I’m Changing How I Learn French
I’m past the 2100 day streak on DuoLingo, and I’ve given up.
Sort of.
I still use DuoLingo every day, but I have given up on taking it seriously anymore. In fact, I’ve purposefully minimized my usage of it. And I’ve added new and more “immersive” techniques.
Let me explain:
The Fall of DuoLingo
Lots of people have been making noise in the last few months about how AI is ruining DuoLingo. Its CEO has said that AI is necessary to provide the volume of materials the app needs to maintain all of the languages in its catalog. (Plus math, music, chess, and whatever else it’s branching out to these days.)
I haven’t see it, to be honest. From what I’ve heard, that’s been happening mostly in the less popular languages. French is one of the most popular, so it hasn’t hit there yet. Also, DuoLingo has a history of being quirky and teaching bizarre sentences to keep your attention. That doesn’t at all bother me.
What does bother me is looking at DuoLingo over the nearly six years now that I’ve been using the app and seeing what it’s become. It started as an app with a Feel Good mission to teach the world a new language. Every step it’s made since I’ve started learning with it, however, is a step towards monetizing it harder. The ads are more voluminous and longer and more annoying. Features have been taken away that people used and liked, but required some moderation. New features are all behind the paywall.
I don’t begrudge them the need to make money. They provide a helpful service that deserves to make money. And if they didn’t do their annual sale right after Christmas at the absolute worst time of year to ask me to spend even more money, I probably would be an annual subscriber. I can’t justify the total price for an annual plan or even the monthly one, so it’s never going to happen.
The constant notifications are also growing more absurd by the month. I get notifications at 1:00 am that I’m going to let down one of my friends if I don’t continue our streak that day. I like getting that 10:00 p.m. reminder to do a lesson, so I keep it on. However, this is turning into too large a price to pay.
The final straw for me, though, is their recent move away from hearts and towards the battery power analogy they’re using. It used to be that you could play for as long as you wanted so long as you didn’t make five mistakes and use up all your hearts.
That recently switched to a method where you use a little bit of power for every question you answer. You get back some of that if you hit certain streaks of correct answers. However, in the end, you’re being punished for using the app. There’s no way around it. You will lose all your energy if you play for too long, even if you get every answer right.
I tested this once and I think I made it through four perfect lessons before I ran out of power to do more.
It is now impossible to learn a language in DuoLingo. Nobody wants to suffer through this new system.
I’ve also become disillusioned with everything else in the app. I don’t care anymore about what level I’m at. I don’t force myself to play more on a daily basis so I can get enough points to move to the next level or, at the higher levels, stay where I am.
I’ll go back and take an older and easier round of questions just to keep my streak going and to review random things from the past. If that’s all I have time for in the day, then that’s it.
If I build up a head of steam and start pouring on the points, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to run out of energy, particularly once I’ve reached the point where I’m getting double or triple points for meeting the daily goals.
It’s another anti-reward: Work hard to get those 2x and 3x rounds, and DuoLingo will stop you early because you’re out of power.
Unless you pay. Or watch a LOT of ads.
Quel dommage.
It’s also possible this is a sign of personal growth and maturity. Maybe my ego is strong enough now to handle NOT being in the Diamond League. I can’t deny the strength of a good streak, but at the same rate I’ve used more Streak Freezes this year than any other. I just don’t care enough.
It’s a good bump to remember to do some small amount of French in the day, but it’s not the center of my day anymore.
New Goals?
The goal is still the same in that I want to be able to readles bandes dessinees in their original language. That’s triply true in a day and age where series I’ve enjoyed are no longer being translated. (Hello, “Ekho” and part two of “The Beast“.)
But I can’t deny that I want to be able to speak it, too, now. It almost seems like a waste if I can read it but can’t speak it. Weirdly, people who know I’ve been learning French like to challenge me to say something. It’s a thing people to, I suppose, and I need to have a sentence ready to go to impress them that sounds super smart, even if it’s the most basic thing ever.
One other thing happened, as mentioned previously. I traveled to Europe for a week. Spent it in Prague, where I didn’t know anything more than hello and please and thank you. But being immersed in that world, I couldn’t help but pick up a few words without even trying over the course of the week. It was street signs, advertisements, instructions on the walls, and more. It was all the little things that helped push me forward, even when I wasn’t trying.
Conventional wisdom is that the best way to learn a language is through immersion, and I lived a very small part of that in that week. I wasn’t even trying. And Czech is NOT a romance language. It sounds like nothing else I’ve ever learned. (I took Spanish and French in school.)
