8 Duolingo changes I want to see after a 1,000-day streak

I quite like Duolingo, which seems an unfashionable thing to say in 2026. It may have been a trailblazer in language-learning apps, but, at best, it divides opinion these days. I certainly can’t blame anyone who has given up on the app. There are various reasons to dislike what it has become, or its limitations as a tool. I’m also considering my options because the list of solid Duolingo alternatives is growing fast, but I’m a loyal customer and resistant to change. I also think Duolingo does a lot of things right, and with a handful of changes, it could reclaim its language-learning crown.

I’m not talking about crazy benevolence like making the entire app free for everyone — you might as well hope Duo will do your taxes for you. Let’s be realistic and take the obvious stuff as read. But after years of defending the app and building a 1,125-day Duolingo streak, here are the changes I’d ideally like to see.

Love it or hate it, there’s a very good reason that Duolingo is so gamified. Everything from the gems and leaderboards to the silly characters and the zingy noises is meant to lure you in. That’s enough to put plenty of people off, but I choose to embrace it. I’m happy to yield to an addictive app — that is, as long as I’m learning. I like competing against others and building my streak, but I can only justify it to myself while my Spanish is improving. The problem is that Duolingo gives you too many ways to pretend you’re learning.

One example I always fall back on is Match Madness, where you have to match words in two languages against the clock. If you get very good at this, you can earn points and fly up the leaderboard way faster than if you go through the standard lessons. I’m a beast at it by now, but that’s not much of a boast because I’m barely learning anything. I can beat the top levels while my mind wanders and takes in almost nothing. It’s bilingual whack-a-mole. Still, if I need an extra 500 points on a Sunday to win the league and I’ve had a long day, this is where I’m headed.

By all means, have these side-shows, Duo, but let’s make doing lessons the focus.

Speaking of ways you can compete without learning, it’s insanely easy to cheat on Duolingo. I stumbled across a really obvious cheat in the speaking practice section last year. Since then, the UI for that section and the rest of the app have been overhauled, but inexplicably, you can still use this cheat. I don’t use it regularly, but if I just want to keep the streak alive when I’m tired at the end of a long day, I have succumbed to temptation. In my defense, I also snitched on myself and the rest of you by imploring the app to shut it off.

It won’t surprise you to learn that this isn’t the only way you can cheat at Duolingo, and I’m not talking about anything as sophisticated as hacking. The ways to cheat are out there on the internet if you want to find them, but I don’t want them. I need to improve my Spanish, so take away the temptation, por favor.

There’s no way that the Duolingo team doesn’t know about these cheats, so it’s strange that no changes have been made. It would be in the company’s interest to do so. Not to ensure everyone is learning while earning points — that’s nice, but I’m pretty confident they don’t care about that — but because it creates a level playing field. People as tragic as me like to compete in the leagues, and if you’re competing against people who are cheating and getting away with it, it’s dispiriting.

Duolingo can teach me textbook Spanish, but that only takes me so far. I live in Mexico, and it’s no secret that the Spanish spoken here is very different from that spoken in Spain. I think I actually got lucky in that Duo seems primarily focused on an American audience, so Latin American Spanish is prevalent on the app. That in itself, of course, has many regional variations. If you’re using the app to pass a school test, it’s fine. If you want to understand the language in a particular country or region, it’s less useful.

Even if it was teaching me the finest Mexican Spanish, there’s still a leap to understanding locals. Most people, wherever they live, use slang in conversation. You probably do it, and often without even noticing. Again, there’s no reason why Duolingo can’t give you, and itself, an advantage by teaching some of the most common words you’re actually likely to hear on the street, rather than those you’ll see on a news site or public notice.

If I were meeting Duo the owl in a cafe or on a bus, I’d have no problem getting by. The trouble is that most Mexicans aren’t purple-haired cartoon teenagers asking whether the bear has a suitcase.

Hey Duo, if I just swapped my usual Spanish learning for Korean, do you think it might be because I’m about to go on vacation? And while I’m in a new country and culture for a limited amount of time, how likely am I to want to set aside time for my usual language practice? I want to enjoy my trip and not be conjugating verbs in a hotel room at 11:58 PM.

