You might recall that I’m taking an Irish language class. In our first class this week, the teacher suggested getting Duolingo for vocabulary-building; while the general consensus seems to be that Duolingo is shit for Irish pronunciation, it is full of words, and I don’t know very many words yet and would like to know more. So I got Duolingo. I hate Duolingo.
I might be the only person in the world who has never screwed around with Duolingo, the owl-based language-learning app that I mostly only know from when people post funny sentences from it on social media. I actually didn’t even know it was free until our teacher told us it was, which definitely made it more appealing. So I installed it on my phone, selected “Irish,” and dove in.
To my deeply limited knowledge, the Irish pronunciation is hit or miss. Some words sound fine, while others are computer voices that even I, a total beginner, know aren’t quite right. I spend a lot of time checking any new word Duolingo says at me against Teanglann or Abair, which provide pronunciation in the different dialects. Additionally, some of the grammatical things it’s shown me so far feel under-explained– I was thrown by the app’s “Labhraím Gaeilge” for “I speak Irish” instead of the “Tá Gaeilge agam” (literally, “I have Irish”) that I’ve heard before; looking up why it’s different actually taught me useful grammar information. But this learning feels like a side effect of me being a nerd rather than Duolingo’s intention, especially since it didn’t give me any of this context in the app itself.
Anyway, I am a complete beginner at this language and will not presume to correct a long-standing app with facts I’ve Googled, so I’ll move on to what I can confidently hate about Duolingo, which is: everything about Duolingo. Why did no one tell me it’s like this?! When I opened it for the first time I was instantly inundated with shit: XP and stars and gems and hearts and flames, many of which, like the Irish lessons themselves, it doesn’t really explain. At first, I kept trying to figure out how to use my XP to, I don’t know, level up, before realizing it functions more like points. I did not understand why I was pursuing these chests full of “gems” or what the gems were for. When I first started using the app, I didn’t understand what counted as completing an activity toward my “streak,” since each little circle has multiple lessons attached to it, so I just kept going until I asked a friend online when I was allowed to stop.
The whole concept of “hearts,” lives that you lose if you make a mistake until you lose them all and can’t go through lessons anymore, makes a kind of sense for a video game or a gamified app, but as a learning tool just makes me afraid to fuck up. While they do encourage you to slow down and think about your answer, they also feel like bad design for a learning app, and one that sometimes teaches you new words through guessing. I feel like I’m being punished for being a learner, and I will thoroughly cop to cheating on occasion by doublechecking the spelling challenges before committing to them. Irish is a difficult language to spell, especially as a new learner coming from English, and it pissed me off to no end to have to stop learning new words because I couldn’t spell the Irish word for “salad,” a word that God willing I will never have to spell. (It’s “sailéad,” which I suppose Duolingo has indeed taught me to spell, but only through fucking up, the thing Duolingo punishes you for!)
People on social media and in our Discord warned me away from Duolingo’s leaderboards and “leagues,” which only made me want to know about them more. I’m currently top of the “Bronze” level Irish leaderboard thanks to my amount of XP, and I can see its insidious appeal; I absolutely do not want to engage in this cursed feature and turn my learning into a competition against strangers, but also damned if I’m not gonna beat the person below me. There are apparently all kinds of tricks you can employ to game the leaderboards, which I feel mostly confident I am never going to do, but I have found myself clicking the ugly brown trophy icon multiple times a day to check if I’m still comfortably ahead of the second-place user. But the only way to increase my distance is to get more XP by playing more, and the only way to play more is to not fuck up and lose all my hearts, which just incentivizes me to cheat.
Or, as Duolingo so obviously wants me to do, to pony up for its paid version, which has unlimited hearts and other features. This is clearly the real reason Duolingo is like this; rather than offering me something good for my money, it makes the free version so crappy that the paid version sounds like the “real” app. There are so many ads, mostly for the paid version of Duolingo, but others for shitty mobile games. You can watch ads to earn more hearts, and some of them ask you to interact with them, playing parts of mindless mobile games. Perhaps unpopularly, or as a side effect of being an old person who used to watch TV before streaming, I don’t as a life rule hate ads; my time is not so valuable that 10 seconds makes a difference to me. But the ploy is so naked, the app so clearly enshittified, that the ads infuriate me, because the actual thing being advertised by every ad suggesting I pay for Duolingo is just how to have a less shitty experience with Duolingo.
But the real problem is that, despite yelling “what the fuck?!” in my first five minutes with a program I always imagined was a regular learning tool and not some kind of gamification limbo, I am already utterly trapped in its stupidest bits. I don’t care about its XP beyond my growing obsession with the leaderboard, but I absolutely crave pressing the buttons and hearing the sounds and watching the circles fill in. It feels like the dumb mobile games it foists on me in ads, mindless and shallow and disgustingly satisfying. I keep using it? playing it? even when it’s long stopped “teaching” me anything and I’m just repeating things I’ve been shown in previous lessons or choosing an answer from the only new word on offer. My nerve endings love the stupid chime sound of getting an answer correct; I feel like I’m good at Irish when I 100% a lesson, even though the achievement comes from the app’s design instead of actual language knowledge. It is the most naked, blatant bullshit, and I am disgusted with myself by how I’m so fucking here for it.
Right now, I have one heart left that I’m determined to bank, but I keep picking up my phone and poking impatiently around the app for something to do, the kind of compulsion I’ve never felt for other apps on my phone. I fucking hate it; the whole thing is vapid and greedy and aimless, but jesus christ I want to keep pressing the buttons. I resent–
OK, literally in the middle of typing the above sentence I got an alert purporting to be from the person below me on the leaderboards, who has apparently overtaken me. The alert told me to “Earn more XP to reclaim your reward chest” (what is my reward chest? Is it something to do with the leaderboard?) and I did so immediately, without even thinking about it and even though I was busy doing my actual job. I played through a tedious review, and in my impatience I got something wrong and lost my last heart. I actually gasped in shock, while Duolingo immediately told me I could pay to keep playing, which I am not going to do no matter how much it asks. But now someone else is sitting above me on the leaderboards, and I am furious at them, even though I 100% do not actually care about this in any way.
Fuck you, Duolingo, and the five hours and 41 minutes until I idle my way into a heart to keep playing you. (Playing?) The most useful thing you’ve taught me so far is what a fucking rube I am, though also where to find the accent marks on my iPhone keyboard.