Then, being in the French airport and attempting to speak a little bit of it and read some signs convinced me that I needed to be able to speak it out loud. Also, my wife may have given me a hard time that I couldn’t understand anything I heard coming from the announcements in the airport. To be fair, I could, but it was just isolated phrases. I’m not an expert in Fast French, thanks.
How I’m Learning Now
I’m still on DuoLingo. I’m going at a much slower speed and that doesn’t bother me. I’m getting a bit of “book learning” from that, discovering new words and phrases. Every little bit helps, and it only costs me about five minutes a day.
I will not be paying for the app or trying to speed run it or take it too seriously, however.
But after watching this video from Olly Richards, I’m listening to a lot of French. His plan in that video is a little over the top. He was doing 2 – 3 hours of listening to Italian spoken every day for weeks on end. It was a language he had zero knowledge of. He didn’t try to translate every word. He listened for repetition and phrases and words and pronunciation. Later, he studied some vocabulary and conjugations.
I’ve already done some of those last two things, so maybe this will go a little faster for me, despite not totally immersing myself for hours a day? Can I rewire my brain on a half hour or less a day, even if it’s over a much longer period of time? I’d be fine with that.
I’m subscribed to a bunch of podcasts now, and try to listen to spoken French for at least a half hour a day. Last weekend, I had a day where I listened to closer to two hours, just because I was doing some house cleaning and errands. I had LOTS of time to listen to podcasts.
The trick is to practice that immersion thing by listening to just French. Even if I’m lost and confused, the goal is to get my ears used to it. I do mix in some mixed English/French podcasts, too, to give my brain a slight break. It can be headache inducing to think that hard all the time.
The Podcasts
Here are some podcast choices:
Inner French – Running weekly since 2017, each episode is completely in French and explains some facet of life. I’m starting from episode #1 here and have listened to episodes on robots, the new President of Fance (in 2017, that would be Macron), and stereotypes about the French.
Coffee Break French – I’ve listened to this in the past. It’s more a teaching podcast, mostly in English with some brief French conversations and explanations of the same. They’ve gone through some different phases over the years. Right now, I’m listening to their first “En Route” series, where they drive through the south of France and basically audio vlog the experience, with lots of conversations with locals. It’s a good mix of culture, learning, and conversation.
Journal en Francais Facile – This is a daily news podcast. It’s ten minutes long and covers multiple stories of events happening around the world. I’m not sure I’d call it “facile,” though. It feels at least a full step above that. I saw someone on a Reddit thread call is “Advanced.” It probably is, but it’s also the thing I’ve listened to the most regularly in the last month. At 10 minutes a day, it’s doable. And I’m definitely picking up new vocabulary and some sentence structures from listening to it. It’s all news based, so I’m hearing a certain set of words more often than I would anywhere else I try to learn a langauge.
I also occasionally listen to an entire news story and have no idea what they’re talking about, but my ears perk up when I hear a random phrase I know and suddenly feel smarter again.
On the website, you can read the English translation of the episodes as they scroll by, in sync with the French. It’s a little confusing that way sometimes, though, as words don’t translate 1:1. I’d love to see the French and English written side by side somehow. But now I’m just being greedy…
C’est Plus Que De La SF – This is a weekly podcast interviewing people from all sides of genre pop culture. It’s mostly writers and movie/TV folks, but comics creators show up often enough. I just listened to an interview with the creators of “Orbital,” and have more episodes lines up talking to Mathieu Bablet, Francois Schuiten (!), and Fabien Vehlmann. This is not “easy” French at all, but it’s very conversational. You definitely hear a different set of phrases and more conversational structures in this podcast than you do the more carefully scripted and prepared podcasts.
Actua BD – This is the podcast of the excellent site, ActuaBD.com, where I get a bit of my Franco-Belgian comics news from. As you might expect, it’s a lot of interviews with auteurs et dessinateurs (writers and artists). I’ve talked about a lot of them here: Jose Luis Munuera, Jul, Frederic Maffre, Pierre Alary, and more.
I also want to go back and watch more French TV without the subtitles on. Maybe I”ll start with “Asterix and the Big FIght” or rewatch “Lupin.” I don’t know. I’ll come up with something.
YouTube
I’m also watching more of the instructional channels on YouTube. A partial list:
Loic Suberville: OK, this is mostly for the humorous shorts poking out inconsistencies in various languages, featuring English and French. (German is a particularly funny guest.)
