The big Duolingo course upgrade is making some learners feel lost

As a part of the increasing minority of people who haven’t yet given up on Duolingo, I laid out a bunch of changes I’d ideally like to see to improve the app last month. Well, Duolingo has indeed made some changes, but they aren’t the ones I wanted. Worse still, the recently introduced Duolingo course upgrade that the company implemented instead has infuriated a whole bunch of people online.

Several recent threads on the r/duolingo subreddit are full of users complaining that their language courses have been shuffled around in ways that make their progress hard to follow. In one thread, a user learning Italian said they had been at around level 50 and were working through more challenging material, only to find themselves suddenly being tested on basic words such as sugar, cat, tree, and milk. Other users in the same thread said they had run into similar issues with Japanese, German, and Spanish.

The exact complaints vary, but the theme is familiar — Duolingo has rearranged the furniture, and some learners are now stumbling into tables. A few say they have been pushed backward into easy material, while others say the app is acting as if they have already learned words and grammar points they have never seen before.

As an example of that latter complaint, a German learner said lessons had been added retroactively to their path, with Duolingo treating unfamiliar material as if it had already been covered. Another commenter summed up the frustration neatly, saying they liked the idea of Duolingo improving and extending courses, but not that completed units were now filled with topics they didn’t recognize.

That leaves some learners with an awkward choice. They can carry on from where Duolingo says they are and hope the missing pieces eventually make sense, or they can reset the course and slog back through material they learned years ago. That second option is even less appealing now for free users affected by Duolingo’s Energy system, which limits how quickly they can work through lessons unless they spend gems or switch to the paid version. They have one other choice: to finally ditch the app, and there certainly seems to be some enthusiasm for that option.

There is also a separate but related frustration bubbling up around Unit Review. One Reddit user said they were considering canceling their subscription because their Unit Review had been replaced with flash cards that were too strict about acceptable answers. Personally, I couldn’t agree more with that gripe, as it’s one I share. Flashcards are a reasonable idea in theory, but when you pronounce a word and it gets marked as incorrect, you then hear the app provide the correct pronunciation. When that reveal sounds exactly like the noise you made, it’s hard not to simmer with frustration and shout “that’s what I said!” at your phone.

Duolingo announced in April that nine of its major courses had been expanded to reach a Duolingo Score of 129, which it says aligns with B2 on the CEFR scale. Those courses include Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese, and English. That may at least explain why some courses look different or expanded, and a few learners in the Reddit threads liked that the course gave them more material to keep moving forward. However, it’s hardly a full justification for what many users see as an almost random reshuffling of progress.

Has the little green owl isn’t completely thrown you off course with a recent update? Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the poll above or the comments section below.