For refugees, I can't recommend Lingq enough. I tried every app in the past to learn Spanish and it was the only one that really moved the needle.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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I'll check this out. I feel I've had some progress, but it really does plateau.
I used it for a week, I was harassed by application and I uninstalled it. I don't want to be in a relationship right now.
I'm still hoping for a FOSS language learning platform to replace these type of services. DuoLingo seems rather limited, to what crowds of volunteers could create by working together.
Early Duolingo was curated and corrected by the community. Clearly people were volunteering to do it, so I don't know why they removed all the community tools and are now using AI to fill the gap.
Probably not quite what you're looking for, but there's Anki, a software for flashcards. It has some shared decks available for download, and you can make and potentially share your own. It can also be used to study things besides languages.
I found duolingo usefull to start when your proficiency in a language is next to nothing, a good place to start. But it doesn't get you that far in my experience. I moved on to reading books in translation apps, so I have the original and the translation side by side. And I must say, Les Trois Mousquetaires is teaching me a lot of French, but it's also actually a really fun read, it has some hilarious dialogues. So at first I wanted to learn French, now I just want to read the novel. You don't need gamification when the actual content you're reading is good in itself. I've now combined it with the audiobook. Each reading session I start by listening to the parts I read last time. If you pick famous books, the audiobook can usually be found on yt or elsewhere.
800+ day streak, all gone. I did actually want to keep learning so it pushed me to start taking lessons. Ai is so bad it got me talking to people. 😔
Congrats on taking a difficult step towards improving your learning. I moved away from Duolingo a while ago, and in hindsight, it was a significant boost to my language skills; it was only after I had left that I realised that Duolingo is better at hooking people with gamification than it is at actually teaching language skills (even before the AI trash became prominent). I hope that you experience similar productivity.
Thank you for the encouragement. ❤️
Everyones sayin duolingos shit cause of ai but i tried hungarian(native) on it once and it was already horrible. Failed a test three times on it lol. Also the whole thing is designed to make you feel like youre learning samething but youre not.
People mention their Duolingo streak the same way people mention how much karma they had on reddit.
I had a streak of over 1200 days, and after years of reduction in quality and them constantly making the ad based version harder and harder to use, I finally left. AI was the last straw.
I have my eyes on Lingonaut, an app still in beta, and being created by volunteers for free to recreate the early days of Duolingo.
I'm a fan of lingodeer a lot so far. Already learned more in 40 days than I did with 5 months of Duolingo
I paid for Lingodeer Lifetime, which was $120 at the time. I thought that was pretty hefty already, but it was like 8 months of monthly subscription, and I figured I would need that much time to get through the course anyway. "Regular" price for lifetime is apparently $300, but they constantly run sales that take it down to more reasonable amounts.
On the other hand, I have to admit that the quality of the course is worth the $300 and I too learned more from a few months of Lingodeer than 2 years of Duolingo. They're also honest in that they teach you all the grammar fairly quickly with a minimal vocabulary and then just end the course with the advice to start reading books. They're not trapping you in language purgatory like Duolingo does.
Awesome. Just installed, looks good.
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1200 days of language learning? Different languages or the same one? If it’s the same one you probably don’t need an app anymore. Try talking to natives in your chosen second language. You might be surprised how much you know. I used duo for about a year when i moved to a different language country. After that year i found it was holding me back more than helping.
The same language, but I only did about 15 minutes a day. I am more the "pick away at it a little bit" than an "immerse your entire life in it" kind of learner. I learned a lot, and can have basic conversations at this point, but I still have a long way to go and will continue using some kind of language app going forward. I watch media too which helps. Apps are just one tool of many.
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Same, I was a couple weeks shy of 1500, I think. Can't say I really miss it, I wasn't getting anything out of it except big number.
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Nobody ever learned a language with Duolingo. At best you learn a handful of words. Stop wasting your time pretending to learn.
Quietly? Seems like it’s been loudly, and on fire. And smelly.
They did that "prank" where they killed Duo. But they really did kill him
was duolingo ever actually good for language learning tho...?
I feel like people constantly shit on Duolingo and other things like it, especially compared to other forms of language study like full classes, immersing yourself in that language via cultural exports (movies, TV shows, books, etc.), or interacting with people that speak that language.
But I think that's kinda missing the point — Duo and other programs structured like it offer a way to learn a decent chunk of a language without a lot of effort. If you put in a bit of time every day or so and take things at least a little seriously, my understanding is that you can learn a lot. Maybe you won't be truly fluent, and certainly you won't learn as much as you would with intensive self-structured learning or classes at a university, but it takes way less effort and is far more approachable.
That being said, definitely look somewhere else now that Duolingo is using AI.
Not really... if you wanna learn something like swedish where you basically replace a few words in an english sentence and switch the word order to V2 it probably works but when you have languages like russian(because other slavic langauges warent even available last time i checked) or hungarian you enter a completely different level. Idk that much about russian but i can say for sure in hungarian you have to keep like 20 tables in mind constantly and have to be thinking about what roles the words in your sentence fill so you can attach the right suffixes and also keep in mind all the suffixes and vowel harmony for tense, aspect and mood, etc. Not to talk about word order, intonation and other affix related shenanigans.
Do you know of any good options similar to Duolingo?
I've been pissed off with that platform for a couple of years now. They keep changing the structure of lessons and learning paths. I think they've been trying to make learning more based on quick rewards at the expensive of context, which I don't like.
I took a look around for similar apps a coding of years ago, and they all seemed to be one of: a) paid, b) rifled with ads; c) have crappy/buggy UIs. I realize the ads can usually be motivated with a DNS server, but the fact they showed do many ads is kind of a red flag in general. But I know FOSS options have really taken off in the last year or so, so I'm hoping a new, good, free platform has stepped up to tackle Duolingo and the like.
Mango languages is nice, and lots of library systems have licenses so you can unlock the premium features with your library card.
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My understanding is that you won't get fluent but it would give you up to a middle school level understanding, depending on the language. French and Spanish were more advanced than Mandarin or Welsh.
I’ve been using Duolingo to study Mandarin for a few years now. It’s fun but the lessons are frequently frustrating. They love to teach me a bunch of new characters, then stop using them altogether for a few months, then bring them back and expect me to know them with zero review.
The lessons should be structured to include more review if you’re only doing 1/day (which I think is the normal way people use it).
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I learned the basics of spanish with it. Now i’m pretty decent at it. I used duo for about a year and then just started talking to spanish speakers. This was years and years ago though.
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Everything enshittifies unfortunately
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