An opinionated critique of Duolingo

Link: https://isomorphism.xyz/blog/2025/duolingo/

Context

Duolingo is a great app. But it is just gamification of user attention. I tried learning Japanese, and I can’t understand the language as a human, as a repeating process it is nice, but no, it doesn’t click I am using it for learning chess, so far it looks good, its like a textbook way of learning things. Nothing personalised or very sophisticated. But the UX is cool, the interaction and user feedback is smooth and top notch. It is a engineering marvel, but not on the human-like-learning path. If it can do that, it is a great app.

Source: techstructive-weekly-62