Easy French: Everything is in French with English and French subtitles as specific situations, phrases, grammar rules, etc. are explained. I like hearing it while I read, and I find the instructions often cement concepts I figured out in DuoLingo but couldn’t exactly explain. As with the SF podcast above, it can be very conversational with its man on the street interviews.
Learn French With Alexa: This one feels like old school foreign language education, with rules, white boards, lists, and conjugation. Handy stuff and useful, but not necessarily exciting.
Story Talks French: This is a recent find that is both awful and wonderful. This channel produces 20 minute videos that tell stories entirely in French. Very basic, very simple, very straightforward. Silly stories just to give you a chance to listen to dialogue and learn new words. The animation produced on top of it is likely AI. I should hate it on principal, I know, but it’s so laughably badly done (the airplane taking off in front of the Eiffel tower, for example) that I just laugh at it and learn from the story. There are far worse uses of AI on YouTube than this.
There are some other channels I look at because YouTube keeps recommending them to me, but I haven’t subscribed to them just yet. There are lots of channels about living in Paris or how to learn a language, but the latter gets repetitive fast while the former isn’t exactly what I’m looking for. I’ve recently picked up “French Mornings With Elisa” as a podcast based on the YouTube videos I’ve seen from her over the years. She speaks clearly and at a lower level, I think, to help new learners.
Yet To Be Done
A lot of these podcasts and videos offer full transcriptions. I need to listen a second time to some of them while reading the transcripts to see what I’m missing. I have to think it would be a great help. On the other hand, the podcasts I like to listen to when I’m driving or walking the dog or doing work around the house. I don’t have much time to listen to them all over again while sitting down and reading. That’s why I listen to podcasts — it fills that hole in my listening schedule nicely.
At some point, either I’ll get more serious or curiosity will get the better of me and I’ll start doing more of that.
I’m also repeating some phrases as I hear them while I’m listening to podcasts in the car. Obviously, if you want to speak a language, you need to practice it. I’m not up to using one of those on-line sites to be paired for a live tutor or anything crazy like that, but I’m trying to wrap my tongue around some of these things.
Testing My Levels
I picked up a few recent Spirou Journal issues and some previews from the six book “The Mastodon Workshop” series to test my French. I’m nowhere near perfect with them, but I had to look up far fewer words than I thought I would. Some pages I got through entirely, picking up a couple stray words from their context more than anything else. (Also, Lewis Trondheim as the gruff workaholic is hilarious. I”d love to get my hands on those books, but they’re completely un-findable in my usual spots.)
Still, I’m sure this only puts me at an A2 level with flashes of B1, at best. There’s a long way yet to go.
But onwards I trudge!
Has it been 6 years already ? I remember when you started and how enthusiastic you were at the time. So was the gamification of learning just a fad or what ? To disappear through a combination of users losing interest and producers being too greedy for their own good ?
I never really bought into the trend of gamification of anything as a valid way to motivate. Nothing beats effort and commitment. But nobody wants to work hard at anything these days, not worth it, is seems, under this global feeling of apathy and nihilism. Wait, is it just me being moody as crappy year 2025 comes to an end, with nothing really better in sight ? Perhaps.
When it comes to learning languages, there is a plateau that at some point you reach and stay on by not being immersed in it. When I was learning English, I was always good in school (better than my french cohorts, which is not that high a bar I guess), but that is also because I enjoyed the music (thank you Sir Paul) in my downtime, and the late night TV ciné-club watching B&W Hollywood classics with subtitles. When I got the chance to move for work and live in London I was struck by the gap between my then (supposedly good) level and the every day colloquial. But being immersed in it made my progress exponential, since I had the basic grammar and vocabulary. Especially TV, the BBC was an invaluable trigger for me up to using English as my primary language today. Oh, and of course american comic books.
At this point in your learning journey, I would definitely suggest immersion. You can’t probably move here (yet),but French movies with subtitles (have you tried american movies dubbed in TRUEFRENCH with FR subtitles. lots of fun to be had with YT free streaming alone). One of the good ways to also familiarise your ear is to listen to FR news podcasts, main French radios RTL, Europe 1 and France Inter all have short news bulletins (around 10 mn every hour) you can listen to on the go.
Being an avid reader, I was always more interested in the written word, so nespapers were very useful to me to familiarise with current expressions and turns of phrase, but also topical references, so that migh work for you too. At some point your mind links visual and audio, then everything starts to make sense.
