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.

IMG_2242

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.

  1. 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.
  2. I listen to Spanish language videos on YouTube. If they are too hard for me to understand I can use the subtitles.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.