For the past 264 days, I have been hounded by a merciless small green owl. If I were to share this with friends, troubled whispers about my mental wellbeing would soon strike up. Disquieted, they might even cart me off to the hellscape of a wellness intervention. And yet this malevolent bird is entirely real.
It is there when I unload the dishwasher, lamenting its disappointment in my efforts; and it is there when I put my daughter to bed, warning that it is about to become ‘very angry’. Yes, Duolingo is an insidious Jiminy Cricket on modern shoulders – except that it lives in our pockets and, rather than dispensing wisdom, is an emotionally blackmailing shame merchant with rage issues.
It wasn’t always this way. In the early days, Duolingo was an indefatigable champion of my faltering attempts at learning Italian, applauding trifling achievements as I repeated words I secretly already knew. But as the weeks turned to months, its true nature emerged, the love-bombing exchanged for something more sinister. For I had entered the most tyrannical affliction in online modern self-improvement: the streak.
We’re all at it. We count steps, track sleep, monitor protein, close rings and log habits. Somewhere along the line, the metric became more important than the thing it was supposedly measuring. Tempted to slack off from tapping out essential phrases such as ‘the horse doesn’t eat pizza’? Watch as the owl swoops into passive-aggressive overdrive. ‘Don’t let Duo down today’ it’ll shriek, before hysterically threatening the breaking of the all-important streak – the purest expression of rampant self-improvement culture. Nobody cares whether you can actually speak Italian; the important thing is that you opened the app. The reward is no longer becoming better at something but preserving an unbroken record of having tried.
I am not alone in submitting willingly to the abuse. Duolingo has 50 million active daily users globally, and in the UK, Gen Z learners have swelled by 32 per cent over the last two years according to research by Duolingo and Airbnb. Its genius lies in persuading people who would never sit down with a grammar book that they are learning a language while simultaneously turning that learning into an obligation. I can’t fault our aspirant young linguists who, in keeping with their general horror at everything that has gone before them, are righting the British tradition of going abroad and speaking loudly in slow, ‘foreign’-accented English.
But the question remains: do the ends justify the means? And are the ends, in fact, all that? DuoLingo’s distinction from traditional language learning lies in its gamification. You will never be asked to conjugate a verb, for example. There’s no memorising to be seen here. Instead, you’re given small chunks of text to translate, the hope being that gradually these words will be internalised. There are characters we meet again and again – an intensely irritating young boy, a jaded teenager, a boneheaded muscleman – and its use of AI tracks your weakest areas, strengthening them with lessons that focus on these chinks in the (admittedly pretty thin) armour. An entirely arbitrary league system, meanwhile, taps into our competitive spirit, latent or otherwise, and keeping up the godforsaken streak triggers small hits of dopamine, the eternal loop of the Zeigarnik Effect well and truly exploited for our own darn good. Undoubtedly, it’s clever.
I can confidently inform you that the horse doesn’t eat pizza, that the cat owns a hat and that somebody’s aunt is drinking milk in the library.
And yet all of this knowledge feels a bit… hollow. There’s a reason that you can still pull out your long-receded school French when you really need it and it’s because it was built on firm grammatical foundations. Are you continually ‘acing’ your multiple-choice Duolingo lessons with an average of 94 per cent? That’s because the lessons are objectively easy. I can confidently inform you that the horse doesn’t eat pizza, that the cat owns a hat and that somebody’s aunt is drinking milk in the library. Whether I could navigate a minor disagreement over a bill with a waiter in Rome remains considerably less certain. The app is very good at telling you to keep going. It is much less good at giving you a sense of where it is going.
But perhaps the reason that so many grown adults feel guilty about disappointing a cartoon owl is our collectively dismal record at mastering foreign languages. We are undyingly lazy when it comes to bothering to ‘speaka-da-lingo’, and even the rise of Duolingo can do nothing to halt the terminal decline of language teaching in schools, with many state sixth forms no longer offering any core modern languages at all. Maybe we take it from Duolingo because, well, we deserve it.
And yet next time, as I’m wearily brushing my teeth at the end of another day only for Duolingo to pop up depicted as a statue covered in cobwebs, maybe I’ll finally find the strength to dig out my prized collection of Italian swearwords and unleash hell. In an apologetic, stuttering, grammatically incorrect way, obviously.
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