I cancelled my Duolingo Family subscription about a month ago. The renewal email sat in my inbox for two weeks before I clicked kill. What I am doing today is the harder step: deleting the app so I stop falling back to the free tier. Not because I hated the app. Because I was paying for a habit, not a language, and a habit is what I am trying to drop.
I learned English the old way and it worked. Since grade 5 I have watched movies with English audio and English subtitles. I never switched them to Bahasa Indonesia, even when I missed half of what was being said. Years of that, plus talking to people online, plus reading things I actually cared about, is why I can write this post in English. No app drilled me into fluency. A decade of paying attention to real English did. So I know what language learning that actually sticks looks like, and Duolingo is not it.
The streak taught me consistency, not a language
I used Duolingo for English, Chinese, Japanese, and the Chess course they launched. Before I started I had read plenty about how Duolingo “doesn’t really teach you a language.” I told myself I would use it differently. I would do the lessons, write my own sentences, watch shows in the target language, run Anki on the side.
Here is what I actually did. Open the app. Five-minute lesson. Close the app. Tomorrow, repeat to keep the streak green. After a year I could not hold a basic conversation in any of the three languages I “studied.” I could pass the placement test back to where I started. That is the version of progress that feels productive and is not.
The streak loop is brilliant engineering. It is not a language curriculum. The dopamine hit of the green flame, the panicked notification from Duo the owl when you skip a day, those will keep you opening the app for years. It kept me opening it for a year. I cannot recall a single sentence from any of the courses without looking.
If you want a daily habit, Duolingo is the best app on the market. If you want to speak a language, a $15 textbook and a language partner on Tandem will beat it. So will just watching 200 hours of TV in the language with the original audio.
The Family plan was for my niece
I bought Family so I could share it with my niece. She tried it for a few months before giving up, which is more grace than most kids give a learning app. I kept paying because I told myself she would come back. She did not. The Family plan is a fine deal on paper, but it only pays off if more than one person is actually using it. I was the only one, and I was barely using it for its intended purpose anyway.
I cancelled the subscription a month ago. What is left now is uninstalling the app so I stop defaulting to it in dead time. The free tier does the same five-minute lessons, and I have already proven I will do exactly those five minutes whether I am paying or not. Hearts, the AI conversation features, the Family sharing. None of it changed what I did inside the app, so the money was buying me nothing.
The content I do not want in a learning app
Two of the things that pushed me over the edge are not about the product.
The first is the steady injection of LGBT-themed characters, stories, and lessons. Duolingo has been open about this. They have blog posts celebrating the queer characters they added to the Stories section, plus Pride Month promotions every June. In 2024 they deleted all of that from the Russian version after the regulator there classified it as LGBT propaganda. That tells you exactly what kind of content it is. Duolingo will keep it everywhere they legally can.
This matters to me specifically because the Family plan is shared with my niece. A 12-year-old should not be the audience Duolingo is targeting with its queer representation in vocabulary drills. I do not care what adults do in their personal lives. I do not want it served up to a kid who is just trying to learn how to order food in German, and I do not want to filter my own reading material either. When I am paying for a language app, I do not need a story about two men getting married to learn the word for “cake.” I am not homophobic. I am an uncle who wanted a learning app to be a learning app.
The second is the CEO. Luis von Ahn, the founder, is a Guatemalan-born billionaire with a public persona built around inclusion and morality. He has publicly supported Israel through the genocide in Gaza and donated to pro-Israel organizations, including posts on his own X account and reporting from outlets like MintPress News. For a CEO who likes to lecture the public about morality, picking the side that is bombing hospitals and starving children is a choice, and it is a dealbreaker for me.
What I am doing instead
For the languages I actually want to keep, here is the plan:
A real grammar book. Chinese Grammar Wiki for Chinese, Genki for Japanese. Boring. Works.
Anki with a custom deck built from real sentences I pull from podcasts and YouTube transcripts.
YouTube input. Easy Languages channels, plus any native content with subs on. No five-minute drills.
The Chinese class at my office. It runs in-house, costs nothing extra, and meets on a fixed schedule. Real teacher, real classmates, real accountability.
Reading real books. Paperbacks, long-form articles, anything longer than a Duolingo sentence. Most of my “studying” time was spent on five-minute drills that ended the second I closed the app. I would rather spend that hour on a chapter of something I actually want to read. The vocab sticks better when there is a story behind it.
For chess, I am dropping the Duolingo course. Lichess with the analysis board open did more for me in an afternoon than a month of Duolingo Chess.
The streak is gone. The owl can email me. I am not opening it.
If you read this as a Duolingo fan, you do not have to agree with me. The app works for some people. It did not work for me, and I am done pretending the green flame is fluency.