Oh by the way, it’s QUEL dommage, not quelle. Dommage is a masculine noun.
You’re not wrong about people not wanting to work. I’m ready for it, though. I just need more time. 😉
I think gamification of learning could still work, but DuoLingo’s need to feed the bottom line won out over gamification and just turned it into frustration. When I think back to what DuoLingo was like when I started, it’s a BIG change. 10x more ads, some AI grafted on, the removal of features people liked and made it almost feel like a community, and then the final straw of the battery power thing that turns away users. The learning process feels like a distant third place reason for DuoLingo to exist anymore. It’s a real shame.
That said, DuoLingo is never going to be great for helping you speak a new language or for having conversations. There, obviously, you’ll need experience with real people and some level of immersion. That was fine when it was all about reading comics. Now that I kinda sorta want to speak it a bit more and, more importantly, I’ve come far enough that I want to learn to think in the language and not spend all that time translating it in my head, DuoLingo is just not as useful. It’s still good for learning some vocabulary and a bit of sentence construction stuff, though, which is why I’m not giving up on it. I’ve just come far enough that I need something else, too.
I need to do a short post soon with updates on what it is I’m listening to most often, and what YouTube channels I’m watching the most. There have been some changes since I wrote this up.
Random thought: I love how speaking French can cover up a certain lack of knowledge. You can’t HEAR the difference between many conjugations of the same verb, for example. Faire is guilty of this, for one example. And if I miss an un/une difference, I’ll just chalk it up to my bad french accent. 😉
And as an English-first learner, I’ll never get the masculine/feminine thing right with nouns. I will go fix that one for dommage, though. =)
You can be forgiven for that, it’s the main issue for many non-french speakers (and even for some natives). Jane Birkin lived in France for some 50 years and she hardly ever got nouns gender right 🙂
My Duo streak is at 825 for Spanish (with a short stint of German before we went on vacation a couple years ago) and I’m also on the verge of giving up, but I’m sticking with it because I’m still learning enough to justify the hassle.
I completely agree with you, that energy bar is garbage. Most of the time I can’t even complete 3 lessons even without making any mistakes.
But my Spanish has improved a lot, on our recent Mexican holiday vacation to visit my wife’s family I got a lot of compliments about my progress. It used to be that I’d get overwhelmed after 20 minutes of my wife’s Tias talking fast around me and my head wanted to explode. But now I can listen and almost understand most of the conversations around a table, I’ll still get overwhelmed and confused when there’s too many people talking at the same time. And while I struggle quite a bit to form coherent sentences and tend to keep it simple I’m generally able to get my point across.
I’m with JC that immersion is best for learning, as the longer I spend around her family the more comfortable I get with the language.
So Duolingo still has its use (for now…) as far as learning new words and verb conjugation, but I also need to practice speaking (which I should do more at home with the wife) and reading more. To help with that I bought a book about typography and El Eternauta 1969 (the shorter version drawn by Breccia, it’s from Argentina, but couldn’t find any interesting Mexican graphic novels). As for listening material I’m not really into podcasts so I watch lucha libre instead. Wrestling and comics is what helped me learn English as a teen, so I figure it’ll work for Spanish haha.
I think that’s the thing that really keeps us going in language learning — using it somewhere, no matter in how small a way. There’s a buzz you get from using it that you don’t get from finishing a lesson in DuoLingo or even understanding a french comic strip without having to go to Google Translate for something. The latter is still meaningful and useful, but being able to speak back and forth in it is powerful stuff.
So, basically, what I hear you saying is that I married the wrong woman 18 years ago and should have held out for a french woman on a visa or something? 😉
Are you keeping up with Spanish idioms at all? One of the things I’ve heard can be difficult in learning a new language is the phrases that every country has that’s unique to them. They make absolutely no sense to anyone outside their country, but are every day things when there. French has one that goes something like “À bon chat, bon rat” for “you’ve met your match.” And I’ve seen a couple of videos from people who talk about immersion where that’s the part that always throws them for a loop the hardest….
