The REAL problem with duolingo

Dualingo is fun, don't get me wrong, but it's not optimized for how humans actually learn languages. In this video, we're breaking down the linguistic mismatch at the heart of the app, the better way to learn. And if you insist on using Duo, the tweaks that actually make it useful. Spoilers, you're probably not going to like those. And full disclosure, I used and still sometimes do use Dolingo. When my daughter was first born, I was putting in like 2 hours a day in Duolingo French while holding her for contact naps. and it was a great way to spend time that wasn't just mindlessly scrolling social media. I even learned a few things and some of them I even retained. But it's just not the best way to actually learn a language as I'm sure you've heard before, especially on its own. Now, lots of people say that and you didn't need me to tell you that. But what I'll do that the others don't is explain why it's not ideal and then we can answer two separate but related questions. What actually is ideal? And how can we make Dolingo more like that? if we really just like learning with ibu. And no, the problem is not their AI first mindset. That's a whole separate video. Honestly, if you're new to the channel, I'm Dr. Taylor Jones. I've got a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. And on the channel, I discuss everything related to language, linguistics, language learning, and culture. If you're into those topics, be sure to subscribe and ring the bell for notifications. This is Language Jones. So, the problem with Duolingo is not their AI first stance. Nor is it the fact that every course is different. That's actually a plus. Nor is it the weird sentences like, "My zebra ate a balloon or the ducks are conspiring against us. " Those are also actually a boost for memory and retention. Instead, it's a complex of factors that all interrelate based on how they teach. First is information overload. You're simultaneously trying to learn phenology, that's the sounds of the language, morphology and syntax, and vocabulary. And it's all in a way that's not optimized for memorization and retention. As you're learning a language, you should be starting with the sounds of a language. Dualingo is okay with this, but not great. Not just because they don't explain it, but that's a huge part of it. And this is where the AI first approach is a problem. Some of their AI voices are just not good enough for you to learn the correct sounds. I'm looking at you, check. And when it's not AI voices, it can be hard to hear what is a general funological alternation and what is casual speech and what is something else. Sounds go together to make morphes, the meaningful building blocks of words. Think about how meaningful is composed of mean and ing and full and they combine together to mean something more. And then you have to learn the words themselves and the syntax. That's the conjugation paradigms, word order, all that stuff. Sometimes Duolingo is really good as when they consistently use the Germanic equivalents of what they're teaching in French. So you can actually map phrases like go out to their French their romance counterparts. And sometimes their idiomatic translations don't particularly help at all. So you're trying to translate fine, not ideal, but fine. And you're also trying to grock new information across like four different linguistic domains. And on top of that, the structure is not optimized for memorization. Now, back when it was the tree, it was a little loosey goosey and choose your own adventure. The path, I think, is a net positive, but they have been tinkering and tinkering with the organization of the path. And its current iteration, last I saw, does not provide effective spaced repetition of what you're learning. Meaning, you do all that work, but you're not going to lock in what you learned because you didn't really fully understand it, and you don't see it enough afterwards. I have my theories as to why this is, but I have to add a little more before we get to that theory. If you want to learn more about memorization for languages and best practices I recommend, be sure to check out this video. I'll link it at the end. But here's the thing. The path keeps you locked in without really seeing where you're going. If you buy a textbook, you can flip through it, skim it, see what all the contents are, develop a plan, target weak areas, and so on. For Dualingo, the path is just not transparently linked to a clear progression with standards of learning, either in terms of content or in terms of training and testing. What Dolingo does is give you a dopamine hit from new words and from gamification. All that XP, the feeling of progress through a circular progress bar in a lesson or movement along a path with a skill, but you're not getting a picture of how many words and grammatical structures you've studied, how many you've ostensibly learned to the point that you should be able to use them or anything along those lines really. There's not even really a meaningful way of doing targeted reviews, although you can do some partial lessons over again, but it's discouraged in the UX. Why is this? Well, Dualingo's mission is not to teach you a language. I've mentioned this elsewhere. Teaching you a language is a secondary goal. It's certainly one that's beneficial to them overall, except for maybe not. Dualingo runs on subscription payments or ads, and they've gified learning ostensibly to make it effective, but more realistically, to keep you on the app. They're financially incentivized to keep you using their app as long as possible. They're not

