Why I uninstalled Duolingo after a 1500 Day streak

I am not much of a new year change person but this 2022 start happens to coincide with a 1500 day language learning milestone. So, I thought this is a good opportunity to stop using and uninstalling Duo Lingo.

As you can tell, Duo Lingo has been one of my most heavily used apps. I finished all lessons of Portuguese and then moved on to learning Spanish. I started using the app years ago when I was traveling to Brazil and wanted to get a sense of the language to survive in Brazil but kept using it for much longer that I imagined.

What Duolingo does really well

- it has one of the best gamification in the industry. The streak based motivation works really well for people who like consistency.

- it’s diversity if languages is phenomenal. You can learn a range of languages including some endangered ones.

- it has a great community approach to learning and encouraging each other to improve.

What DuoLingo does not do well

• I believe the hard truth is that DuoLingo alone will NOT make you good at speaking the language. No matter how many lessons you do, no matter how much streak you have, the app alone is not an end to end solution to learning a language.
• DuoLingo focuses too much on grammar and being able to write the words in a new language but for people who are looking to speak, the writing does not really help and ends up being a waste of time

Some advice for the Duo Lingo team:

• Ask users what’s their intention of learning the language. If it is to speak, be transparent that Duo lingo will never be enough and partner with services that can help people speak
• Consider creative solutions to helping people learn. Example, if a user is looking to survive a travel to a new country, build an AI assistant that will listen to the question being asked and will give them suggestions on what to respond.
• Look beyond languages. DuoLingos mission is to make education free for everyone, and the product can work well with many types of learning not just languages. Consider if byte sized lesson format can work well for other types of education.

Conclusion

Overall, DuoLingo is a good started app to get your hands dirty and learn basic concepts about a language. You can try out multiple of them and find the one that resonates best with you. But once you have covered the basics, move on to other language learning products and techniques.