This is really interesting, you point out a notion that language apps probably do not address properly, it’s the constant evolution of the idioms, expressions, words deformations and creation, etc. I do remember “À bon chat, bon rat” from reading it in books from my childhood that belonged to my parents or grandparents, but that saying was already outdated by then (I’d say it goes back from the La Fontaine days, so roughly two hundred years ago). If you asked a Gen Z today or even a millenial what that expression means I’m sure that 98% of them would have no idea. Current generations use terms that were not in the language ten or even five years ago, so it’s a constant race against the clock to stay relevant, shed the old and absorb the new. When I listen to modern french rap lyrics (whenever I can surmise what they are saying, which is hardly) many of these expressions leave me totally clueless. Yet apparently that is how they speak today and when I see this in writing (for example in publications aimed at younger readers, like Spirou) I can sometimes use context clues to understand the general meaning (not always) but I always enjoyed knowing the etymology, the origin of how words and expressions were formed (classic education latin / greek, I’m guilty) so you can imagine my frustration, growing more and more every day.
First-time commenter, here. In the past I’ve replied to your posts & comments at Reddit, but I’m not sure you ever saw them. I do like your Pipeline project, and have it highlighted at my site’s resources page (below). Okay, anyway– when I first saw you state that you were only concerned about reading French, and thus, didn’t care about pronunciation, I was pretty sure that was eventually going to be a problem. The issue is that learning and memory-involved tasks are generally best done synchronistically as I understand it, which is why for example “Shisa Kanko” is used in Japanese railways, in order for train personnel to help remember key decisions and statuses. But that’s just one example out of countless others, such as using mnemonics to help learn, with the overall goal being in trying to activate as many different parts of the brain as practical to assist in absorption. That said, I get how frustrating it is that spoken French is so far ahead of what is essentially an outdated written model, with up to five or so letters at the ends of words regularly either not pronounced, or done so almost inaudibly.
Also, while I agree with you that DuoLingo has “enshittified” to an extent, I still find it eminently usable, part of a valuable, small arsenal of tools I use to learn French. And yes, I get that the new points system is annoying if you’re in a place where the only option is to use your smartphone to learn, but if you’re in any other situation, including next to a computer, I find it easy as pie to just tuck the smartphone away while it plays its ad that I’ll never see and can’t hear. Easy-peasy. Btw, I find that the streak-oriented learning style they try to push works terribly for me. The main problem being that by learning one lesson a day (for example), one won’t finish the full A1-B2 course for something like 15yrs by my last calculation! So, bursts of learning have worked far better for me, again supplemented with other tools, like humble Google Translate in order to reinforce pronunciation (yes, it’s a thing there).
Oh, and speaking of that, I’ve found that when one’s in a hurry, and if one has a digital comic in whatever foreign language, Google-Translate can 1) help read the sucker, and 2) help you learn the language as you read, going from left-to-right. A small how-to article on that is here: https://piefed.social/c/eurographicnovels/p/1577350/google-translate-has-upped-its-game
NOTE: Not sure if this comment will get through, as there’s a tonne of javascripts that needed enabling on this page. Anyway, cheers!
First of all, apologies for taking so long to approve your post. It got mixed up in a small avalanche of spam I had to sort through from the last month or more. But now that I’ve approved one message, all future comments will be approved automatically (unless you include a link to some Bitcoin scheme or something. 😉
You’re right about language learning and engaging the whole brain, of course. I think I’m just finding that out myself now. I’m looking at a couple of other learning techniques to progress my learning, as well. I’ll report on that in the future, though. It’s too new to mention any results. I do find, though, that my french “accent” when I read anything out loud has improved a LOT just in the last month after listening to so much french out loud. I’m not sure I’m right with any of it, but I am using a lot more nasal sounds, so I’m heading in the right direction!
And, yes, DuoLingo is a disaster as a language learning app, but it is still a source of my education. It’s just a far more limited one that I think less about. I still learn vocabulary through it and some sentence structures. I’m just satisified with spending less than ten minutes a day with it mostly, and then not caring about things like what level I’m on. I am still addicted to the streak, though. It’s far trendier to think of it as a atomic habit, though. 😉
And that’s a good use of Google Translate. I’m using now to read a comic, but it’s more like me reading a panel, guessing what means, and then passing my camera over it and watching the live translation. Having the two pages side by side like that would be great. There IS also an open source project out there that takes a comics page, uses AI to find the word balloons, read the words, translate the language, and output a new page re-lettered. Last I saw, it was very early days and the new lettering would often miss the balloon shape. Hope they’re still working on it. I’ve lost the link. Must be on GitHub. I probably saw it on Reddit in the first place…
Thanks for the thoughtful thoughts and, again, apologies for the delay. The Javascript is annoying and I do my best to limit it, but it provides useful functionality I don’t want to get rid of.