, but then would lose my nerve trying to order a coffee. All those hours on Duolingo had given me a huge vocabulary but left me more or less mute.

Perhaps needless to say, I didn’t reach fluency in German, French or Irish either. I have, slowly, read books in French, but I lose conversational threads quickly. I can tell you that I don’t like someone’s trousers in Irish anytime you like, but that’s about it. German, I still know basically nichts. So I gave up on Duolingo about five years ago, thoroughly disillusioned.

In the meantime, Duolingo has continued to be the most downloaded language learning app in the world. The app’s green owl has become a popculture figure in his own right, loved and hated for his insistent good cheer that turns into something more like menace if you fail to return to the app for your lessons each day. Duolingo is free but has a paid subscription option that removes ads and gives you infinite “lives” to use on your lessons. More than 1 billion exercises are completed on the app daily. I’ve been ambiently aware that, while my obsession lapsed, other people have remained firmly in the owl’s clutches, perhaps more so even than I was. Their inability to break away from Duolingo has a lot to do with what the app calls streaks, a ticker that increases by one every day that you complete a lesson, and resets to zero if you miss a day. Millions of people have streaks over a year long. One user, a historian named Agnes, told me she forced herself to complete her daily lesson while in labor with her son, so she could maintain her now-1,738-day streak. Jack Remmington, a British TV presenter whose Spanish streak is coming up on 1,000, said he would be “devastated” if he lost it. “It’s become a bit of an identity thing,” he told me, adding that he has found himself in the corner of nightclubs at 11:58 p.m. yelling into his phone to keep his streak going.

The question that remains in my mind, and in the minds of many of even its most dedicated users, is: what is Duolingo actually teaching you? “The speaking element is trash,” a user called Elizabeth, who has a near-400-day streak learning French, put it to me bluntly. Practically everyone I spoke to told me that speaking was far and away their weakest suit. If Duolingo is not really teaching you to communicate in a language, what is it doing? According to Matt Kessler, an applied linguist at the University of South Florida who has researched Duolingo’s efficacy, the app is giving you a beginner’s guide, and not much more. “It’s really good for learning receptive skills: listening, reading, learning about grammar and vocabulary, so it can be a great place to start. But oftentimes people struggle with production: speaking and writing. Studies have shown that again and again,” he said.

There was something about Duolingo that made it compulsive: the friendly, bright green owl, the promise of learning a language almost by osmosis, without really working at it.

Duolingo knows that spoken fluency is a promise it can’t make. A recent blog post on the company’s website included in its list of FAQs the question “Can Duolingo make me fluent?” to which the answer was a dressed up, encouraging version of “no.” “Research shows that Duolingo is an effective way to learn a language! But the truth is that no single course, app, method, or book can help you reach all your language goals,” it says.

Duolingo hopes, however, that this is about to change. In September, I attended Duocon, the app’s annual conference, streamed live from Pittsburgh for any user to attend. The company was going to be unveiling a new feature, something it promises will transform the speaking element of the Duolingo experience. I watched as a product manager at Duolingo called Zan strode out across the conference stage and told his story. He had been studying Spanish, and met a Spanish speaker at a party. When the person tried to speak to him in Spanish, he froze. “In hindsight, I knew all the words, I just couldn’t get them out.” This sounded familiar to me. Simply repeating phrases that appear on a screen does not lead to being able to speak a language. Duolingo’s solution to this problem is, no surprises really, AI.

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For users of Duolingo Max, Duolingo’s priciest subscription plan, there is now something called “Video call with Lily.” If you use Duolingo, you’ve met Lily already. She’s the Daria-esque, laconic girl with the purple hair who gets you to use moody phrases like “I don’t like her new husband at all” or “The chicken soup is disgusting.” Now, whenever you like, you can simulate a video call with her, where she will talk to you, and you respond in real time. Zan demonstrated this feature on stage. Lily sulkily asked him about his travel plans, and when he said he was going to a wedding in Mexico City, she responded that weddings aren’t her thing. The choice of Lily, with her scratchy demeanor, was intentional, said Zan. Native speakers are “kind of intimidating,” and talking to Lily, rather than someone nicer, is supposed to build “conversational resilience.” The more you talk to Lily, the more she learns what you’re interested in talking about, like a real person would.

