I quit Duolingo yesterday. It was a long time coming. I joined in 2014 to remember my high school French before going to France for the first time. It helped.
Eventually I decided to learn Spanish. So, can I speak Spanish?
Absolutely not.
What Duolingo did well
For an absolute beginner it was good for getting a lot of vocabulary in.
The major thing that it did for me was give me a daily streak to protect. That meant that I had to do at least one lesson every day. That consistency was really valuable. It made me think about learning Spanish for at least a few minutes every day.
What Duolingo didn’t do well
Grammar and verbs
I’m a language nerd. I like knowing the hows and whys of how language works. Nothing was explained in the app. It drove me crazy. I feel like there are basics that I probably misunderstood at the beginner level that I will need to relearn correctly when I realize that I’m wrong.
Duolingo hasn’t been helping me advance for a long time. But, I was hesitant to let it go. I think that there was some sunk cost fallacy thinking there. I decided that I’d let go at 1000 days. That was a nice round number.
RIP Spanish streak May 12, 2023 – February 4, 2026
I’m relieved to not have to do it anymore because it was annoying but it was sort of hard to make myself delete the app.
So what am I doing now?
I still want to be learning so I’m doing a few things daily.
- I’m reading a few articles a day in Spanish on the BBC Mundo app. I can tell even after a few days that I’m getting better. I’m able to highlight paragraphs and translate them to make sure that I’m understanding complicated ones correctly.
- I listen to Spanish language videos on YouTube. If they are too hard for me to understand I can use the subtitles.
- I’m playing around with a few other apps. EWA for more listening skills. I’m also doing an online story course that has grammar lessons.
- I need to do more talking. I don’t have any Spanish speakers in my everyday life. I’m not a big fan of doing online Spanish practice with real humans because I don’t really like talking to humans. I tried talking to an AI chat bot in Spanish. It couldn’t understand me at all. That really discouraged me until I realized that it couldn’t understand me at all in English either. I need to just talk to myself and the pets for a while I guess.
I’m thinking about quitting Duolingo too, I have a 650+ streak but Duolingo is becoming worse recently, and I don’t learn much. I’m not so sure about quitting it yet, for the sake of my streak….or should I just get it to 2 years and then quit? I am doing this for the sake of getting the Chess.com app because I love chess…
Please share your thoughts.
Fair enough – you did far better than me ? I wanted to learn Spanish, did well with Duolingo in 2021 then felt I wasn’t actually learning anything. Can do the key phrases on holiday though so I’ll take it as a win.
It’s great to be able to take a cold, hard look at the things we do and see if these things are still valuable.
Wow – congratulations on quitting duolingo so intentionally. I had to do that myself. I found that keeping my streak was becoming too important, so I chose a date and made myself skip that day. I did learn a lot from the app, but not enough to justify the time spent on it.