Linguistics Nerd Critiques Duolingo

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in which your humble host bashes language-learning app, and then has another think about it

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For one brief day this quarantine, I decided to learn Japanese on Duolingo. It was a very brief day, because I soon gave up, and gave over to giving the app increasingly vehement pieces of my mind as I counted its methodological failings.

I’ve not used a language-learning app before, and all my foreign language-learning ventures so far have started either in the classroom, or with a choice textbook that begins by walking you through the alphabet. I spent 14 months of sixth form doing a research project on language pedagogy, to bolster my application to study undergraduate Linguistics, so maybe I know what I’m talking about.

Duolingo lets you learn any of umpteen languages from Welsh to Arabic to Klingon, so for the sake of comparison I also took up courses on Latin and Swedish. I know a little basic Latin, but I started at the beginning anyway. I already speak some Swedish, so I took the placement test to skip me ahead to a suitable difficulty level. (It turns out that my Swedish good enough to beat the highest level on Duolingo.) I can now look at Duolingo’s methodology across three different languages, at different levels.

Duolingo feels like a strange half-way house between gamified learning using translation exercises, and an unmediated info-dump of the lesson’s learning objectives.

The Duolingo programme is constructed around lessons made up of exercises, most of which are multiple choice: you match a word to the correct meaning / pronunciation, or form a translation by picking out the relevant words from among irrelevant ones. You might also get to type something or read something out loud, but those are far less common. My initial impression was that Duolingo is absurdly vague: the lessons are insipid translation exercises that encourage guesswork, and no attempt is made to explain anything about how the language works.

But my complaint was answered when by chance I clicked into the Tips section. Tips explain everything from the language’s writing system to noun cases to verb modality, all the linguistic information that was missing from the exercises themselves, and without which completing the the lesson would simply be dodgy guesswork.

If I was annoyed about Duolingo’s lack of pedagogical rigour before, now I’m just confused: the underpinning linguistic information is framed as tips, as if they are peripheral and unnecessary to making any progress. As if to reflect this, the Tips are impractical to access as they are fully separated from the lessons. Once you start the lesson, you can’t access the Tips, and when you look at the Tips, you’ve left the lesson.

The Tips themselves are sporadic. Some lessons don’t have corresponding Tips, while others have them in abundance. The Tips for introductory Latin, covering four lessons, consist of nine sections, dealing with among other things, in order of appearance, all six personal pronouns, the verb ‘to be’, pronouncing Latin, and what different grammatical genders look like in the nominative. The next Tips are about greetings, dealing with an equally diverse range of things. I would say they should have interspersed the Tips with the exercises, so you can take in and practise one grammar point at a time, apart from Tips are evidently a post-hoc commentary written for lessons that don’t care about grammar points. If the lessons were grammar-centred, the Tips would be more cohesive documents.

It’s possible to do well at Duolingo without using Tips. Exercises often reuse the same example sentences verbatim, changing the format from multiple choice translation to typing to dictation, or switching the direction of translation. You can learn to reproduce a sentence en bloc because it keeps appearing, without understanding how its individual components come together.

Intuition and guesswork come into play in many exercises. The lessons rely heavily on multiple choice, which means you can get the right answer without completely understanding the material. A logical process of elimination helps in most instances. If you are told to pick the word meaning ‘singer’ from three choices, one of which is the preposition meaning ‘on’ and another is a word you’ve never seen before, you know to pick the third one. When you have to translate a sentence by stringing together the right words from a pool, you know you need to start with the capitalised one. Often, once you’ve selected the first couple of words, all you need to do is construct a sensible sentence from the remaining pool.

There are also times when Duolingo’s use of multiple choice is positively absurd. The beginning of the Japanese course aims to acquaint you with the kana writing system (hiragana, to be exact). A recurring consolidation exercise involves you being shown four kana glyphs and asked to pick the one that makes a particular sound, say ‘na’. When you see a glyph and are asked to give its pronunciation, the recall process strengthens your memory of it. But Duolingo allows you to freely tap on any of the four glyphs before you submit your answer, and every time you click on one of them, the app plays how that glyph sounds. Always having its pronunciation accompany a glyph is fine per se - this also strengthens the link between orthography and pronunciation, but it’s counterproductive in this context. It reduces the exercise from ‘Select the correct kana for “na” ’ to ‘Select the button that, when you press it, makes the sound “na” ’!

