Featured in Farrago Magazine Edition Six 2026

After years of getting by without the need to expand my vocabulary beyond the latest internet slang, my linguistic guilt as a native English speaker took over. And so, several months ago, I decided to start my mission to join the multilingual 60 per cent of the world’s population. 

My goal was straightforward: to become proficient in another language, in the shortest time possible, with the least financial investment. I wanted access to expand my cultural horizons and to see what I was really missing out on in my monolingual existence.

Despite being aware of the ridiculousness of my aim to magic my way to fluency, I turned to perhaps the most popular digital option: Duolingo. Promising low financial commitment and a clear path to fluency, all contained within a single app, the choice seemed to be an obvious one.
 
Famed for its aggressive owl mascot and entertaining social media presence, Duolingo was founded in 2011 with the mission to make high-quality education universally accessible. Today, it boasts over 50 million active daily users, and it's not uncommon to come across users with many thousands of days logged on the app. 
 
This was not my first introduction to Duolingo, however. During the lockdown years, I had a brief, yet obsessive, language-learning phase, which I have little to show for today despite my hours spent yelling Mandarin phrases into my phone. The difference this time around was that I hoped the app could be a legitimate learning tool, rather than a fun way to pass the time. 

What I remember the most from my first time on the app was the community focus of the platform. It allowed you to see explanations when you got a question wrong, ask questions in specialised discussion forums, and progress through courses that were developed by volunteers, which allowed language offerings to expand and be improved by real native speakers.
 
This time, when I downloaded the app and fired up my sparkling new Swedish course, there were immediately recognisable features. Colour-coded lessons were laid out like a physical path to mastery, as celebratory pings and colourful characters filled the screen—although these aspects of the app certainly seem to have been amplified over time. And, as always, there is its famously addictive streak feature, tallying the number of consecutive days a user has completed a lesson.
 
There were also some things I was surprised to notice were missing. Most notable of these was the “heart” system that once functioned like lifelines but has since been replaced with an energy bar that, indifferent to a user’s mistakes (or skill), frustratingly prevented extended periods of learning. The solution to this problem? Purchasing one of their heavily advertised paid plans which, for upwards of $100, provides a year of limitless ad-free learning. In my typical fashion, I signed up for a free trial and promptly forgot to cancel it. And so, with a sizeable hole in my pocket and a chip on my shoulder, I had no choice but to put my doubts aside and wholeheartedly embrace all that Duolingo promised.
 
Propelled by my determination to make the most of my unwitting investment, I began to dutifully complete my lessons each day. The lessons seemed reasonable enough for a beginner, aside from the odd laughable phrase—my personal favourite of these being the lesson that required me to translate the sentence, “There is a Norwegian architect in my bed”.

With each passing day logged on the app, I became increasingly hooked. Until eventually, I realised that my desire to learn the language itself was no longer my primary motivation to continue. Keeping my streak alive was what kept me returning to the app, and Duolingo’s in-game currency and daily quests were what encouraged me to sink more hours into my lessons.

It should have been no surprise that I had fallen completely into the trap that Duolingo had laid for me—a gamified model that directs focus to superficial measures of progress. Metrics that I legitimately became obsessed with.
 
The effect was instant. The echoing ping of correct answers and the disheartening clunk of wrong ones had become the soundscape of my home, much to the annoyance of everyone around me. To my delight, my enthusiastic learning was garnering me enough XP to quickly advance through the game’s weekly leaderboards, each increasingly competitive level named after an increasingly valuable precious stone. I longed for the day when I would achieve my final goal—not my desire to be able to engage in Swedish conversation, but my desire to make it to the most challenging competition of all: The Diamond League. 
 
Then, just over three months after my very first lesson, the day finally arrived. I had made it to the big leagues. My competitive streak came out in full force, and I found myself in a bloody (and most likely one-sided) battle for first place with a stranger named Marg who had a 5-year French-learning streak. It was David against Goliath, IKEA against The Palace of Versailles. The competition was fierce. When 9 pm on Sunday came around, marking the end of the weekly leaderboard, I saw that I had emerged victorious and I felt what I can only describe as pure ecstasy.
 
It didn’t last long.
 
After a brief celebration, crowing about my victory to anyone who would listen, my achievement of Duolingo’s Diamond League Holy Grail had ultimately left me feeling empty and directionless. I was suddenly horrified that the thing bringing me the most pleasure in life was a glorified video game that sent me threatening notifications if I was late to complete a lesson. I no longer had the same desire to keep playing.
 
Then, to make matters worse, not long after my motivation began to dwindle with my completion of the Diamond League, I reached the end of the Swedish course.

Now there was no new content, no leagues to be conquered, and there was no clear way for me to progress beyond the awkward advanced beginner realm Duolingo had left me to idle in. Somewhere along the way, my passion for learning had turned into a passion for winning, so what was the point now?
 
It's no secret that Duolingo has come under fire in recent years for increasing AI components and letting go of a large number of its contract workers, including translators and language specialists. Duolingo is not the only app to fall into this trap. Companies like Spotify have been part of the growing trend in which online platforms change their content delivery, often by reducing staff, pushing paid features, and building their business around statistics that promote superficial engagement. Like Duolingo, Spotify’s prioritisation of AI-generated mixes and recycled algorithm recommendations has come at the cost of editorial playlists and arguably the possibility of genuine music discovery.
 
While Duolingo’s current AI-powered approach allows for vast amounts of content in certain courses, it ultimately seems to lack the heart of the app I remember from years ago. Duolingo was never a perfect app, and many of its flaws are inherent to its central gamified system, but it is saddening to see the user experience cheapened by a loss of community while cost barriers continually increase.
 
Communication is fundamental to our existence as humans, so what is the value of learning a language in a process stripped of human involvement? Real life doesn’t have reward chests filled with gems or triumphant trumpet sounds, and human conversation cannot be replaced by a cartoon character and a speech bubble.
 
For me, completing the Swedish course was the end of my journey with Duolingo, but not the end of my bilingual dreams. After getting over my initial disillusionment with my progress, I found that what remained was a genuine motivation to learn and improve, which, perhaps to Duolingo’s credit, was driven in part by the app's aggressive tactics to increase user hours. 

I have since turned to different methods, more grounded in human interaction. In-person classes (although decidedly more costly) and language-learning podcasts have become the basis for my ongoing quest to learn Swedish. While my progress is no longer presented on a silver platter with colour-coded sequences, it has felt more fulfilling than the satisfaction I felt logging more minutes than anyone else on an online application.
 
So far, from my short language-learning journey, I have learnt that my initial goal of finding a shortcut to fluency is just as impossible as it sounds, despite what apps like Duolingo seem to promise. No app can truly offer what the personal experience of engaging with native speakers can, particularly when the humans behind the screen are increasingly replaced by robots.

While I mourn the time sunk into this strangely addictive app, I will always have the brief, yet dark phase of my life ruled by gems, leagues and French-speaking adversaries to thank for guiding (or driving) me to the point where I feel truly motivated to continue learning. Duolingo can offer fun mini-games that involve occasionally suggestive scenarios, but I worry that the features that capture our attention have come at the cost of its original mission—the bringing together of people through language.