Learn a new language with the world’s most-downloaded education app! Duolingo is the fun, free app for learning 40+ languages through quick, bite-sized lessons. Practice speaking, reading, listening, and writing to build your vocabulary and grammar skills. Designed by language experts and loved by hundreds of millions of learners worldwide, Duolingo helps you prepare for real conversations in Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian, German, English, and more. And now, you can learn Math, Music, and Chess the Duolingo way! • Build real-world math skills – from calculating tips to identifying patterns – and sharpen your mental math in our Math course. • Learn how to read music and play familiar songs on your device in our Music course – no instrument required. • Master moves, level up your game, and play real matches in our brand new Chess course. Checkmate! Whether you're learning for travel, school, career, family and friends, or your brain health, you'll love learning with Duolingo. Why Duolingo? • Duolingo is fun and effective. Game-like lessons and fun characters keep you motivated to build solid skills across language, math, music, and chess. • Duolingo works. Designed by learning experts, Duolingo has a science-based teaching methodology proven to foster long-term knowledge retention. • Track your progress. Work toward your learning goals with playful rewards and achievements when you make practicing a daily habit! • Join 300+ million learners. Stay motivated with competitive Leaderboards as you learn alongside our global community. • Every course is free. Learn Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Dutch, Irish, Danish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Esperanto, Polish, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, Hebrew, Welsh, Arabic, Latin, Hawaiian, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, English, and even High Valyrian. And now, learn Math, Music, and Chess with our newest courses! What the world is saying about Duolingo:
5.2M
150 reviews analyzed
Competitors
Details
Duolingo receives mixed reception as a fun, accessible language-learning app that helps beginners build skills in various languages, but recent monetization changes have significantly hurt user satisfaction. Many praise its engaging daily lessons and progress tracking, while complaints center on restrictive energy systems, disruptive updates, and aggressive push toward paid subscriptions. Overall, it retains loyal users for casual learning but risks losing dedicated ones to competitors.
What users love
Effective for quick language gains with consistent daily lessons in languages like Swedish, Spanish, and English
Beginner-friendly courses that make learning approachable and motivating
Engaging gamified elements that encourage streaks and friend interactions
Additional features like chess lessons add unique value beyond core languages
Where it falls short
Energy system replaces hearts and limits lessons even with perfect scores, feeling like a cash grab
Frequent app changes disrupt progress and force restarts or unfamiliar material
Annoying notifications, reminders, and vibrations designed to boost dopamine and retention
Overreliance on AI results in poor content quality, weird phrases, and lack of depth
Difficult subscription cancellations and poor customer support
Energy system limits practice regardless of performance and pushes paid upgrades
Introduce an optional performance-based energy refill that rewards accuracy with extra free lessons
Target → Casual daily learners frustrated by arbitrary limits who would switch to more generous apps
Sudden lesson changes and lack of easy progress recovery
Add a dashboard for revisiting previous units with one-tap restore and customizable learning paths
Target → Long-term users with multi-year streaks seeking stability over constant updates
Praise
Lern
Helping people learn including me learn Russ
— Nicky!30
Duolingo
Seni çok seviyorum senin sayende ilerledim seni kocaman öpüyorum Duolingo ❤️
— İkizroşşş
العراق
انهو برنامج رائع جداً و هوه وسيله لتعلم اللغات
— حامدالجزاني
Duolingo
Duolingo is a great language teaching app. It has taught me swedish and chess each in a under 100 days with one lesson a day.
— Valdigt göd app
Complaints
Becoming a cash grab
Changed heart system to energy system which instead of rewarding you for doing good it punishes you for trying to learn more. Old system was better and made you want to learn until you ran out of hearts. Now no matter if you do good or bad you’ll still run out of energy and can’t continue either way. Seems very counterproductive to learning and very much like corporate greed to get people to spend money
— Danyo73
What Happened?
I have loved this app and have been using it for years to learn Spanish, German, and more recently French. In the past you had 5 hearts and if you got an answer wrong you would lose one but as long as you had one heart you could keep learning as long as you pleased. Even longer ago you could practice to regain the hearts for free. Now they use energy. You can have 25 energy at once and it refills. However even of you get no question wrong this energy will go down. To refill you can pay for Super
— Lkat19
Frustrating Changes Ruined The Learning Experience
I was committed to this program, but the recent lesson changes completely disrupted my learning experience. The app suddenly advanced users into unfamiliar material with no clear way to return to where we left off unless we completely restarted.\n\nI canceled my subscription, and I know many other users are doing the same. There are plenty of other language-learning programs available, and at this point I would recommend choosing something other than Duolingo
— littleduende
No
Im done with this Im leaving
— TMFJess