I Practiced German on Duolingo for 2 Months for a 7-Day Trip. Was It Worth It?

Emboldened by my abilities, I decided to drop Spanish lessons in my second year of college and replace them with Russian night classes. I had an upcoming train trip from Paris to St. Petersburg in the works and decided it was a good idea to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, as well as the basics of greetings, counting, etc. before I spent six days on board a Russian train and two weeks in Russia. While it was a decent idea, two semesters of classes weren’t nearly enough, and I spent more time than I’d like to admit pointing and gesturing to make myself understood while in Russia. Nearly 20 years later, I can still decipher a few things, but most of the Russian I had is gone. And so is the Spanish I so carelessly let go of.

I never stopped working on my English, however. I studied English language throughout college, went off to live and work in Ireland for several years, completed a Masters Degree in Translation, and have been living in Canada for 15 years. English comes just as easily to me as French now.

While I always tend to learn some phrases in the local language of the places I travel to, whether that’s Corfu, Rome, or Istanbul, until this past spring, I had never actually started an intense language course since my early 20s. When I was invited to spend a week on the island of Rügen in Germany, I decided it was time to get serious. I downloaded Duolingo on my phone and went to work.

Photo: Morgane Croissant / Duolingo

I started as a true beginner: I knew fewer than five words in German. I set myself a goal of practicing 15 minutes every day. And let me tell you: It’s harder than you think to stick to language-learning goals when using Duolingo.

While for the first 20 days the app’s smart gamification of the language-learning process made me eager to meet my goal, it quickly became a chore. Not because I was lazy or because the lessons were difficult, but because the free version of the app is extremely irritating.

While many users find the notifications reminding them to practice to be relentless, It’s the ads that got me. After every lesson, a 20-second ad, which I had to watch to continue learning, would pop up. Most of the time they were advertisements for mobile games, but there were also ads for local construction companies or for ridiculous fitness apps promising to help with belly fat. All those ads were always cleverly followed by Duolingo’s own 20-second plug for Super Duolingo, a premium version of the app that promises no ads so you can “learn without interruptions”. See what they did there?

Photo: Morgane Croissant / Duolingo

Beside the promise of no ads, Super Duolingo has another big advantage: No matter the number of mistakes you make, you can keep the lesson going. By contrast, the free version blocks you for around five hours if you use up all your hearts by making too many errors. And if you wait until late at night to start your 15-minute practice and use up all your hearts, you’re well and truly cooked. You can wave goodbye to that streak of yours.

I’m not cheap, but I’m stubborn and I don’t like being manipulated into spending money so I refused to sign up for the premium version. To entice me, the app let me try Super Duolingo for a few days and I have to say, it was a much more pleasant experience, but I was still not ready to pay for the upgrade.

Every time I completed a lesson the ad kept urging me to sign up, enter my credit card numbers, and get Super Duolingo for two weeks for free, but I resisted. I was especially put out by the fact that the monthly price for Super Duolingo wasn’t displayed anywhere: not on their website and not in the ads they bombarded me with. (by doing research online I learnt that it is $6.99 per month.)

Photo: Duolingo

In the end, I continued to use the free app and managed a 70-day streak, i.e. over two full months of daily practice, before my trip. I had just started learning how to count to 10 in German when I boarded the train bound for Deutschland. Something told me I was going to struggle.

And struggled I did. While most of time context helped my understanding of what was said to me and I always tried to answer in German, the most important phrase in my arsenal quickly became: Ich spreche kein Deutsch, sprechen sie Englisch? (I don’t speak German, do you speak English?). Of course, the Germans, whose reputation for speaking very good English precedes them, obliged kindly.

Despite the difficulties, I was able to use some of the vocabulary and pronunciation I had learned from the app in multiple situations, including at the bakery, on the train, and at the hotel, but I could not handle any further questions or details asked of me. I could order salad but I could not ask for a specific dressing, I could ask for water or the bill at a restaurant but I did not know how to say I didn’t want the sparkling kind or request to pay with cash.

70 days of language practice isn’t enough to get you through even a short and simple visit. I might have been more motivated to practice more had I signed up for Super Duolingo, but even then, I would likely have needed more time — five to six months to my estimation. My experience with Russian showed me that 20 years ago but apparently my inflated sense of self constantly takes over.

Learning a language from scratch is always worth the effort. If anything, it works as brain gymnastics. But even if you speak several languages already and are very confident about your abilities, you should never leave it to the last minute. Unless you want to be humbled real fast.