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.
Reaction to My Column: Duolingo Only Teaches One Phrase
Yesterday’s column on Duolingo Only Teaches One Phrase—the one where I noted that after an entire year of daily streaks (and a green owl stalking me like a digital landlord), “me encanta la playa” was the only complete sentence my Spanish had produced—arrived at what can only be described as inbox apocalyptic.
The email queue flooded. X lit up with people who feel personally victimized by a smiling parrot app, and others defending it like family members on trial. You learn a great deal about modern consumers — Americans, Europeans, Asians when they’re honest — when you ask them to confess their relationship with Duolingo. Here are eight letters from the newsroom inbox and what I wrote back:
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LETTER 1 — Marco:
“I used Duolingo for two years and when I finally arrived in Spain this spring, I could not even ask for a bottle of water at the bar.”
My reply: This is exactly my point. Two years—730 days—and your survival vocabulary consists of “the beach” plus an ability to correctly match multiple choice options presented by an owl with dead eyes. The terrible irony here isn’t that Duolingo failed; it’s that you told yourself, every single morning for two years, you were learning Spanish, when in fact the app had trained you to be a pattern-matching machine who can identify a dog but cannot request mineral water without gesturing like a desperate Roman.
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LETTER 2 — Elena from London:
“Duolingo takes up 21GB on my phone which only has 13GB storage.”
My reply: Either you’re confusing gigabytes with gigahertz (which many non-technical people do, though it doesn’t help your case), or this is a deeply unwell device that needs to be placed in the sea alongside everything else Duolingo managed teach. But I respect the outrage angle — apparently even on a crippled phone there was room for one more language app nobody needed.
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LETTER 3 — Pierre from Paris:
“You bitch, Duolingo is literally the best language learning app ever! My girlfriend said it was trash and now she’s single.”
My reply: I stand corrected by your anecdotal evidence of romantic replacement. Though between you and me, “duh-lingo” has taught millions of people to be confident enough to order in a foreign language and embarrassed enough never to try again — a cycle I respect as deeply inefficient but emotionally very human. Tell your ex that confidence is not fluency, though at £6.49/month it’s probably the best deal on either front.
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LETTER 4 — Sofia from Singapore:
“I am Spanish and my father taught me to speak in the house but Duolingo made me cry because I could not translate ‘The turtle swims through a turbulent lagoon’ for three weeks.”
My reply: A language app brought you, a native speaker living on one side of the world, to tears over grammatical gender. You are proof positive that Duolingo does not teach languages — it trains reflexes using the linguistic equivalent of finger exercises for piano students who have never heard music. And yet I cannot pretend this isn’t deeply funny because yes, nothing humbles quite like being defeated by a lizard sentence you could construct in your sleep when speaking to your father at breakfast.
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LETTER 5 — Matteo from New York:
“Two years and seven months of French lessons and last week my colleague asked me something simple at lunch. I said—nothing. Just smiled.”
My reply: That smile, mon cher Matteo, is one of the most European experiences available in 2026. A non-verbal surrender between strangers across borders — the original Schengen Treaty was never more accurately depicted than you nodding at a French colleague while thinking about green owls and conjugated frogs. This humiliation has been building for centuries; Duolingo is merely democratizing it with push notifications.
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LETTER 6 — Chiara from London:
“I paid for the premium subscription! $95 a year! And I still cannot follow an episode of The Bear without English subtitles.”
My reply: Well done then, you’ve purchased what millions have learned: that paying more doesn’t fix bad pedagogy, it merely makes the failure look expensive. Premium Duolingo was designed by people who thought removing ads from their lessons would somehow make vocabulary stick faster than ads themselves — a hypothesis so elegant its only flaw is being untrue.
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LETTER 7 — Luca from Paris:
“I learned four words over eight months and three of them were useless.”
My reply: The honest truth, which Duolingo users rarely articulate because they are kept in a state of manufactured optimism by points, leagues, and — worst of all — the owl smiling while holding a sword. Four words isn’t nothing (a toast to a dinner party you might actually use), but neither is it “learning French.” You have enough for the order and just enough to misunderstand everything entirely. The tragedy is real even if the numbers are small.
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LETTER 8 — Marco from Milan:
“My English improved because I’m watching every show in Spanish now with Duolingo as background motivation. It actually helped more than any course.”
My reply: This may well be the only productive use of Duolingo ever achieved in human history — that it served as negative motivation dressed up as positive reinforcement. You wanted to speak so badly you rewired your brain through dubbed Netflix shows, and somehow made it happen despite existing, which I think counts as accidental virtue rather than design on their part entirely.
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In closing: what the inbox told me — and there’s a lot more where these came from, honestly — is that modern consumers are in love with apps that promise transformation but deliver only routine. The reason this column landed so hard was not because everyone hates Duolingo but because everyone knows they hate it and keeps coming back to it every Tuesday like you’re showing up for confession without any absolution on offer.
A language app became the new religion of aspiration, in which we all sit in our digital pews repeating “me encanta la playa” while waiting for meaning that never arrives. That is perhaps more tragic than what anyone could ever learn to order at a bar — but also, as my inbox has confirmed beyond reasonable doubt, deeply funny.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.