Duolingo Reviews 

I've now had a string of issues with the Duolingo English Test that I think prospective test-takers genuinely deserve to know about before paying.

My first test was invalidated because paper and a pen were present on my desk. Note-taking is permitted on IELTS and TOEFL, so I genuinely didn't know it was banned here - and crucially, the paper was clearly visible during the mandatory environment scan at the start of the test. The system reviewed my surroundings, raised no warning, and let me proceed and pay in full. The same setup that was apparently disqualifying was openly shown to their verification system at the one point designed to check for it. I missed the 72-hour appeal window because of the speed it all moved at.

My second attempts was then invalidated for "looking away from the screen for an extended period of time." I had received a mid-test warning, immediately adjusted, and at no point looked away from the camera. The AI gaze tracking is clearly oversensitive and there is no human reviewer in the loop to sanity-check it.

On the third attempt, Duolingo's own software restarted my laptop mid-test. That attempt now shows as "The test was not completed and uploaded" - effectively burning one of my limited retakes through no fault of mine, on a technical failure caused by their platform.

I now have one retake left, on which I also received a "do not look away from the screen" warning despite doing nothing wrong, and if it's invalidated I will have lost the entire fee with no result to show for any of it.

The wider issue here is the design. The environment scan doesn't actively block non-compliant setups, the AI proctoring invalidates aggressively with no human review, the appeal window is only 72 hours, and you can only appeal once. Their own technical failures cost you attempts. This is not a fair system for a paid product, and I would strongly recommend anyone with options to consider IELTS, TOEFL, or in-centre PTE Academic instead.

When the app first launched, it had a clear mission statement to provide people with an accessible pathway towards language acquisition. If one could not expect to achieve complete fluency using the app alone, they could certainly use it as a gateway towards greater understanding. Now, the app has demonstrated a complete disregard for its original goal, and like so many, has prioritized a culture of incentivized monetization or a "pay-to-win" system. Aside from removing the old online forum support where Duolingo members could interact, they've begun integrating AI based voices and learning, which would perhaps not be much of an issue as it is paywalled under their subscription, but the AI video calls still show up and take a space in the free model lessons forcing users to skip over them and many of the original speaking, story, and listening exercises on the free lessons have been reduced. While the move away from the traditional five-heart system for free players to an energy system is actually not a negative, in that the energy system allows more leniency for mistakes than the five-strike system, and incentivizes studying the harder languages as a result, the only negative is the amount of energy used when attempting to achieve a legendary status on any lesson requires next to a perfect lesson and even then you may be forced to use gems to recharge, so the balance for how much energy legendary lessons require needs to be balanced more fairly as currently I can only properly achieve it on the stories due to the fact they consume less energy overall. However, the most recent and worst change to Duolingo has been shortening the number of people who can rank in a league (originally 15, down to 8). It is a clear tactic to prey on those competitive individuals (the ones who either have the disposable income or the predilection for gaming addiction) and tip them over the edge so they spend, if not for a subscription, then for the gems to keep playing and stay in their preferred league. It is a dirty manipulation tactic on the part of Duolingo and far removed from what the original mission of language-focused, learning-first used to be upon the app's launch. They also have yet to address one of the barriers for players with specific learning and physical disabilities, which can make the forced-writing exercises inaccessible. Where players can currently choose to skip speaking exercises and listening exercises, the exercises that require they type out words or full sentences remains an option players cannot request to temporarily skip over. If you are dyslexic, suffer from certain vision impairments, or muscle disorders, this can make the lessons more tiring; especially on legendary, sometimes entire exercises are comprised solely of text-only responses and even the few they allow one to substitute the voice prove impossible because the current voice translator is highly finicky and struggles to correctly make out the words no matter how slow, enunciated, or loudly one speaks. Many times I have been dinged for wrong answers when they were correct because of mistranslation (e.g., the Spanish course likes to misunderstand the word "triste" as "Tristan" and "crystal," respectively, and if you don't see it written out wrong, you don't even realize that is the reason it's being rejected) so imagine how someone with a speech impairment or a heavier accent must struggle trying to use the speech-to-text option Duolingo occasionally provides as an alternative to typing out full sentences. There needs to be an option to simply skip text response requirements and have the words on the screen to fill out sentences by selecting them instead. I say this as someone who used to recommend this app to friends and family and have seen some of those individuals struggle with this very issue either because learning disabilities like dyslexia makes correctly spelling out certain words in a foreign language a particular challenge (especially when the margin for error Duolingo will accept is a bit all over the place, for me it once accepted a word where I had accidently hit one of my number keys typing fast and didn't catch it to correct it before I hit enter and then dinged me in the same lesson for missing a single letter in a word) or disabilities (one person I know quit playing due to their muscle weakness from essential tremor making the texting too arduous to keep it up and their frustration with the in-game's speech-to-text being both irregularly offered as an alternative and highly finicky boiling over), and I have been submitting feedback along with others for this to be included in skippable exercises for better accesibility to no avail. In short, Duolingo's goal is no longer to promote learning; it's all about profit.

