I completed the entire Russian Duolingo course. So I’m fluent now, right?

Duolingo knows how to push my buttons to keep me pushing the buttons on their app. I need to keep my streak alive! (It’s very important of course). And I need to turn all those “achievements” gold. And I need to get rid of that sad looking broken line that crosses out old lessons Duo wants me to review. And I need to move up the leaderboard so I can stay in the highest “league”. If I don’t do all these things where will I find self worth?

Perhaps I’m exaggerating a little (but only a little). The app kept me coming back, which motivated me to work harder and accomplish more of the tasks, creating a self-reinforcing cycle, one that led me to a streak of 400 days and completing the entire Russian language tree. Now, this should all be good, though, right? Isn’t all this simply in service of my goal of learning Russian? Doesn’t this mean I’m fluent in Russian now? Well, as a Russian would say, “нет.” (No).

The problem is, after countless hours of playing the Duolingo game I could barely spit out anything in Russian and could only pick up isolated words when listening to Russian. I found a collection of beginner “slow listening” videos in Russian and a collection of beginner simple reading activities. I dabbled in those while working on Duolingo, but made very little progress. I could make some sense out of the simplest ones, but only with a struggle. It seemed that Duolingo wasn’t transferring over to more natural language. But why? Why wasn’t all that time paying off?

Duolingo is a game. It’s meant to be a game — that’s what keeps me coming back to it. I want to do better in the game than I did last time. It marshals the addictive quality of any smartphone game but offers us, perhaps, a higher purpose: language learning. While I don’t think Duolingo is a complete waste, its fundamental weakness is that it misses the point of language.

Humans invented language so that we could communicate with each other. And we’ve continued inventing new languages and re-inventing old languages ever since… all so that we could communicate with each other. Put people in contact with each other who speak different languages and they’ll invent “pidgin” languages to communicate. Or they may invent their own language to communicate. Language is about communication. It’s about making sense of other people and their thoughts, sharing a bit of ourselves, and even understanding ourselves and our own identity. So, language is about making sense… making sense of messages from other people certainly, but also making sense of the world we all live in and our places in it. Reading a story and understanding what happens. Listening to someone talk and making sense of their ideas. Recognizing the values, the culture the language brings with it.

Now, Duolingo does keep me reading and listening to the language. But Duolingo falls short of focusing on making sense. It offers a series of sentences that are completely unrelated to one another. But this is not how language works. When was the last time you had a conversation that went like this:

-”Hello, how are you?’ someone says to you.

-”My grandmother wears a blue dress”, you naturally respond.

-”The Dragon lives in the castle”, your friend of course tells you next.

- ”There is blood on my ticket.” you say and you and your friend part ways.

I actually think I have had that conversation multiple times in my life. Although, every single one of those times it was me and Duo conversing. (And no kidding, “There is blood on my ticket” was actually a sentence I learned in Russian on Duolingo). The problem is that a completely random series of sentences robs us of context to make sense of what we’re reading. Frank Smith in his book Understanding Reading described a simple test of whether or not an example of language makes sense: “If the order of sentences can be arbitrarily changed without anyone noticing the difference, then they do not make sense, they are not normally functioning language.” Duolingo does not pass the test for giving learners “normally functioning language”. The language in Duolingo just doesn’t make sense.

Unfortunately Duolingo further distracts me from trying to make sense of the disconnected pieces of language they offer. Duolingo every so often pops up with a message reminding me not to worry about mistakes, just keep going. Nice sentiment, I appreciate that. But unfortunately Duolingo penalizes me for every mistake I make and stops me from doing any more activities if I make too many mistakes (of course unless I buy their paid version… I’m sure that has nothing to do with why they force me into this situation though). So, they may talk a good game, but the app itself is designed to get us to focus on perfection…. Which is a separate goal from making sense. When I’m reading in Russian now I don’t know every word, but I can push past an unknown word here or there and still make sense of the text. Because making sense doesn’t require perfection, in fact a focus on perfection pretty quickly distracts me from making sense. The same goes for speaking. Ever have someone interrupt you to correct your grammar? Beyond how infuriating and condescending that is, it also distracts from making sense. The more we focus on perfection, the less we focus on making sense.

I should mention that some Duolingo courses have a “Stories” section, which I think is the best thing Duolingo has done and honestly I think they should redo their entire app to be exclusively stories (there is also a community led project to create stories for the other Duolingo languages, which if you like Duolingo you may want to check it out). Their stories pass Frank Smith’s test. The order of the sentences matter, so it’s normal language.

So, was my time on Duolingo a complete waste? I don’t think so. I became comfortable with the Cyrillic alphabet and I learned a lot of basic vocabulary. So, I’m not saying immediately delete the app or never use Duolingo. If it offers you motivation to keep studying a language, then by all means keep using it. But also keep in mind the limitations of Duolingo. While the foundation of knowledge I gained from Duolingo allowed me to begin making some sense out of those beginner listening and reading activities, it was only once those had my full attention that I finally started making consistent progress in those areas. After I replaced Duolingo with reading and listening to normal language, I was making sense of simple texts faster (sometimes on one reading) and quickly progressing to more complex ones. I think Duolingo had quickly diminishing returns. If I had been a little less stubborn with my goals about completing Duolingo (notice Duolingo effectively motivated me to finish the course — so again my motivation was focused on getting good at Duolingo), I could have switched over sooner to those reading and listening activities that have allowed me to make so much progress. I was centering my language learning practice around Duolingo instead of around making sense of language, so I got really good at Duolingo while getting only slightly better at Russian. Now that I’ve recentered making sense, I’m getting way better at Russian, but that does come at a tradeoff. My Duolingo skills are getting kind of rusty.