If language learning were a meal, Steve sees Duolingo as a side dish and LingQ as the main course. Duolingo helps you drill vocabulary, but LingQ immerses you in the language. #Languagelearning #Duolingoreview
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To follow that analogy, Duolingo can also be an appetizer to get you started on a language, as well as a side dish. It’s quite ineffective on its own though, which is why I also use LingQ, Busuu, and Lawless French and Spanish – as well as lots of YouTube videos and other sites.
Naturally, how effective Duolingo is depends on the popularity of the language that you pick: the courses for languages like German/French/Spanish are more varied and of higher quality than those of the likes of Finnish/Swedish.
However, I would argue that Duolingo is a net negative for the motivated, casual language learner. The method of Duolingo is a rigid and linear sequence of themes and repetition. In my experience with Swedish/German the exercises repeat a very limited vocabulary of only a few hundred words and you are not explicitly taught any grammar and expected to pick it up through recognition. As touched on in the article, Duolingo gamifies the language that you are learning as part of their business model. User retention and the incentive to make in-app purchases is driven by streaks/XP/‘leagues’/constant reminders to learn and the like; often you have to grind through exercises on concepts that you already understand in order to get to the content that you want which is further down in the course.
I spent quite a bit of time with the Swedish course. While I was able to train some of the absolute basics, I am certain that I would have learnt more in the half that time using LingQ or using a textbook/exercise book. In my opinion Duolingo should be used like a catalogue when picking a language to learn at the very beginning or something to have on your phone if you have literally nothing better to do.
While you can certainly learn something with this app, I say that it is a net negative because it sort of ensnares casual learners and keeps them from pursuing more effective and independent means of language learning reading/podcasts/LingQ/textbooks. I’m not convinced that a person using Duolingo as their sole learning resource could make serious progress.
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