I wanted to learn Spanish by this summer, and I have spent a lot of time on Duolingo. I don't know if they realize that they keep calling "new words" words that they taught us multiple times before. I would actually like to learn new words relevant to a slightly deeper conversation than changing my password in an app or playing hockey. In short, I feel let down now that I have invested so much time.

It is a gaming app. Not a learning app. Plus they don't let you unsubscribe unless you meet their insane requirements. Don't ever pay them money.

If I could give zero stars, I would. Duolingo engages in incredibly shady billing practices and has some of the worst customer service I’ve ever experienced. 
I signed up for a free trial through their iPhone app. Knowing I didn't want to keep it, I went to my Apple subscriptions to cancel—but the subscription wasn't there. I checked Duolingo's official website, which explicitly instructs users who signed up via the iOS app to go to the App Store to unsubscribe. Since it wasn't listed in my Apple ID, I assumed the trial had already been canceled or simply hadn't gone through.
I was wrong. I got charged anyway.
Apparently, there is another way to sign up for a trial within their app that completely bypasses the Apple App Store ecosystem. Their website has absolutely zero cancellation guidance for this alternative subscription method. Their own policies are completely inconsistent and misleading, leaving users totally blind to the fact that they are about to be charged with no obvious way to stop it.
To make matters worse, trying to get my money back has been a nightmare. There is no actual human presence at this company. Their customer service consists entirely of useless email bots sending automated, canned responses that don't even address the actual issue. I am currently fighting a stupid bot for a refund because of their deceptive app design and completely inaccurate website instructions.
Do not trust their free trials. They bank on confusing you so they can quietly take your money, and then they hide behind automated email responses so you can't get it back. Buyer beware.

I enjoyed using Duolingo, but my recent experience with customer support has been extremely disappointing.

My subscription renewed automatically, and I noticed the charge on the very same day. As soon as I saw it, I requested a refund because I had no intention of renewing. I had not used the renewed subscription and acted immediately.

Despite this, my refund request was denied.

I understand that subscriptions renew automatically, but refusing a refund request submitted the same day as the charge, before any meaningful use of the service, feels unreasonable and unfair.

The app itself is good, but this experience has significantly reduced my trust in the company and its customer service policies.

Duolingo should serve as a fun way to learn, NOT to push an agenda. On the first of June, Duolingo.com explained their celebration of "Pride Month" and how it has three "queer" characters incorporated into the app with detailed stories about their sex. Many children use this as a learning tool and should never be exposed to sexual preferences when doing so. I used Duolingo to teach me languages and Chess, not this. I'm very disappointed and hope they make the content neutral and appropriate in the future, but until then I won't be using Duolingo anymore.

I've been using this app for years. I initially started with spanish, but as many other reviewers observed, the lessons range from easy, to "why don't you know this, I grew up learning spanish, but somehow expect you to divine the syntax and word order all on your own." It often fails to properly explain things and I found learning spanish to always be unenjoyable. I eventually switched to learning Japanese.

This was actually enjoyable, but as with other lessons, Duolingo does an abysmally poor job at explaining things. I am at a point now, were one moment I'm learning ridiculous things like how to say icecream, cupcake, and chocolate, in japanese, to now being expected to type out an entire sentence like "how is work as a pro baseball player" in japanese.