A Vacation Mode is possibly the most glaring omission possible from a leading language-learning app. I should have the option to freeze my streak and the league I’m in while I’m out exploring a new place. Duolingo offers streak freezes, but you only get a few, so anything beyond a long weekend isn’t protected. A streak should be motivational, not a hostage situation with push notifications.

This could be abused, of course, but there would be all manner of ways to counter that. It could be GPS confirming you’re away from your hometown, only offering two or three ‘blocks’ per year, or whatever — I don’t need to be the details guy. This one is a no-brainer when it comes to Duolingo changes.

I pay for Duolingo, but this is one of the changes that will be at the top of the list for many free subscribers. The app introduced a new energy system last year, and it couldn’t have been a more shameless example of enshitification. Instead of having hearts that you only lose when you make a mistake, you now have energy that depletes based on lessons, perfect or not. That means you can only do so many lessons for free each day.

If Duolingo had always been this way, perhaps it wouldn’t be much of a big deal. The problem is that the app set a standard and then massively lowered it as a cash grab, leaving scores of free users understandably upset. It pushed my colleague Megan to leave the app for good, and she won’t have been the only one.

Maybe this made the owners a bit more money from subscriptions in the short term, but it’s also short-term thinking. As its competitors gain ground in both number and innovation, treating loyal users like this could easily backfire. Roll it back, please. Some people don’t care about gems or points or XP-multiplying potions — they just want to learn.

Some Duolingo users will want a general introduction to the language, but many others will have a specific purpose in mind. It could be an upcoming vacation, help with speaking to customers, or maybe even dating. But it doesn’t matter, because this week Duolingo is teaching you how to talk about criminals and bank robberies.

With AI no doubt driving the app, there seems to be no reason why the direction of the learning can’t be carefully chosen or steered. This should include more real-world scenarios relevant to each user, or greater focus on a specific reason for speaking the language.

And while we’re at it, how about the option to learn how to talk about current or upcoming events? When I next get a haircut, maybe the barber will be keen to talk about the upcoming FIFA World Cup in Mexico. It would be great if my version of Duolingo had anticipated this and prepared me with the right terminology. I doubt he’ll ask me whether the duck is under the table.

Far be it from me to request more AI in an app, but Duolingo seems to be ignoring the existence of chatbots. It’s 2026, so a top-tier language app should be quasi-sentient and ready to help you understand in any way that suits you.

I don’t pay for the ‘Max’ subscription as I’m not interested in an AI video call for extra money, but I’m pretty sure you’re still limited in the feedback you get at that level. At the Super tier most paying users like me use, there’s now an “Explain my answer” button, but it just gives you a fairly textbook reason about how the words on the screen are used or conjugated.

If I have more questions, I don’t need to pay anything more to Duolingo. I can switch to ChatGPT or Gemini and ask questions like “Would this sentence work in Mexico?” or “Can you give me three more examples using the same rule?” Duolingo needs to add this facility, or it’ll be overtaken by an app that does.

The last of my Duolingo changes is a bit in the weeds, but it’s a personal bugbear. As you will have gathered if you’ve read this far, I recently tried to learn a bit of Korean on Duolingo. I was going there to visit family, but I gave up almost immediately.

The problem was that I wasn’t starting out on the journey to becoming fluent in Korean; I just wanted to pick up some words and phrases that might be handy for a week there. However, the Korean language uses a writing system called Hangul, and the characters are completely alien to a European like me. I’m a visual learner, and I was really struggling to pick up words just from how they sound.

Phonetically spelling out the sounds in my native language would solve this. I get that it might detract from learning the writing if you’re aiming to be more immersed, but many people starting out just want to make progress step by step. If you can learn how to order a coffee or ask directions, the feeling of achievement spurs you on. I was surprised that Duolingo didn’t offer this option.

Did I miss anything obvious in my rundown? Let me know which Duolingo changes you’d make in the comments.