Lingofable vs Duolingo: An Honest Comparison

I’ve spent years on the learner side of language apps. By the time I passed the HSK 6 I’d logged around 2,400 hours of Chinese (quite a bit more since), and a decent chunk of the early ones went to apps that felt like progress but weren’t. This post is mostly me trying to save you from repeating that particular mistake in Spanish.

My somewhat unpopular position is that Duolingo is best understood as a games company. This isn’t meant as an insult, as the streaks, leagues, and the owl that guilts you at 11pm are genuinely world-class game design, and their shareholder letters (which lead with daily active users, not learner outcomes) suggest the company sees itself much the same way. The trouble is that a game about Spanish and actually acquiring Spanish part ways surprisingly early. Once you can limp through a simple sentence (or even before), I’d argue you’re better served nearly anywhere else.

What the numbers say

Duolingo’s own commissioned efficacy studies place learners who complete the A2 sections of the Spanish course at around A2 to early B1 in reading and listening, with speaking and writing behind that. And that’s the best case they publish: it covers only the small minority of users who finish said sections at all, and lower-intermediate comprehension is what those years of daily lessons buy you. What’s more, a CHI-published study of the app’s gamification found users with streaks in the hundreds of days who weren’t sure their Spanish had improved; one 600-day user said exactly that. Hundreds of days of “I did my lesson” without ever quite getting to “I understood something in Spanish.” That gap is worth taking seriously before you’re 600 days in yourself.

Why drills stall out

The underlying issue is one of volume. Krashen’s comprehensible input hypothesis (the idea that you acquire language from input you mostly understand, in quantity) has held up remarkably well over the decades, and it matches my own experience: what finally moved my Chinese wasn’t any app’s course path but months of reading books slightly too easy for me.

And volume is precisely what a drill app can’t structurally provide. Duolingo evidently knows this (hence Stories and DuoRadio), but Stories exist in only six courses, run a minute or two each, and sit at fixed points along the path. They’re real input, just in homeopathic doses.

What I’d use for the from-zero weeks instead

Even for the true-beginner stage, where Duolingo is at its best, there are frankly better (and equally free) options. If I were starting Spanish today, I’d work through Language Transfer’s Complete Spanish, a free audio course that actually explains how the language works instead of having you tap cute word tiles, alongside a starter frequency deck in Anki for the first 500 or so words, with SpanishDict on hand for conjugations. A few weeks of that and simple sentences stop being noise, at which point you’ve reached the handoff. (A patient tutor accelerates all of this considerably, if it’s within budget.)

To be fair to the owl (or perhaps I’m just trying to protect my family): the free tier really is a full curriculum, the habit scaffolding genuinely helps people who’ve never stuck with anything for 30 days, and they teach 40 languages to our one. If the streak is the only thing keeping you in contact with Spanish at all, keep it. But I challenge you to demote it to warm-up duty for a week, and see how much faster you actually learn.

All in all

Use whatever gets you through the first weeks (though I’d sooner point you at Language Transfer and a frequency deck than at the owl), and then get yourself reading real Spanish at your level as early as you can. Lingofable’s placement test takes a few minutes and tells you where you stand on the A0–C2 scale; do take it even if you never pay us a cent, as knowing your actual level changes what you choose to read everywhere, not just with us.

I sincerely hope this saves you some of the hours I lost to the wrong apps. And if your streak is at 600 days and your Spanish is thriving regardless — genuinely, tell me! The feedback button in our app goes straight to me, and I’d love to be proven wrong.