The reason why this is so infuriatingly frustrating, is because I don't know how to use a Japanese keyboard, and while I completed my lessons on hiragana and katakana, and I can read most words in japanese, that's a far cry from being able to type out full sentences. Also, there is not "katakana" keyboard option. It baffles me that Duolingo can't grasp this concept.

There is an option to "speak" into a microphone on mobile devices, but both duolingo and these mobile devices are awful at understanding what's being said. Also, Japanese uses three different character types. I mentioned Hiragana and Katakana above. There is a third called Kanji. All three can be used in a single sentence.

Here is where Duolingo and the developers failed miserabley:
1) they did not teach the use of the keyboard
2) they expect you to memorize the three character types and when to use them, but do a terrible job at teaching this
3) they fail to comprehend that the talking into a microphone will not help since the the app fails at hearing properly and fails at typing out what is said in the proper character type.

Mix all this in with the constant crashing, and this app is infuriating to use.

So many things to improve!!! First and worst are the constant annoying ads to upgrade!! When i tried on a trial basis things weren’t much better with ads to purchase energy tokens. No explanation of grammar unless you make a mistake and click on give explanation for mistake. Even then it doesn’t generalize enough.

I have been using Duolingo for 7 years now and can really say, I can't bear it anymore. Instead of improving vocabulary alternatives, it is focusing on gamification. The Duolingo app face is now utterly revolting, with its crying, melting ugliness. I used to enjoy it and it certainly helped to improve my French and German, but I do not want to play a game, or compete or earn points, I just want to learn. How in earth do they think that an ugly crying or melting face is going to encourage people to study on it? I see my feelings about it are quite common.

I was given 1 week free subscription and then I was given an extra week of free subscription but once the 1st week ended, I got charged for 1 year of subscription. Scammers, don't buy their subscriptions. And their customer support is AI which always repeats the same message, so there is no customer support.

There is no way to stop cheaters.
I played a game of chess and this player (JUANCA) was playing extremely well but was taking a while for every move, apparently most of his moves were ‘best’ or ‘great’. He was 934 ELO too.

It’s just so bad. You can tell the company doesn’t care, they never reply to any questions and no replies to any of these reviews.
What I find totally strange is how they don’t explain or build up your knowledge of different endings.
The funniest part is when they put a word in that you have no clue or have learnt. Duolingo is basically hoping that when you learn to drive, if you crash enough times that it starts to stick.
It’s a total waste of money and time, the worst language learning tool out there.

When you cancel remove your card from subscriptions as they will still try and take your money even when they shouldn’t

It's easy to learn the basics, but honestly, it's so frustrating. There are too many repetitions and very small steps of learning. The ratings and leagues are putting too much pressure on me, especially since there are no different "servers" for beginners and professionals, which just happened to check how Duolingo works. This makes me very nervous, alongside constant manipulations like in this image. It would really be better if they lowered the competition level. I wouldn't recommend it for people with low self-esteem, because it might make some people question themselves even more.

I think Duolingo has been great in terms of learning the language but not speaking the language. However, the customer service is horrible. I have written them seven times about a glitch i have and only received an automated response. It’s never been fixed. I am paying for the service and it’s frustrating to have no accountability on their end. There is no one you can call or email to get it fixed. Susie Q

Awful experience. I kept on getting emails to continue using the app and learn languages. When I decided to do so, all I get is the option for a paid option. I am leaving Duolingo and turning to other better AI assisted apps that are free and more generous.

I purchased the one year subscription to Duolingo. Didn't use it and after one year received a notice that they were deducting the subscription for the next year. Notified back immediately to cancel. They still deducted the subscription unauthorised. They do not respond to my emails to refund the money. Don't trust them.

If I could give negative stars I would never ending constant APP glitches and issues. The language they teach you is bluntly WRONG! For correct answers you get marked as wrong , the pronunciation is so wrong and often very American, nowhere near correct. And a lot of never ending ads dubious.

I have used Duolingo for over a year now and find there is some really useful learning tools for a new language. But recently I have experienced a bug which I have reported several times where the system does not accept a talking answer. This is very very frustrating as I was using a Windows laptop to do lessons. We have also experienced the same bug on an Android phone. It hasn't been fixed after multiple attempts! So had I not renewed a subscription recently I would probably find another provider. A shame because there is a lot of good stuff in Duolingo too which is why 2 stars and not one star. But this bug is a major failing.