The Reasons Why I Quit Duolingo
Published on November 11th, 2024
I have always been passionate about languages, but this feeling had skyrocketted on me around five years ago when the idea of learning Mandarin got stuck on my my head. I tried to learn it for about three to four months, but I didn't know what I was doing, so progress was minimal. I remember that around the same time I was talking to a teacher of mine about languages and she told me she was learning Japanese, and that was probably the moment where the idea of doing the same entered my head.
I already knew some basic facts about Japanese such as that it had two syllabaries (Hiragana and Katakana) and it used Chinese characthers (Kanji). In my head, having syllabaries would make the process of learning the language easier than it was with Mandarin since I was struggling with Hanzi (the name of the Chinese logographic system). Even though a while back ago I would say that younger me was wrong, nowadays I really think that syllabaries do really help in the learning process because it does not take a long time to learn them what makes it faster for you to be able to immerse in the language. But, at the time this made me switch learning Japanese. Later, I probably had learned Hirgana and Katakana in one to two weeks and then proceeded to quit studying Japanese for three years.
Last year I finally decided to give another chance to learning the language, and my first decision was to use Duolingo. I already knew about more effect resources such as Anki or Memrise, this last one that, as far as I have seen, has gotten worse than before, but I still decided to use the green owl app because in my memory, it was great. For my bad luck, the new update had arrived for me almost at the same time, making the experience horrible, but even with this I managed to mantain my streak for more than 1.5 years.
My point is, Duolingo was great back then, especially when I first met it, nevertheless it has become unusable now. Before the course wasn't completely linear, allowing you to chose what you would learn first. Also the units were shorter when compared to those we have to day that take you about an hour to teach you random AI generated phrases that don't have any pratical purposes. My progress with the app was minimal and it wasn't null since I used other resources like books and immersion. For instance, I managed poorly to solve an JLPT N4 mock test while my goal was to reach N3 by the end of this year.
Also, the transition of Duolingo from free to freemium locked many features under a paywall, what I don't see as problem since they are a business and need to profit. However, the features which they have decided to restrict were essential to allow you to really learn something. For example, they removed the possibility of commiting mistakes out of the free plan (first on mobile, and later on the web version), what, for me, made using the program terrible. The way they did is the classic energy/heart system that limits something by giving a definite amount of credits for the user to use in a certain period of time a charge for more.
Obvioulsy the app has some good points. One of these in my opinion is that there a stories that are meant to be comprenhensible for the level of the learner troughout the course, but these are scarce for the size of the learning program. I also like how they implemented sections for learning Kana (Hiragana and Katakana) and Kanji. It is also impossible not to mention about the gamification on the app, that is amazing for keeping you learning, but there was a time I got sick of it.
That is why I decided to quit it and go straightfoward to immersing myself the maximum as possible in the language. I still think I need some conciouss studying though, so I am still reading a grammar book by Tae Suzuki and Yuki Mukai called "Gramática do Japonês para Falantes do Português", which in my opinion is the best book for learning Japanese avaliable in Portuguese. Reflecting now, this is the way I learned English. I started immersing myself by the age of six or seven and without realizing I got fluent on it by the age of ten of eleven.