Duolingo review: is it worth it?

Duolingo is the most downloaded language app in the world and the one most learners of Chinese, Japanese or Korean try first. It is very good at one thing, which is getting you to open it every day. Whether that turns into a language depends on what else you do.

Kungfucius's honest position: Duolingo is a decent first month and a poor only method. It will teach you kana or Hangul, a few hundred words and the habit of daily study. It will not teach you to speak, to hear tones, to read real text or to understand why a sentence is built the way it is. Use it for what it does and leave before the streak becomes the goal.

Which Asian languages Duolingo teaches

For English speakers, the list in November 2026 is shorter than Duolingo's long catalogue suggests.

Language	Course for English speakers	Depth
Chinese (Mandarin)	Yes, Simplified characters with Pinyin	Long course; Duolingo says it now runs to B2
Japanese	Yes, with kana and kanji practice	Long course; Duolingo says it now runs to B2
Korean	Yes, with Hangul practice	Long course; Duolingo says it now runs to B2
Vietnamese	Yes	Short beginner course
Hindi	Yes	Short beginner course
Indonesian	Yes	Short beginner course
Cantonese	Only for Mandarin speakers	You need to read Chinese to take it
Thai	No course for English speakers at the time of writing

The three big courses changed in 2026. On 22 April 2026 Duolingo announced that nine of its most popular courses, including Japanese, Korean and Chinese, now teach "through B2" on the European CEFR scale, where they previously stopped at about A2.

Treat that as a statement about how much material exists, not about what you will be able to do. Kungfucius's observation is that learners who use only the app rarely get beyond roughly A2 in practice, however many units they complete. Tapping the right word tile in a sentence is recognition. B2 means holding a conversation and reading a newspaper article, and those are different muscles.

The Vietnamese, Hindi and Indonesian courses are small by comparison and have not had the same attention. They are a taster. For Vietnamese in particular, where six tones decide everything, a taster without tone training does not take you far.

What the free version limits

The lessons themselves are free, with advertising between them. The limit is on how long you can keep going.

For years this was done with five "hearts": each mistake cost one, and at zero you had to stop. From July 2025 Duolingo began replacing hearts with an energy bar. According to Duolingo, each lesson uses a little energy, correct answers in a row earn some back, and the bar refills fully in about a day. You can also top it up by watching an advertisement or spending gems. Users widely report a full bar of 25 units with one unit spent per exercise, right or wrong, though Duolingo's own announcement gives no number.

The practical effect is that a free user can no longer study for an hour simply by being careful. A session of several lessons can empty the bar. The change was unpopular with long-time users, and it is the main reason people now pay.

What Super and Max cost

Duolingo does not publish a price list. Prices are shown in the app, differ by country and are sometimes tested at different levels on different accounts, so take these as US reference points:

• Super Duolingo: US$12.99 a month, or US$83.88 for a year. No ads, unlimited energy, extra practice of your mistakes.
• Duolingo Max: widely reported at US$29.99 a month or about US$168 a year in the US. It adds AI features: "Explain My Answer", role-play conversations and video calls with the character Lily. It is not offered in every country or every course, and the coverage for Asian languages is patchy. Check what your course includes before paying.
• Family plans exist for both and are cheaper per person.

Kungfucius's view: if you are going to stay on Duolingo for months, Super removes most of the irritation. But the yearly price of Max is close to what a serious course, a good textbook and several tutor lessons cost together, and those teach more.

What Duolingo teaches well

• The habit. Streaks, leagues and a persistent owl do get people to study daily. For a beginner, turning up is the hardest part.
• Kana and Hangul. The script sections for Japanese and Korean are well made. A couple of weeks of them and you can read the syllabaries, which every later resource assumes.
• First vocabulary. A few hundred common words with audio and pictures, repeated often enough to stay.
• A low-cost test. A fortnight of Duolingo is a cheap way to find out whether you like a language before you buy anything.

What Duolingo does not teach

• Speaking. The speaking exercises ask you to repeat a sentence to a forgiving microphone. Nobody answers back, and nothing requires you to build a sentence of your own at conversational speed.
• Tones. In Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese the tone is part of the word. Duolingo plays the audio and moves on. It gives no real feedback on whether your third tone was a third tone.
• Characters. There is character practice for Chinese and Japanese, and it is better than it used to be. It still does not teach components, stroke logic or how to learn 2,000 of them, and the Chinese course offers Simplified characters only.
• Grammar explanation. The app prefers that you guess the pattern from examples. That is tolerable for Spanish. For Japanese particles, Korean verb endings or Chinese 了 (le), most adults need the rule in a sentence or two, and the short notes are thin.
• Anything beyond roughly A2. See above. The sentences are also often unnatural, which matters more the further you go.

The "AI-first" controversy

On 28 April 2025 Duolingo's chief executive, Luis von Ahn, published a memo saying the company would become "AI-first" and would gradually stop using contractors for work that AI could do. Two days later the company announced 148 new courses created with generative AI, more than doubling its catalogue.

The reaction from users was loud and mostly hostile. In May von Ahn wrote that he had explained it badly, that he did not see AI replacing employees, and that hiring continued. In August 2025 he told the New York Times that the memo had lacked context and that Duolingo had never laid off full-time staff.

For a learner, the employment question is one for your conscience. The practical question is quality. Most of the AI-built courses were existing courses translated for speakers of other languages, and for Asian languages a wrong reading or an odd sentence is hard for a beginner to spot. Kungfucius recommends checking anything that looks strange against a dictionary or a human being.

Is Duolingo good for learning Japanese, Chinese or Korean?

Japanese: good for kana and the first weeks. After that the lack of grammar explanation hurts, because Japanese grammar is where the language lives.

Chinese: the weakest fit of the three. Tones and characters are the two hard parts of Mandarin, and they are the two things the app handles lightly.

Korean: good for Hangul, then the same grammar problem as Japanese, with speech levels added.

In all three, nobody becomes fluent with Duolingo alone. People become fluent while also using Duolingo, which is a different sentence.

Better pairings and alternatives

Keep Duolingo for the daily habit if you like it, and add the missing parts:

• For Chinese: HelloChinese is built for Mandarin only and treats tones, Pinyin and characters properly. As a first app for Chinese it is the better choice.
• For Korean: Talk to Me In Korean supplies the grammar explanations Duolingo leaves out.
• For Japanese: Bunpro for grammar and WaniKani for kanji, once you can read kana.
• For speaking and listening: Pimsleur makes you say whole sentences aloud from the first lesson, and a tutor on italki makes you say them to a person.
• For keeping vocabulary: Anki, free on desktop, does the memory work more efficiently than any game.

For a full comparison by language, see the best apps to learn Chinese.

What to do next

1. If you are starting from zero, use the free version for two to four weeks. Finish the kana or Hangul section if you are learning Japanese or Korean.
2. Cap it at 10 to 15 minutes a day. More Duolingo is not more learning.
3. In week three, add one tool from the list above that covers speaking or grammar.
4. Do not pay for Max until you have compared it with the price of real lessons.
5. When the streak is the only reason you open the app, thank the owl and move on. He will send notifications for a while. He recovers.