Although Duolingo’s Tips explain some aspects of grammar and vocabulary, it doesn’t offer substantial help with pronunciation, especially for a language like Swedish where the letters look very similar to English. Duolingo does play native-speaker recordings for their foreign-language material, but it’s still hard to tell how exactly you are meant to move your mouth, simply from hearing fluent speakers do it. The recordings also suffer from homogeneity, as spoken sentences are cobbled together from the recordings for individual words, and each word has only one or two recorded versions. The vowel in Swedish vi (‘we’, said ‘vee’) routinely sounds like e (said like the start of English ‘yet’); I also came across a Japanese recording for ‘ro’ that sounds like ‘do’. I was tempted to conclude that Japanese ‘r’ can be pronounced like ‘d’, until I checked with my mum (who is fluent in Japanese) and she said the recording is simply inaccurate. Such phonemic distortions happen in everyday speech, influenced by accent, emphasis, speed and so on, but native speakers’ idiosyncrasies become no less than erroneous when they are exclusively used to teach beginners.

And none of this taps into the special pronunciation rules of a language. Take Swedish again: Duolingo never properly explains the rule where consonant clusters that involve k or j make a sound like ‘sh’ or ‘h’ when they come before certain vowels. (For the nerds, sk before bright vowels, and skj, stj or sj before all vowels make a fricative sound that resembles a ‘sh’ or ‘h’ depending on dialect - the relevant Wikipedia article is titled ‘Sj-sound’. This is similar to but distinct from the ‘sh’-like sound made by k before bright vowels, and tj or kj before all vowels. Another related phenomenon is how rs is pronounced like ‘sh’.) There are a lot of common words that have this, but not enough that you can deduce the general pattern by simply coming across instances of it.

It was also annoying to see Duolingo treat the Swedish å, ä and ö, which are letters in their own right, as a and o with diacritics. If you misspell a Swedish word using a or o instead of these letters, Duolingo simply tells you to not forget the accents next time, even though writing o instead of ö is just as much a misspelling as writing k for p, and might mean you’ve written a different word.

Not that Duolingo’s gamified approach makes up for the inadequacies of its methodology. Gimmicks are plentiful (trophies, experience points, leaderboards, level-ups, virtual currency, and more), though most of them have no bearing on your learning experience. You also get a user profile, where the languages you’ve learned with Duolingo are displayed as little badges next to your name - the Duolingo forum is full of personages decked out with them, like the decorative medals of a warlord from the Kaiserreich.

The app’s system of feedback punctures your learning to a point where it feels intrusive. Every time you get something right, you have to sit through a celebratory sound effect; then, seemingly at random, consecutive screens will pop up to tell you about your answer streak, that you are being rewarded with harder questions, that you are 300XP short of the next crown, or something. A considerable amount of your time is spent on these sections that have nothing to do with the actual learning, so scant linguistic content is dispensed at a low efficiency. On the other hand, if you’re not doing so well, you risk being shunted out of the lesson altogether: Duolingo has a system of Hearts, where every wrong answer loses you a Heart: when you lose all five you die, and have to wait hours for one to grow back. While it’s an incentive for making fewer mistakes (or to pay the platform developers, since buying Duolingo Plus gets you infinite Hearts), terminating the lesson because you’re doing too badly feels like a strange system for education.