incentivized to teach you a language quickly and effectively because then you won't keep using the app. It's the whole problem with language learning in general. And if you say, "If they're effective, I'll learn another language with them. " That may feel true, but there's a very practical, very low ceiling on the number of languages anybody would learn with them. What they're really designed to do is keep your attention with a language focused app. Now, this doesn't mean that you can't learn a language from them. I honestly found that with some tweaks, their Hebrew course is one of the best things out there for learning Hebrew, but it means that you need to be aware that they are incentivized to make you feel like you're making progress, not to actually, you know, make progress. And while I'm getting a little ahead of myself here, when I started using space repetition software with an optimized strategy for encoding for memory, I started really getting a lot more out of Dualingo as a source of example sentences and not the whole thing. If you're studying Hebrew, you can check out a huge document that I made while taking notes as I worked my way through their course. It's over on my Patreon. And that's the thing from the courses where I've actually seen all the content. The content is good, but their job isn't to impart that content to you quickly or effectively. It's to have good content as a lure and for you to feel like you're accomplishing something while continuing to use the app indefinitely. So, what's the answer? Well, I'll tell you what it isn't. It isn't swapping it out for other AI based apps. That's just more of the same. And the conversation-based AI apps tend to be the same, but with less structured of a learning path. And don't get me started on just having ChatGpt or Gemini or whatever teach you. It's not always clear whether what you're learning is actually used in real life is correct or in some cases even real words. I once asked chat GBT for a list of nifal conjugation verbs in Hebrew with four root letters. To my knowledge, there aren't any. But I thought, why not try the AI and see what it says? It confidently returned a long list of words that were all hepail conjugation verbs in the first person plural. This is not a good way to learn a language. Confidently wrong is not ideal. If you're ready to ditch Dualingo entirely, what works is targeted study. Determine your why and then select materials to help you get to that goal. That can be a textbook. I've been using the routage colloquial series for various languages recently, a course, a teacher, a school, even a streaming platform like LingoPi depending on your level. I even use children's books and yes, phrase books with my textbook to Anki pipeline to memorize the contents. And that's the crucial part. You don't have to do it like I do. But what you need and what Duolingo is lacking is the elements that really help you remember, retain, and reproduce the language you're learning and improvise. That's effective encoding. Apps that have real audio and pictures and interactive portions where you actually have to decide what to respond are going to be better than apps that only have textbased translation of random sentences, especially if those sentences are algorithmically generated. You'll need a memorization practice that takes into account the benefits of structured spaced repetition. In my case, this effectively entailed using Duolingo as a source of content to memorize, but then having outside study time to actually do that memorizing before skipping ahead in the app to the next chunk of things to memorize. It's also ideal to have, you know, progress tracking. When I look at my ANI statistics, and that's just the app that I use, I know how many words I'm learning from a given source, how many I've already studied, and what subset of those are mature and I should expect to actually know and be able to use, and what subset are not fully ready for prime time yet. And this hasn't even gotten to the part where you test your boundaries and figure out what things you want or need to say, but you can't yet say. For instance, in the middle of writing the script, I needed to write somebody and I wanted to say, "We were invited. " But I realized I could only say, "X invited us. " The ideal thing to do once I learned the passive form there is to add it to my space repetition and learn it. But let's say you're not ready to kick the little green owl to the curb. Is there a place for dualingo? Yeah, the toilet. No, really. It's actually a great way to do something that passes the time. It's also good at bus stops, subway rides, the train, and that's the real problem. We want to learn a language with no effort in spare moments in our commute or in an elevator or on the toilet. I can't speak for anybody else, but I can't really think of any active skills I've actually learned in those situations. Yes, you can learn a little about something or think about a topic you like and that reflecting on it will help as a little teeny tiny supplement to your actual skill building, but it cannot replace actual skill building. If you want to learn judo, you have to spend time on the mats. You can't just watch YouTube videos about it and think you're going to understand or be able to apply kuzushi off balancing. Same with language learning. So, let's say you just really want to make Dolingo work for you. I get it. The real way to make Duolingo work is something like my document for Hebrew combined with that textbook to Anki pipeline. I'll probably

make a few for other languages once I get around to version two of this one and finish up the Ankex I'm currently building for Hebrew and Italian. If I were to do Dolingo for another language, and I might, here's what I would do. First, speedrun the course. But don't just do that to get through everything. The XP doesn't matter. Instead, extract all the vocabulary. Fill in missing gaps in what they're teaching. For instance, in some languages, they don't teach a full conjugation paradigm for all the verbs they introduce. As you're going, relate the vocab to useful chunks, collocations, and sort of phrasy bits, not full sentences. Maybe extract a few full sentences that are indicative of sentence structures you want to learn. Then, an dump using the method I've outlined elsewhere. You can watch my other videos for the details on why I do things this way, but the short version is to take your spreadsheet or however you're tracking it. Import to an add audio. I use Hypert, which can do either AI generated text to speech from a variety of sources or even draw from real recordings of actual people from Forvo. Add images that relate to the things that you're memorizing and add pneummonic images where needed. For me, I just use the English and the image for the target word as a trigger to generate the language chunk in my target language, trying to do so as fast and as fluently as possible. Build in a practice of doing this every day and then go back and use Duallingingo in your spare time as a sort of randomized review of content in context. When I started doing that, I actually found that using Dualingo, and by that I mean actual time spent on the app was boosting my language retention and comprehension, and I was actually getting a lot out of it. But what are we actually doing here? This one makes you actively engage with the material in a much more serious manner analyzing and refining your understanding. Two builds in much more effective space repetition using the platform of your choice and three makes your use of the actual app actually effective review. It's also a ton of hard work which is exactly what somebody using Dualingo is trying to avoid. So why do that at all? Well, first of all, and probably the main reason for anybody using Dualingo, it's free. But beyond that, there's nominally a structure where they've implicitly suggested that when you use Dualingo, their end of the bargain is that they will in theory teach you a language. As far as I can tell, even their short courses are decent sources of content. And using this method, you can get a pretty solid foundation before moving on to either more self-directed study with free resources on the internet or once you know you really want to continue with the language and you've invested some time and energy and seen a return, you can buy a textbook or sign up for a course or whatever. So, what do you think? Have you ever used or misused Duo like this? Do you have a 600 day streak but an inability to speak your target language? If you like what I'm doing with the channel, you can always support it on YouTube with superhanks or over on Patreon at patreon. com/languagejones. Please leave me a comment. They are great for the algorithm. And subscribe if you haven't already. Until next time, happy learning. —