Survey shows Duolingo’s latest course overhaul has a majority of users disgruntled

I’ve defended Duolingo more times than the app has probably deserved. After almost 1,200 consecutive days with the green owl, I still think its convenience and simplicity make it a useful learning tool, even if it’s still annoying in many ways and nowhere near capable of teaching you a language by itself. But that defense becomes harder when a Duolingo course update doesn’t merely annoy learners but leaves them unsure of what they have or haven’t actually learned. That seemed to be happening for some users recently, even though I didn’t particularly notice it myself. We wanted to know how many of you were negatively affected by the recent course upgrades, and we set out to find out.

That was the theme behind our recent poll. We reported on the fact that the Duolingo course expansion appeared to have shuffled some users along their learning paths, with completed sections suddenly containing unfamiliar material and other learners being sent back to lessons far below their previous level. In that article, we asked whether these changes had negatively affected your progress in a poll, and you responded in your thousands. Let’s take a look at the results.

The results show that the online complaints about the Duolingo course updates were far from the voices of a few disgruntled individuals — the clear majority of respondents to our poll said the changes had negatively affected them. Some 46.5% said the updates were annoying but that they would keep going, while another 9.6% said they were quitting Duolingo as a result. Over 2,500 readers chose one of those two options. By comparison, 28.9% said their course was fine. The remaining respondents had either ditched Duolingo previously for other reasons (12.8%) or had never tried the app (2.2%).

Perhaps the most interesting part of that split is that Duolingo appears to have tested many users’ patience without quite breaking their habit. Nearly half of the respondents were annoyed enough to say the changes had hurt their progress, but they were still planning to carry on. That might say something about how sticky the app has become, although perhaps a better explanation is that fans of the app, like me, are used to this kind of thing. For example, this Duolingo course update doesn’t even compare to how annoyed free users of the app were when the hearts system was replaced by the energy system last year. That change actually limited the amount of practice free users could do each day, and caused plenty of people to quit. If you rode out that switch, a bit of course rearrangement is unlikely to put you off.

Still, almost one in ten respondents saying they were quitting over the update is hardly a trivial result. Perhaps for those leavers, the latest update was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Some of you took to the comments section of our previous article after voting in the poll, with several readers saying the update had disrupted a learning path they had trusted. Justin said the Japanese changes left him unable to understand “half of what was taught” and prompted him to restart the entire course, while mjpk1953 described being confronted with new Italian vocabulary, phrases, and tenses that had never been covered before. Davidgreenberg1305 said that Duolingo reduced his recorded Italian course vocabulary by around 400 words, which he called “very deflating.”

Others had found their own ways to adjust. Profesorfricano said Duolingo’s three Japanese refresher units were “too short to retain the knowledge,” so they began revisiting the course from the first unit and making their own flashcards. Agniesiaa39 felt they had mostly caught up now, but said the update had left their kanji chart “all messed up.”

The recent changes have completely upset my learning programme and my confidence — comment from mjpk1953

There were some more positive experiences. Jnblazier felt the expanded German course was less repetitive and said they were “enjoying learning the new words” rather than skipping ahead. Erior Serpir added, “Your poll is framing the whole topic negatively. As if there were no positive changes made.” That’s probably a fair comment, and maybe we should have had an option for those who wanted to praise Duolingo for the change. I know from my own long experience with the app that there are sometimes changes I like, but only the ones that irk me really register in my consciousness. Even if it’s only occasional, credit should be given where it’s due.

Another commenter raises an example of this. Roger Turner agreed with a related point from the previous article in which I expressed frustration with the new flash cards, saying, “I certainly shout at the flash cards when they repeat the pronunciation I have just used. Tiresome, but ironically, it lets you get away with some appalling pronunciation in the Speak practice sessions.” I’d observed that same inconsistency in my own use of the app, but the day after that article was published, the flash cards started to become more forgiving. That’s more likely to be based on direct complaints than our article, but nevertheless, I’ll give the Duolingo team props for sorting out that fiasco in a relatively timely fashion.