Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz for the greater Milan area. From Paris I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.
Duolingo is the worst language-learning product in the history of edutainment gamification. Not me saying that: anyone who has actually tried to use what they learned from Duolingo in real life says it. And it deserves two 2025 trophies: Worst Application and Worst Application Icon.
Let me tell you something. When you finish Duolingo — complete all the levels, claim every streak, crush every league — the brutal truth is simple: you know no more of the target language than when you started. You can say “un croissant par jour,” win a game with “the cat eats the cheese,” and correctly identify when a sentence makes sense. But ask a Duolingo graduate to describe their day, order in a restaurant — even just say “good morning, how are you?” they fall completely silent. Absolutely mute.
Duolingo teaches isolated words. No real sentences. No grammar explained. Just word-bank matching exercises — which literally means repeating things already typed on screen. You don’t learn to speak: you learn to click the right option from among wrong ones. And when you get it wrong? Mark the exercise as “difficult” and move on, never explaining why. The green owl teacher teaches nothing; he is a emoji mechanic replacing actual lessons.
Then there is the notification system — those horrific push notifications all day, every hour of the night and day, with that pathetic owlet crying or threatening (the Death of Duo went viral for a reason: people killed Duo and were thrilled). Those are not motivational reminders; they are insults. Skip one day and Duolingo makes you feel guilty as if you had betrayed something living instead of an algorithm. It is manipulation dressed up as education.
What does the app actually teach? One phrase: “Me encanta la playa.” Repeatedly, at every level, in every language — always that same silly translation with some variant like “me gusta mucho el café” thrown in. That’s it. Your Duolingo-fluency reduces to loving beaches and drinking coffee. You can’t order an espresso or ask its price: just playa and cafe.
Now the Worst Icon Trophy for 2025. Yes — green mascot Duo the owl deserves a statue of his own. But did he truly earn it? The original icon was hideous, then changed every few weeks with sick owl, angry owl, dead owl variants that readers saw across their hompages as memes while pretending they cared about language education at all. In 2025 it won two trophies: worst app and worst icon. Earned both. Deserved entirely.
Consider a strange fragment from the pre-Socratic thinker Xenophanes of Colophon, who wrote scathingly that mortals imagine gods in their own image — “if oxen had hands they would draw gods shaped as oxen.” The same principle applies to Duolingo: we teach our machines what mirrors we are. Spartan education was even more brutal; the agoge demanded obedience over understanding from ages seven onward, children stripped of identity and taught not through philosophy but through pain and repetition. Xenophanes warned against this very confusion — mistaking memorized words for genuine knowledge. How ironic to find such clarity in a philosopher who spent his days wandering Greece claiming no one truly knows, only guessing like a dice-player. The Spartans at least had the humility to call it what it was: drills, not learning.<
So yes — Duolingo is useless, irritating and visually offensive. Three awards for three merits. Me encanta la playa, they say. Nobody really does, never.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.