I’m Duolingo’d out.

I have long had an affection for the idea of this app. I was one of their early users, I cranked through the French lessons for well over a year-long streak back when I was commuting to work downtown on the train and would sit in a little bench seat and churn through verb conjugations and vocabulary lessons. 

And then I stopped using it for a while. I burnt out a bit, and… well… that was that. Reflecting on why I stopped back then the reasons were pretty similar to how I’ve been feeling this past month or two.

See, last March, almost exactly a year ago I was enrolled in a University program for professional upgrading and I was able to get the student discount for a subscription to Duolingo again. I had been dabbling on my own in learning the Japanese character sets, and we were planning an autumn trip so I figured it would be fun to maybe learn a few words. Duolingo to the rescue, right?

I churned away, cranked through levels, and the app kept telling me, I was making great progress, scoring 100% lessons, and boom: I am a Japanese ace, or something.

This morning I hit my 365 day streak. One year of daily Japanese lessons, some days more robust than others of course, but a solid effort on the app nonetheless.

Am I fluent?

Well, um… that’s the thing.

Duolingo gets a lot of hate online, and the last thing I want to do is pile on. It’s been a good toy. It’s a fun distraction. It definitely motivates. And… well, again. A year is no measure of fluency, but I really have very little confidence in my ability to do much with Japanese beyond the little bit that I learned taking actual in person lessons last fall from a native Japanese speaker. I don’t give the app much credit for progress. It was there, always nagging, but something about it wasn’t sticking.

So, I’m taking a break from it… again.

Learning a new language is complex, and I think if I were to sit in a room with one of the big brains working behind the scenes at Duolingo I would probably hear about a vision that combined complex conversational AI with an easy to use app and motivational pushes to help people learn. And I suppose if I was willing to dump heaps of money into that version and spend a solid thirty minutes a day conversing with a bot and, oh, overlook the shady staffing practices that people talk about online with respect to Duolingo’s corporate owners, yeah, maybe I would work closer to fluency. 

But the core product, the affordable and reasonable product that I am willing to pay for, is very much a half baked game and I no longer think it is doing anything for me in terms of moving closer to fluency with any reasonable speed. And upgrading—considering the aforementioned shady business stuff and also that I’ve just spent a year mostly spinning my metaphorical tires in the duolingo mud means I’m pretty burned out on pushing forward with this approach to learning Japanese.

There are other ways. I have books. I have flashcards. I have access to media and the internet to scrape together something that can’t do any worse than what I’m doing now.  

Sayonara, Duo.