DUOL shares have fallen more than 78% from their May 2025 high, and that’s before its nearly 25% fall in premarket trading today.
I've said before that one of the very few good things generative "AI" may do to the world is accelerating the enshittification cycle so much that it kills stuff that was already terrible and a drain on society (social media; platformization; curation algorithms…). Speaking as a linguist who speaks 4 languages and has read the literature on second language acquisition, it has always been my position that the Duolingo method is useless—it feels like you are learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours with it and gold a full tree and you'll still get nowhere, and if you put a fraction of the time in about any other method, including doing pen-and-paper drills with old-fashioned paper-based textbooks, you'd have progressed much faster.
And old-fashioned grammar drills suck, too. It's just that Duolingo really, really sucks.
(Methods that work better: 1) Find an intensive "conversation"-type course, or anything that is labelled as "natural" or "immersion" or "storytelling" methods; or get tandem partners; or online coaches such as in italki; failing that, join a conventional language course, the more "intensive" the better; work on these until you absorb basic grammar and vocabulary, focusing on spoken language not writing; 2) Once this bootstrap period is over, start talking to people, watching media, or reading stuf that interests you, in large quantities and every day; do not wait until you're "good" to move into the input stage, start actually using the language for things you wanted it for, as soon as possible, which is sooner than you think; partial comprehension is fine.)
Of course I hope Duolingo dies horribly in a fire after it backstabbed its workers with the "AI memo", but even if it didn't, the world is better off without it.
One lesson we can get from this: Consider that overnight 25% drop in investment, which may well prove to be the coup the grâce. It was not caused by Duo losing users or enshittifying with "AI", but by the opposite: investors mass panicked at the company setting its target revenue too low, as in a mere… 1.22 billion, rather than the 1.26 billion the investors wanted. Now the reason Duolingo is not chasing that higher goal is that they're seeing the writing on the wall, and went into damage control mode: they're pulling down a bit on squeezing their current paying users and trying to improve the experience of the free tier, in an attempt to reverse the bleed and bring in more customers.
In other words, Duolingo tried to slow down the slightest tiny bit on enshittification—3% less cash—and this already got swift punishment from the market gods. With capitalism, there is no long-term thinking: you're expected to provide the richest people on Earth with infinite growth of their ever-increasing profits squeezed from customers paying every month more and more, now and forever, or you'll be taken out and replaced by someone willing to try.
Edit : I got lots of questions like "if not Duolingo then what do you suggest?" The full answer is "literally anything else", but I've cleaned up a couple of my longer answers and wrote these blog posts: 1) on comprehensive reading, 2) on tandem exchange.
I also feel like a lot of the critisism of Duo really, I dunno, miss the purpose? Of Duo entirely. Or just language learning.
Especially as someone who isn't young.
Duo is not going to make anyone fluent. No single program or method will. It also isn't, for most people, something that will make you educated in a language in a day or a week or a year, or probably ten. Nothing short of total immersial will do that.
It also feelslike, based on how critics talk, like they go into Duo trying to learn with a method of like, "Manzana is Apple, Hola is Hello" etc. Instead of doing with a mindset of "Manzana is a round red fruit" and "Hola is a friendly greeting."
Basically complaints feel like they come from someone who just, expected way more out of it than its trying to do.
Also, lesrning to speak a lamguage with any app really is not going to work, once again, it needs immersion. But that that does not make the app bad.
That said, I have used Duo for mamy years now, across several languages, Spanish, Norwegian, Japanese, and I tried the math, chess and music. Its honestly, not as good as it used to be, but I blame the stupid hearts/energy for that. For a while Inwas using the "fake classroom" trick to get unlimited play, but they stopped that with the update in mid 2025. This biggest problem with these energy systems is that they punish mistakes. For learning lamguage, mistakes are going to happen, a lot, and punishing mistakes is very bad for progress. At some point, just as you might be stumbling but "getting it", suddenky, you can't try anymore, because you run out of energy.
I also hate how it punishes using, gramatically weird but correct phrasing (in English), that more closely matches the structure of the target language. Because its helpful for learning the struxture of the target lamguage to do the answer in a similar gramatic structure in your known language.
Also, they are really bad about using sysnonyms for some words when more nuanced translations would be better. The one really easy one is translating "Me Llamo Ramen" to "My name is Ramen". When its actually "I am called Ramen". Or probably better, "They call me Ramen". " Me nombre es Ramen" would be "My name is Ramen". It seems "nitpicky" but later llamo is used in relation to call/calling, and being consistent would be better for learning. Also, based on my anectodotal moments, a lot of non English use the "I am called...." structure of speaking.