Ink Tea Stone Leaf

¿Por qué?

It’s kind of complicated, actually. The short answer is “I hate their policy related to AI.” But you should understand my personal context.

My Duolingo streak was, until Friday, something like 1575 days. I could check the exact number, but I also deleted the app from my phone, so it would be a little inconvenient. But you can see from all those digits that I was a pretty steady user for a good long while there.

I was in the Diamond League of users, due to my consistently high scores each week. This was due to the large number of courses I was taking recently: Spanish (to keep it fresh), Portuguese (to indulge my curiosity about the similarities and differences with Spanish, and try to understand the words of bossa nova songs), and Italian (to further my study of the Romance languages as a whole), plus the recently(?) implemented courses on mathematics and music. Five complete lessons a day will get you pretty high on the leader board, but lately I had even begun to step it up, completing multiple lessons in each set to stave off the increasing competitive pressure in the Diamond League. I’m a bit of a show off.

I had been Duolingo-ing for well over a decade: over the years I’d dabbled in such languages as French, German, Latin, Irish, Yiddish, Korean, Vietnamese, Esperanto, and Klingon. I didn’t harbor any illusions that I was effectively learning to speak any of these tongues, but I always enjoyed learning vocabulary, studying comparative orthography, and solving what I thought of as translation puzzles. I do love puzzles so.

When I was teaching at a small charter school about six or seven years ago, I taught a Spanish elective because we had no foreign language teacher and I could do the introductory stuff with no problem. I signed up my students with Duolingo accounts, so they could progress at their own rates and have something to do besides classwork once a week. Since I had a teacher’s account, they even let me use the app ad-free for way longer than they probably meant to.

I had fun with the Duolingo aesthetic. I liked the owl and the adorable way he used to threaten my life like a mafia boss if my streak was in jeopardy. I liked all the characters and the silly little stories they were involved in; they were always good for a chuckle before I went to bed.

But I uninstalled the app, and I didn’t have to think very hard about it. My wife did too, despite all the encouragement we’d given each other in keeping up our streaks and mutual “friend quests.” No ceremony, no regrets, only the littlest bit of muscle memory bringing my finger back to the customary spot on the home screen.

I have been aware of Duolingo’s decision to fire 10% of its human employees and replace them with AI since January. I didn’t act on that knowledge immediately because I don’t always act on such things—a basic fact of our times is that a lot of things that used to be pretty neat are growing worse over time. They call it “enshittification,” an appropriately shitty word for a shitty concept; perhaps you’ve heard of it. Like the proverbial frog in the boiling water, I let things get worse than they used to be without making any substantial reaction to the circumstances.

I kept my streak going when Duo forced me to choose between paying a subscription fee (which I refused) and watching godawful ads between lessons. I kept it going (to my shame) when they fired a bunch of people I’d never met. Then I saw a quote attributed to Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn: AI can teach more effectively than human instructors, but we’ll still need schools and teachers “because [we] still need childcare.”

Fuuuuuuuuuuck you, dude.

It may be that professional educators will never be able to convince the public that they are more than glorified babysitters. I’m not even going to bother to try. I just know that I’ve had enough of this dude and his arrogance and his embarrassingly reductive view of how education works, or how language works for that matter.

Maybe waiting to be personally disrespected by a company before dropping it is not the height of integrity. But I’ll tell you this: there was nothing in the Duolingo experience for me that was worth validating such an obnoxious attitude. I wish I had decided that months ago.