I’ll be “The Daily Phil” could also be a very popular edition based on what he brought to the show 50-55 episodes ago!

For many years, every time it’s come up on r/languagelearning or similar places, the threads on it have been hugely negative. Like many of its competitors, it’s hard to find a single person who has actually learned a language to even a B1 level. Unlike its competitors, there are countless stories of people wasting over 10 hours a week for *years* to not learn a language. I’ve met a number of those people in person over the years and sometimes it’s jaw-dropping to hear from them that they put many of thousands of hours into a language when their skills are behind where a lot of students are after a single intense summer course.

Duolingo fractally bad. The content often has errors in it. The methods used—such as spending a lot of time translating L1 into L2 rather than actually getting input in the the target language—are atrocious. The in-app goals are arbitrary things that have no external value. Then to top it off, it’s highly addictive so people invest their time into it.

Even on their own forums you can see that, after years of use and completing the entire Japanese “tree” in Duolingo, students have almost no hope of even passing the N4 level of the JLPT. That level is titled, “The ability to understand basic Japanese.”

It’s a similar story for people using Duolingo to pass other tests that correspond to useful skill levels and open doors, like CEFR, TOEFL, or the HSK. The story is even worse for people trying to learn the language for spoken use, since the app is so focused on sentence level and smaller chunks of content.

For anyone building an educational app, I’d recommend looking at Duolingo as a target to navigate away from.