It’s worth pointing out that the browser version of Duolingo is a slightly different experience from the phone app. For translation exercises, you can ditch the multiple choice word pool and choose to type instead. This is pedagogically more effective as you have to input whole sentences yourself, but it also allows users to answer with a variety of alternative responses that the algorithm was not programmed to accept. If you’re marked incorrect, you can’t always tell if the answer you gave was equally valid as the ‘correct’ answer, technically correct but unnatural, or actually wrong. A good thing then, that Hearts are not in currency, so you can’t be ejected from the lesson for answering incorrectly. You also have access to the comments section after each exercise, where users sometimes discuss alternative answers. After the lesson, you can see a summary of the questions and your answers.

Despite all this, Duolingo is still not a great learning resource. For a start, it’s impossible to navigate around the course. Part of Duolingo’s game-like experience is that you have to beat the current lesson to unlock the next one. It’s also impossible to gain an overview of the questions within each lesson, because you can skip neither forwards or back. So you are not allowed to contextualise your current ability by having a look at later material from the course, or to go back to the previous question to have another look at where you went wrong. On the app, you won’t even be able to review that question if you restarted the lesson, because the algorithm will have generated a slightly different set of exercises from that lesson’s materials. It feels like the whole course is ephemeral and shifting: when you close the app, all you have is the information you’ve absorbed and perhaps any notes you made, and the tools that got you there are transitory.

This feeling is mirrored in Duolingo’s extremely simplistic and functionally inadequate glossing system. Duolingo’s inbuilt dictionary (not accessible from the app, only the browser version) gives you a simple English translation for each foreign-language word, its audio, and links you to example sentences from the course in which the word appears, with no other information as to how the word is used in the language. It doesn’t tell you how nouns and verbs inflect, or how the same preposition works differently according to context. It glosses each different form of the same word as a separate entry. I understand the need for beginner dictionaries to be simple, but Duolingo’s level of simplicity is counterproductive. Duolingo’s system does nothing to help you make connections between words in the target language. Instead, it only enforces connections between foreign-language words and their English equivalents. For example, the Swedish går is glossed with English ‘go’, and gick with ‘went’, but går and gick never appear on the same page although they are the same verb. This isolates each foreign-language word you learn, which makes it easier to forget or confuse them. It also leads to an over-reliance on using English equivalents to understand foreign-language words, which becomes a problem whenever something doesn’t have a direct English equivalent.

I also have an issue with Duolingo’s lack of typographical distinction between English and target languages that also use the Latin alphabet. Since we read by hearing written words in our mind and recalling the meanings associated with that sound, it’s important that our brain knows what language a word is in at first glance, so as to read it in the right language. In longer pieces of text there are visual cues like word length or diacritics, but for individual words or shorter phrases as seen on Duolingo, English and non-English content look the same without some form of signposting. Half its translations are target-language-to-English and half English-to-target-language, and there are also exercises where you have to match up identical grey bubbles containing corresponding words in English and the target language. I spend half my time doing a double-take, because I’ve read something and realised I started reading it as the wrong language. Consistently putting foreign-language words in italics or in bold is simple, and I think it’s also good taste. - Just a stylistic objection.

It feels like Duolingo is so concerned with having the aesthetics and experience of a game that it doesn’t care how rigorous or reliable its teaching is. The Tips offer some clarity, but the rest of the course doesn’t support it: Tips may tell you about how grammatical gender affects inflection, or how it’s best to learn prepositions from ‘practice and experience’, but Duolingo’s dictionary entries don’t show the gender or inflected forms of any noun, and the exercises from a lesson don’t tell you why one particular preposition is used in favour of another.

Duolingo competence probably won’t translate very well into real-world competence, because Duolingo relies on a very specific methodology and atmosphere, which consist largely of drag-and-drop translation exercises from the comfort of your personal screen. Your success with the repetitive lesson materials feels like you’re making significant progress with the language, but really you’ve just learned a couple more isolated, inexplicable foreign-language expressions. By the end of the Swedish course, for one, you might know Swedish has two grammatical genders, and be able to spout structured one-liners about animals or first aid or the electoral system, but your Swedish skills are still far from functional.

