Duolingo: Why is Duolingo a Lousy Teacher but a Fantastic Product?
“With that streak, you should read Nietzsche in fluent German!!”
A few days ago, a friend found out how long my latest German Duolingo streak was (670 days as of writing, thank you!) and uttered this sentence. They don’t use the app and were dumbfounded that someone could practise German that frequently and still only just say “hello” and ask, “What time does the cinema open?”. It made me stop and think firstly about my inadequate proficiency in German but also to examine from a product perspective why so many people continue to use Duolingo multiple times a day, every single day, despite mediocre progress.
A Lifelong Dream
Becoming bilingual was a dream I’d held for a long time, and I was always awed by anyone who could effortlessly switch between languages. I imagined myself on holiday, speaking like a native, garnering the respect of my peers and impressing the locals rather than shouting my English slowly and hoping for the best. I wanted to make this dream a reality, and I turned to technology to help me where Frau Bassu (my German high school teacher) failed.
Hooked on the Owl
When I downloaded Duolingo, I started with a burning desire to learn, filling my head with all that beautiful, harsh-sounding vocabulary and bizarre grammatical structure. I did my lessons daily, and I could see some quick progress that made me feel proud. Slowly, though, I noticed that this faded as I fixated more and more on the rewards of learning than the teaching itself. Then, I had a moment of clarity that after a year, I’d become a streak addict.
Learning had become secondary to obeying the owl and earning points, increasing my streak and climbing the leaderboards. I rarely checked whether my German was progressing, and I found that when I spoke to my fellow streak addicts, they all said the same thing. My friends had put their trust in Duolingo, but progress was limited, and truthfully, they would prefer to stop, but they could not lose their streak. The way they spoke was reminiscent of the language of addicts, not learners, and it got me thinking about how, like all good drug dealers, they hook you in and, more importantly, how they keep you there.
Why It Beats the Competition
To understand this, we can explore how it beats the competition despite its shortcomings. Creating an enjoyable place to spend time is underappreciated by its competitors. Babbel, Busuu, et al. pay little attention to how their apps look and feel; they often have poor UX and don’t meet the raised expectations of users in a post-Web world. They chose to focus on learning, and in doing so, they have created an experience that feels eerily reminiscent of the classroom. I find the overwhelming sense of it being a chore to use them, and despite them improving my German, I feel little desire to stay there, much like a classroom.
People want to learn, but in a landscape where you compete for attention against everything else, you must understand what the social apps know. That is how dopamine is used to steal attention from users. Duolingo focused its app on delivering the sweet satisfaction of the dopamine hit rather than effectively teaching you the language. Whether they’d admit this is another question, but consider all the choices the next time you use it.
The Mechanics of Addiction
The sound of a successful lesson and how it makes you feel, the agony of watching the slow tick as the streak counter rolls over, the pure ecstasy as you notch another day, and how well they make you terrified of losing your streak. Amplified by all of their advertising and memes that reinforce this idea. So why don’t you care? Because, like me, you are a streak addict.
After you come to terms with your Duolingo moment of clarity, sit back and admire the skill and quality of execution it must take to turn learning a language into an addiction. We can see how the culmination of all their decisions transcends it from just a well-designed app into one of the best anyone has ever built. It’s not just their features, though; it’s how they complement each other and how well they do in improving them to get you hooked:
Leaderboards
Good idea, but not sticky enough. By fleshing these out into multiple leagues leading to a god-tier tournament, there’s always something to shoot for. When you reach the top, your reward is more competition and the constant terror of relegation. I think about how many Sunday evenings I’ve spent desperately trying to get enough points to stave off the worst of horrors: falling into the obsidian league.
Points
Points are a good way to reward progress with a dopamine hit, but they decided to use them more effectively. Rewarding users with double points for a lesson at the start and end of the day allowed them to build a habit and dictate the user’s schedule. Double points mean that they’re making sure the first and last thing their users do daily is obey The Owl.
Daily Challenges
Daily missions make every day rewarding, and the reward is that you get more gems to buy more steak freezes, points to climb those leaderboards, and, of course, more double points. Everything ensures that you stay longer on the app than you planned. More time on the app means more retention and happier investors.
Duolingo Plus
Duolingo Plus is where they think outside the box because a paid tier with just no ads helps you learn better and will not get much traction (hello, YouTube Plus). However, a paid tier that means you know less, can make more mistakes while still completing lessons, and, most importantly, offers you more chances to protect your streak because that’s what you care about is unbelievably good decision-making. To succeed, you have to understand your product’s job rather than the one you think it does, then relentlessly optimise for it.
Willpower vs. Dopamine
Everything works in sync, amplifying the other and always aiming to keep you there. Willpower is a finite resource quickly tapped out, but the brain’s desire for dopamine will always exist.
The Real Killer Decision
One thing stands out, though, and it is the first thing I think about whenever the question of the best product decisions arises: the streak freeze.
Who amongst us streak addicts haven’t woken up bleary-eyed after one too many Weisbiers and realised, to their horror, that they neglected to do their daily lesson. The streak is broken, and all that works for nothing! What you feared more than anything else has happened, and now you must start again. You begin again, but a measly 2 days don’t give you any pleasure, and for many, the pain quickly subsides and turns into relief. You’re free! You don’t care about your streak, and you can now abandon the app and get on with your life, maybe even use the time to learn a language.
Every broken streak for Duolingo means a very real risk of lost use. In their offices, it’s easy to imagine nervous teams huddled around a chart showing user growth and churn after a broken streak. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that the lines on that chart might not tell a story an investor would want to read.
So what do you do? You solve that problem; enter the streak freeze! Offer users a get-out-of-jail-free card, a do-over, and a mulligan, and watch them take it every time and never leave your app. It needs to be said that this really shouldn’t have worked. Indeed, users know that the streak isn’t real, and if they’ve simply paid to keep the fantasy going, they’d get no satisfaction from it. It turns out this is wrong; Duolingo knew what mattered.
What Can We Learn?
We’re always told that understanding your users is the most important thing, but how many companies can say they really do? I think Duolingo is one of the few. To prove it, just imagine you going back in time and pitching the idea to investors that people who want to learn a language would be happy spending years learning incredibly slowly, and you’ll build a monster company. You’ve convinced your users that they only care about streaks, points, and competing with people they’ll never meet, and one of their proudest achievements is a number they know is false. More than that, they paid to falsify it, yet still crave it like oxygen. You’d probably think that doesn’t sound likely, yet here we are; Duolingo has a 500m strong community and $137.5m in annual revenue as of 2023, which is remarkable for an app that doesn’t do what it says.
This results from many smart decisions grounded in a deep understanding of what makes us tick and where the dopamine comes from, and then a single genuinely genius decision in the streak freeze, which means if that’s not enough, you’ll still come back. If I could have only one question answered about any product, it would be: What did streak freezes do to contribute to that number, and how did they feel when they looked at the lines on the chart after it launched?
Final Thoughts
As I’ve said, I have nothing but admiration for Duolingo, professionally and personally. I have learnt a lot of German and have been genuinely grateful to it for offering an even slightly more helpful alternative to scrolling Twitter. Examining some of their choices and potential reasons helps to understand what it takes to design a fantastic product. Still, it also raises questions about the mission and how financial incentives can dilute that. Whether doing some good is enough, whether they should care and whether we should care or just enjoy having our streaks?
Anthony Wilson
(671-day streak)
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