Is a paid Duolingo membership worth it?

August 9, 2023 8:04 PM

I have a snowflake language situation and am not sure if a premium Duolingo membership is worth it. Do you have one? Do you like it? Is this an app worth paying for?

My snowflake situation: I am a native English speaker. I have worked very hard on my French proficiency (including several months of tutoring from a native speaker) to qualify for bilingual government jobs. I am currently low-advanced (functionally bilingual but I make the odd gender/agreement mistake and proofread carefully). My primary 'daily use' of French has been at work.

For Reasons, I will be working in a different area this fall, and will not be using my French at work. I would like to keep up my skills so that when I am inevitably reassigned, I will be ready. I have been noodling around with Duolingo and keep getting pestered to pay for the premium membership. I am not theoretically opposed to this if it's worth it, but a) I am not really sure how long-term suitable it is for achieving/maintaining serious fluency beyond the 'ordering food in a café when I travel' level and b) life is very expensive right now and I am trying to avoid leaking precious money to nickle-and-dime subscriptions.

So...worth it? Not?

posted by ficbot to Education (14 answers total)

Normally I would say go for it, the premium membership has been super worth it for me. But it's definitely much better suited for lower levels of sophistication than you're currently at—in my experience it's just poor at dealing with complex multi-clause sentences and for anything lower you don't need special practice. I'd suggest just reading the occasional newspaper or novel, at your level it won't be too much and you will be able to recover your fluency pretty quickly when needed.
posted by derrinyet at 8:22 PM on August 9, 2023 [9 favorites]

I'm not sure your location but our state library in Kansas offers Mango languages for free. Maybe something to ask about at your library?
posted by aetg at 8:30 PM on August 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm less advanced than you are in my target language and did not find Duolingo Premium to be useful, with the caveat that I used it 3 years ago.
posted by watermelon at 8:49 PM on August 9, 2023

I was a Duolingo Plus user for a couple of years but I didn't find the additional benefits worth it. I've gotten a lot more value out of a one-time lifetime membership for Babbel.
posted by mezzanayne at 8:52 PM on August 9, 2023

Duolingo is not great for your needs IMO; (I'm somewhere in the A2/B1 range I reckon, having learned in grade school and I'm using Duolingo to refresh it for a trip next month). it is built on a dedicated track of structured lessons you traverse in order, so it is much better for learning - if you can jump to the point you start learning - than for maintaining, because you wind up having to do half a dozen very similar lessons about (real example) future simple with irregular -oir ending verbs. Although it won't actually explicitly say that's what you're doing, so you don't get the grammatical context.

I recommend using more immersive techniques to maintain fluency; watching TV or movies, listening to podcasts, reading books. If you're in Canada, the Mauril app repurposes CBC content for skill building. Those will maintain your fluency and boost vocabulary. Even better if it's something that's related to your job -- keep up with the news in your field in French; that'll feed two birds with one scone. Pimsleur advanced levels if your library has it.
posted by Superilla at 10:37 PM on August 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

If you get long enough streaks they'll typically give you a couple days of free premium trial as a reward. My experience has been that the difference is mostly that you can keep playing for much longer because you don't run out of hearts. If you WANT to play longer but are limited by heart deficit, it might be worth it. But you aren't going to get deeper, better lessons than you're currently getting for free.

What you really want is to keep thinking in your already good French. I agree with others that the best way is to try to get immersion wherever you can - read all your news and books in French, listen to French podcasts, change the user interfaces of your most-used websites to default to French. You want to keep the connections in your brain active and growing stronger.
posted by potrzebie at 10:54 PM on August 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

I agree that it is not worth it at your level and won't be an effective way to maintain your functionally bilingual French.