I went to try it for myself, logging into Duolingo for the first time in ages. I did a placement test for French — video calling is only available in French and Spanish, for now — which put me in Section 5, equivalent to intermediate. Then I rang Lily. I felt oddly nervous. She asked me what food I might eat later, and the old panic I felt in Sweden reared its head. I wanted to try out the conditional tense, but by the time I’d thought about what I’d need to say in order to do so, the robot had begun asking me another question. I felt embarrassed in front of the robot.

I continued to call Lily, like a needy friend, with mixed results that only partly had to do with my stumbling French. The video call function is not impressive. Lily told me a story, asking if I was following, which I was. Then she asked if I had a funny story to tell, but before I had time to speak, she said goodbye and hung up. Another time, she asked if I’d seen any complicated films recently, so I found myself garbling to a robot about Charlie Kaufman’s “Adaptation,” at which point the robot asked me whether I liked film adaptations of books. I felt faintly ridiculous. Maybe this is just step one in a process that will get rapidly more sophisticated. As it was, I couldn’t imagine that this robot would ever get me fluent.

Millions of people have streaks over a year long. One user, a historian named Agnes, told me she forced herself to complete her daily lesson while in labor with her son, so she could maintain her now-1,738-day streak.

A second new feature was also launched at Duocon: Duolingo Adventures. Here, Duolingo is leaning harder into its gamified elements. Adventures are little games within the app, where you move a character around a 2D scene (think doctor’s office, supermarket) and have conversations with other characters in the language you’re learning. Duolingo is well aware that this new feature strengthens one of the main accusations leveled against it: that it’s not a learning app so much as a game, designed to keep you playing rather than improve your language skills. “Why not both?” Kate Barker, one of its content developers, said breezily. But I didn’t feel breezy about it. Was I ever good at Swedish, or was I just good at completing levels on Duolingo?

I guess it depends on what you think learning a language means or should mean. When we say that we are “learning a language,” the assumption is that the goal is to reach conversational fluency. To speak to other speakers. When I was doing Duolingo Irish, I did not learn Irish, but I did learn a fair bit about Irish: how to pronounce Irish words, the way syntax works in the language, and so on. I do read French reasonably well. Even when I was barely able to speak a sentence in Swedish, it was still better to be able to understand what was being said around me than not to understand at all. But was I learning a language or was I learning translation? What is the difference?

You can tie yourself in knots with these questions. But getting back to Duolingo every day for this piece, in both Swedish and French, I noticed something happening. I picked up a book in French for the first time in a year. The last time I did this I was in Paris, where I optimistically bought an Agatha Christie novel in French, and sat trying to read it outside a cafe with a croissant and a coffee. I remember that morning well. There’s a kind of excitement I associate with sincere engagement in a subject, and I was feeling it then, a lightness in the stomach. That feeling returned once I got back to Duolingo, checking in each day so my small but growing streak wouldn’t die. I texted a few friends who speak Swedish, to ask them to message me in the language. I watched a Swedish film, with Swedish subtitles.

Duolingo’s streak function is designed to prolong that feeling of engagement. I am prone to fervent attention to certain activities or topics, and then to being distracted by some other thing. Even the smallest sense of obligation to practice my languages every day is a way to break that attention-distraction cycle, to promote longevity over intensity in my interest.

I think there’s something hopeful, maybe even touching, about all of us thinking that five minutes of language-learning a day is going to have us chatting away to natives. But that’s not the only thing you can get out of Duolingo. If you use the rowing machine in the gym twice a week for several years, does it matter that you never get very good at rowing on water? And whether or not Duolingo is a waste of your time, as many users I spoke to worried it might be, depends on what you go on to do with the limited knowledge it gives you. One person told me that learning Yiddish through the app gave her a feeling of connection to her long-dead grandparents. Someone else told me that her rekindled interest in her Italian heritage, but dissatisfaction with Duolingo’s limits, means she plans to pay for Italian lessons next year. Jack Remmington visits Spanish-speaking countries more often now and enjoys a closer relationship with his Guatemalan barber. Maybe the best thing Duolingo can do, ultimately, is get you away from the owl, and out into the wider world.