Why bother learning French? Apps like Duolingo have turned studying languages into a worthless game

For lesser mortals, still stuck in the 9-5, without the time to invent their own systems, there’s Duolingo. In 2020, the market-leading app reported a 67% jump in users, compared to the previous year. In the UK, they shot up by 132%, almost double the worldwide average. The app’s key to success? It has perfected a new kind of language gamification.

To “win” in Chinese or Serbian, users must hold on to their continuous “streaks” by practising every day, and in the process acquire a series of digital baubles — diamonds, hearts and the like. The lessons are packaged to fit into the ten-minute work gap, the Tube ride or a smoke break. They even tap into the way we see our phones as rectangles of productivity — be it actual emails, or just the pseudo-work of social media, or even stuffing your ears with podcasts. To be mentally idle is to be missing out. 

The dominant player from the previous era of traditional educational software, Rosetta Stone, now has 500,000 subscribers in its online incarnation, charging each of those $120 a year. Duolingo, by comparison, has 28 million. Yes, only 1% of those upgrade from their free system to the premium version, but in absolute terms those numbers are so big they still trump Rosetta Stone’s revenues.

As an aspirational product, Duolingo has achieved this by allowing users to dive into multiple languages simultaneously, like kids in a candy shop. It offers more range than anyone else: over a million people are presently studying High Valyrian — the made-up dialect from Game Of Thrones. 

At its worst, though, this leads to a kind of Emily In Paris mode of consumption: doing a thing as an act of fandom, a badge of belonging. It’s a mode set up for failure, practically designed to keep internet consumers grazing on the thousand and one potential futures that they might hypothetically inhabit. As with the Netflix series about a hot American girl who ends up photo-blogging in a Paris sans bainlieus, this is “One day I’ll move to France” as a form of escapism from the drudgery of the commute.

Yet one of the first things the YouTubers will tell you is that Duolingo doesn’t work all that well. Intrigued by the company’s claim that 34 hours on the app was equivalent to a college semester’s worth of instruction, a former linguist spent that long studying Swedish, then convinced the professor of UCLA’s Elementary Swedish course to let him take the final exam. He got an F. 

It’s certainly better than nothing, but, like many internet products, the app is ultimately more interested in driving up your usage time — in creating addiction — rather than in finding the short route to growing your skills. Those who embrace the gamification can end up with kind of obsession of the intellect — the constant need to achieve mastery, a life rationed out into a series of To Do lists: “Abs, breadmaking, Tae Kwan Do, Swahili”. 

After all, when it comes down to it, “completion” will always be tantalisingly just beyond the horizon. And just as no one ever truly “completes” a language, so too no one is ever truly satisfied with their overall crop. Steve Kaufmann — a genial, older YouTuber who claims proficiency in some 20 tongues — is perhaps the Michael Phelps of his domain, hero-worshipped by the younger set. This is a world where everyone knows by heart the US State Department’s bedrock estimations of how long an English speaker will take to learn a target language: the likes of Spanish — with plenty of loan words and common grammar — come in around 550 hours. Russian? Indonesian? You’re looking at 1100 hours. Then, there are the Fiddly Four: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, all a gut-busting 2200 hours for fluency. Like benching 100kg or summiting K2, these are the targets that put you in a whole new quantum level.

But as impressive as it may be, there’s also something a bit melancholy about double-digit language skills. Witness the experience of hyper-polyglot Dr Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia, who, in a piece in the New Yorker, turns up in Malta, spends a week swallowing a dictionary, taking endless notes, practising with every cabbie, hoovering up a casual fluency — then departs, probably never to return. Dr Luis has just had a linguistic one-night stand. 

After all, a language is only as useful as the people behind it: a gateway into literature, a periscope into culture and a doorway towards friendship. For all the gearing that these hackers offer, To Do lists inevitably make for misery, because competence is just the starting line of the good stuff. To learn a language like this is like leaving dinner after the hors d’oeuvres. That’s French for sausage roll, by the way.