Watching series or listening to podcasts is great, especially if you can find one related to your field. You could also look into finding a native speaker online who would want to do a language exchange that benefits you both - that way you will actually be speaking French during this time!
posted by Blissful at 11:18 PM on August 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

A Duolingo subscription isn't paying for access to better educational content, it's paying to reduce pain - getting rid of adverts, being allowed to recover from a mistake and continue rather than being penalised for it, being able to do certain types of lesson without having to save up in-game currency first - and for access to some nominally better targeted exercises alongside the standard path. If you're finding it useful to keep your skills fresh, and removing those annoyances / hindrances to use will make you more likely to keep using it, then it's worth it. But if you're finding the existing content inadequate for your needs, upgrading to paid won't help.

You can do a two-week free trial if you sign up for a one-year subscription, or a one-week free trial if you sign up for a month (caveat emptor: the per-month subscription model works out at much more expensive over the course of a year). Might be worth doing that, seeing if Super makes any difference to you, and cancelling in good time if it isn't. NB they promise they'll remind you when the free trial is coming to an end so that you can cancel if you want to; my experience is that this does not happen, so set a reminder yourself.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 12:14 AM on August 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

If you are already mentally budgeting for Duolingo, why not pay for a few italki sessions instead?
posted by cendawanita at 3:42 AM on August 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'd spend that money on French books and conversations (in person or via Zoom) with a native French speaker. Also switch whatever streaming media you're watching into French dub unless it's something you're explicitly watching for the actors' voices.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 3:45 AM on August 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think ManyLeggedCreature has it - if you find Duolingo useful, paying for it makes it much more pleasant to use. The annual membership is much cheaper than the monthly, and occasionally there are deals to be had (one of my credit cards sometimes has a "get $x back when you spend $y on Duolingo" deal, e.g.).

I'm an intermediate French speaker (B1-ish, I can accomplish daily life tasks in French, even to the extent of getting my car from the tow yard, but I can't express myself with much nuance and my listening comprehension is not great) and I like Duolingo for helping drill subjunctive, conditional, gender, agreement, etc., plus I loathe ads and the price is not prohibitive for me to I pay for it.

I don't think it's much of a substitute for using French in your day-to-day but personally I do find it useful as an adjunct to other avenues (in-person classes/discussion groups, consuming French-language media, etc.).
posted by mskyle at 5:41 AM on August 10, 2023

I am B1/B2 and forgot to cancel my Duolingo trial so am locked in for a year. It has certainly kept me using Duolingo, which means I am using French at least a few minutes a day. I would say it is worth it to keep using the program (the ads are horribly frustrating) but I am not learning anything new really.
posted by quadrilaterals at 6:14 AM on August 10, 2023

I think I may be in your particular blizzard because I work for the federal government and became bilingual for those purposes. In my experience, Duolingo is not great for being able to pass the tests the Government of Canada (GOC) administers because it doesn't cater to what they're testing for (which is a specific skillset and not actually fluency by any stretch) and I would say that Duo will only get you to around a B1 - though that might be fine for what you need. It certainly wouldn't hurt you, though, especially if you focus on the more advanced topics, like subjunctive, the if clauses, etc.

Instead, I would see about getting a French teacher who specializes in the test you are taking. If this is the GOC Second Language Evaluation (SLE) we're talking about, see if you can find someone who used to work for the Canada School of Public Service as a French teacher or who at least specializes in those exams. Not sure where you are located, but looking at the Ottawa Kijiji boards for a French tutor with notes about the GOC SLE tests in their ad would be a good place to start, since this is big business in Ottawa.

I've also commented elsewhere here about approaches to the Government of Canada french testing so that might help your studying. I would also do practice Dictées to hone your grammar (written) skills, since they are awesome at getting at exactly what I describe in my previous comment.
posted by urbanlenny at 10:35 AM on August 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

I paid for a year-long Duolingo plus family plan in June and didn't realize that the family and friends who were interested already had plus. While I wait for theirs to run out, I have room to invite you if you want to try it out (no guarantees about the length I can leave you on beyond a couple months).
posted by Eyelash at 7:41 PM on August 10, 2023