When I started Duolingo, I liked its affordability and lightweight, paperless approach to language courses. I grew up taking language courses paper first, digital second, so an app charging much less than any other program I had used was enticing.

Super Duolingo, the platform’s paid subscription, removes ads and usage limits from Duolingo’s dozens of free courses. But the quality varies considerably. The more speakers, the better the course. The more demand, the better the course. That was the general rule of thumb I could work with. Neither the app nor the pricing page gave me a clear comparison of how much content each course offered. Over the year, the worst offender I found was Latin: a short course, low-quality audio, and limited activities.

Outside of Latin and constructed languages, I found the Russian course ill-prepared. The audio was better than Latin’s. It didn’t have any background noise. It didn’t sound like an archeologist chanting in an ancient tomb. Recent patches have improved it, no doubt, but some sentences still sounded as though the app could not parse them properly. A phrase could sound noticeably different when played as a whole than when played word by word, without helping me understand how the words fitted together. And in courses such as Latin and Russian, there are few activities available beyond writing down what the speaker says.

Duolingo’s odd choice of vocabulary adds to the guesswork. Perhaps this is too traditional a take on learning, but beginning with simple words like “fox” and “zoo” gives learners something manageable to recognize and memorize, especially with an unfamiliar alphabet. I expect the vocabulary to build from those foundations. The idea is to start from common ground. “There is a bear in the village” was an actual example I encountered. Even in English, I would ask again: did you just say bear?

There is an entire subreddit, r/shitduolingosays, for these strange sentences. Duolingo explains that the oddity helps a sentence stick and that learners can apply its structure to other situations. I understand the intention, but these should be once-per-unit bits of fun. Instead, they run rampant and get in the way of picking up patterns in the new language.

Japanese and Chinese managed to frustrate me in the other direction. Duolingo spends so much time covering what would be considered common roots of the two languages. Just like ketchup is “ketchup” in French, there is no need to invest so much time re-learning the common words. The courses also wanted classroom translations of casual speech. I was rather deterred by Duolingo’s odd attitude toward non-European languages.

Conclusion: Casual but Not So Casual Subscription

Remember what I said about the price in the lede? I paid $96 for the year. It is one of the cheapest language learning platforms I can think of. However, Duolingo should have been clearer about what each course offered. There is a significant difference between saying ‘The Latin course needs more content’ and ‘Latin has only about 4% as many lessons as French, but Duolingo didn’t tell me’. We could all brush this off by calling it a casual learning app, but for most people, $96 is not a casual subscription price to throw around.