But if Duolingo gives you an impression of success that doesn’t have much substance, isn’t this really a win-win situation? You want the feeling of success, preferably easy to obtain, and Duolingo wants the revenue from your continued engagement. It might have a mission for free education, but just because we see education as a relatively bona fide kind of social exchange doesn’t mean there are no commercial considerations. After all what isn’t a commodity under capitalism? Unlike fee-paying schools and higher education, which are pricey educational commodities that aim to have substantial use value (e.g. increasing one’s employability), the use value of Duolingo is limited. Rather, Duolingo is an educational commodity with more sign value. Sign value, as proposed by Jean Baudrillard, is the measurement not of functionality, but of prestige, of how one is perceived by oneself and by other people. Wouldn’t you want to be The Kind Of Person Who Learns A Language In Their Spare Time? - If Duolingo is here to sell the aesthetic, no wonder it doesn’t care about pedagogical effectiveness.

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But why should I be so critical of Duolingo?

Because it claims to work, but I can see all the ways in which it doesn’t, and only the ways in which it doesn’t.

Yet lots of people do use it daily, and enjoy it a lot. The Duolingo owl telling you to do daily Spanish practice didn’t become a meme for nothing. Duolingo’s methods are reasonable if its aim is to make language-learning gain more widespread appeal. The simplification of material makes learning easier. The apparently optional Tips let you opt out of learning the grammatical technicalities. The scattergun variety of topics adds interest, as well as bringing in more vocabulary so you feel a greater sense of achievement. (Duolingo seems quite insistent on teaching you that psittacus ebrius is the Latin for ‘drunk parrot’.) The gamified features create a hook for you to go back, and the one thing that everyone agrees is good for language-learning is daily practice. They also make your mistakes seem much less consequential, so you’re less likely to feel put off by getting things wrong. The multiple-choice format suits a digital platform, which makes it easier for you to learn at your own pace. Really, even when you spend most of your time eliminating wrong answers in multiple choice, you still get to see the right answer and have the opportunity to learn it. Anyway, it’s not like Duolingo exists in a vacuum: better grammar charts and online dictionaries are a Google search away, and you can always keep a notebook to record and practice what you’ve learnt. Even if Duolingo is unrigorous and insipid, learning something is still better than learning nothing.

If my research project on language pedagogy has taught me anything, it’s that the method of teaching is determined by the target audience and learning goals. Duolingo’s audience is the masses. Maybe the linguaphiles and the polyglots, but more importantly people who find it cool to know some random words and phrases in a different language, want to learn a language on their phone to keep off Instagram, or have had language-learning experiences so unenjoyable that it counts as a plus so long as they don’t go away hating this. Accordingly, Duolingo’s goal isn’t to help you reach a certain level of proficiency, but it aims for you to feel that you’ve learnt something and are making progress. That’s why the platform offers Esperanto and High Valyrian. It’s also why when you sign up for a course you can’t see the kind of content you will be covering by the time you’re through: the fact of your progress matters, not your objective proficiency.

No wonder Duolingo’s methods irk me so. I’m not its target audience, and in learning languages I have a completely different aim. For me, objective proficiency is what matters. In linguistics, the more knowledge you have about a language, the more analysis you can do on its structures. Having done an A Level in classical Greek and been a fan of constructed artlangs, I enjoy the complex technicalities of language that Duolingo wants to sideline. I’ve become accustomed to exactitude when talking about language, so I resent how Duolingo doesn’t always explain what’s going on. When I learned English and Swedish, the real progress I made came from immersion, as I lived in the respective countries. The insights I gained into how the languages are used in situ are so important to me, that learning a language without that broader context feels like an inauthentic experience. So, when I think about learning a language, I’m always bringing with me the implicit goal of attaining as comprehensively native-like an experience of the language as I possibly can.

Translating sentences about spirituality on Duolingo is never going to give me that, because it wasn’t designed to. I criticised Duolingo because it didn’t meet my aims for effective pedagogy, when the platform wasn’t designed to meet my aims in the first place. But if you just want to try out a language - say hi in Turkish or Swahili, be able to say in Swedish ‘I would buy all the roses in the world and give them to you’ - Duolingo might be for you.