Duolingo / YMMV - TV Tropes

Accidental Innuendo:
- One of the sentences taught by the French course is "Le garçon plaît aux filles". It's pretty innocent—it just means "the girls find the boy appealing". That doesn't stop players from snickering at one of the alternative translations, which is "the boy pleases the girls".
- The French course teaches you how to say "it seems that he enters more easily".
- From the Korean course: "A woman and a man come together".
Awesome Art: The video "Duo's Work Day" is incredibly well-animated, offering a creative and detailed look into a control center where Duo supposedly works and sends notifications from. Duo's animation is especially notable, as it gives him so much personality without uttering a single word.
Awesome Levels: All of the Scandinavian courses are well-loved by users, but Norwegian in particular seems to be a favourite. It's known for being very well made and fun to complete, having one of the longest trees and featuring pop culture references and funny sentences to keep things interesting. Some users have admitted to starting Norwegian just to see what all the fuss is about, only to end up sticking around to complete their tree just because they enjoy the course so much.
Bizarro Episode: While most of the stories are grounded in realistic situations, the two-parter story "Alert!" ends with the reveal that the characters are Human Aliens and that humans from Earth have landed on their planet.
Captain Obvious Aesop: "Bombs are bad!", "I don't like dictatorships!", and the fantastic, but equally obvious "Don't sell your soul to the devil!"
Cargo Ship: From the German course: "I don't love you. I only love mayonnaise."
Crack Ship: The Duolingo TikTok account fully embraces the pairing of Duo with Dua Lipa.
Crosses the Line Twice: The "Spanish or Vanish" song from the 2024 April Fool's Event song has Duo subtly threaten two people to complete their lessons by threatening to eat them and comparing themselves to a praying mantis all to a happy tune.
Crossover Ship: Duo with Hooty from The Owl House:
- The Duolingo Twitter account shared fanart of Amity from The Owl House using the Duolingo app.
- Dana Terrace, creator of The Owl House, considers the two of them bitter rivals, but has since acknowledged that the two of them share an Enemy Mine—the owls of Gahoole.
- One of Duolingo's illustrators drew fanart of Duo and Hooty in Duolingo's art style.
- A threatening parody of Duolingo even appeared in the Season 3 premiere!
Ensemble Dark Horse: Besides Duo, Lily tends to get the most attention among the in-game cast due to her cool design and deadpan personality.
Fan Community Nicknames: Some people call users of Duolingo "Duolinguists".
Funny Moments:
- One of the very first words you learn in Gaelic? Irn Bru, which of course is spelled IRN BRU in the course.
- Similarly, one of the first words you can learn in Japanese is "sushi," which of course just means, you guessed it, "sushi."
- Some of the random sentences can get pretty hilarious.
  - From the Norwegian course: Pingvinen har farlige ideer. "The penguin has dangerous ideas."
  - From the Irish: Itheann an leon an ceapaire. "The lion eats the sandwich."
  - From the Welsh: Prynhawn da, Draig. "Good afternoon, Dragon." It's unclear whether you're speaking to an actual dragon or someone who inexplicably has the name of 'Dragon'. Of course, other lessons have you casually acknowledging that you are a dragon, so make of it what you will.
  - From the Japanese: Kore wa anime janaidesu. "This isn't anime." It's hilarious how snobbish it sounds.
  - Because each sentence is randomly generated individually, you can get "Are you listening to jazz?" followed by a similarly snobbish "No, I'm listening to music."
- Before the last two exercises of each lesson, Duo will appear and say "Great work! Now let's make this a bit harder." But sometimes the next exercise generated will be identical to one you've just done!
- The Duolingo widget on your phone is a handy way to remind you to keep your streak going, sure, but the pictures accompanying them are all over the place. Special mentions go to a Duo version of the "This is fine" meme, to a Duo Mona Lisa, and even one of Duo laying on his stomach with a duplicate of his face on his backside. See a compilation here.
Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the exercises in the French course involves completing a text which translates to "Chloe is the worst player in her football team. But her friends like her a lot and they help her. Thanks to them, she will surely improve." In summer 2022, Chloe Kelly scored the winning goal for England in the final of the Women's Euro '22 tournament. Looks like she did improve!
It's Easy, So It Sucks!: The app version features easier exercises (unlike the website version, you often get a word bank so you don't have to write the words yourself), which leads to many users complaining that they're too easy and don't really make you learn the language.
Les Yay: Many fans have often taken Lily and Zari being Best Friends and seen it as a sign of a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship, or even outright view them as dating, to the point where ship art of the two is incredibly common. It also helps that they greatly resemble Amity and Luz respectively, one of the most famous animated sapphic couples in The New '20s.
Memetic Mutation:
- "Hi honey!"^Explanation
- Please Take a Shower Immediately.^Explanation
Memetic Psychopath: The company's mascot, a green owl named Duo, will send you reminders if you neglected learning a language, often in a passive aggressive way (for example, sending a notification written in red text over black message balloon). This behavior prompted people to talk about how Duo would jump from being passive-aggressive to aggressive in the form of finding you in real life, threatening you, and/or holding your family hostage if you didn't do your Spanish (or whatever language) lesson. In fact, the company themselves mentioned this when they introduced Duolingo Push.
- This has also spawned the Memetic Mutation of the phrase "Spanish or vanish" in reference to the threats involved. Some others include variations like "French or in the trench" and "Chinese or on your knees".
- As shown in the Funny section above, the widget images can range from being hilarious to embracing this wholeheartedly. Your reminder to practice your daily language lesson at 8 AM? Duo could just be waking up, or singing in a bright blue sky. Your reminder at 11:45 PM? Duo is glaring at you and seemingly ready to jump out of the widget if you do not practice now.
- Duolingo teamed up with Angry Birds 2, with an advertisement that has Red and Duo starting a Bar Brawl because someone didn't want to do their lessons.
Nightmare Fuel: There's a glitch that causes Vikram's pupils to vanish for half a second when he's supposed to be blinking, which is already a bit frightening but especially jarring if it's the first thing you see when you start a part of the lesson.
Paranoia Fuel: From the Indonesian course: Apel itu bisa melihat kalian. ("That apple can see you.")
Questionable Casting: Many fans have criticized Lily's Spanish voice used in stories, as it sounds too cheerful for such a deadpan character.
Self-Fanservice: Lily and Zari are Noodle People with cartoony proportions in the game with little to none notable attributes. Fanart tends to portray them as curvier and bustier that they actually are.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- Gems. They replaced Lingots as the virtual currency on the app, but are worth way less^note, and it takes longer to earn enough to buy anything from the store. When the currency change took place, players only got approximately 500+ (how many Lingots they had) gems, leaving those with thousands of Lingots feeling robbed. The only way to get a decent amount of gems without lots of grinding is buying them with real money—and they're not particularly cheap, making the currency change feel like little more than a cash grab. Insultingly, the in-game message told you that you could buy "brand new items" for your new gems—but that update actually removed items from the shop, with the only new one being refills for the reviled health mechanic (see below) which was introduced at the same time.
- Gems were intended to fix the problem of players having tons of Lingots and not enough to spend them on. Sadly, this "fix" didn't really improve things: instead of actually adding interesting stuff for purchase, the devs just replaced the currency, greatly devalued countless players' hard-earned in-game money, and made everything in the shop overpriced.
- The Candy Crush Saga-like lives system. You have five hearts, and every time you make a mistake while attempting a new lesson, you will lose one heart. It's allegedly supposed to "encourage users who are making mistakes to take a breather and review previous lessons before moving forward", but, in practice, it can be very annoying to deal with for several reasons:
  - The idea of a lives system in an app meant for language learning is an absurd concept, to begin with, as, even if it claims to exist so users can review previous lessons before advancing, with how it's executed, it feels more like the app is punishing users for not getting answers right on the first try.
  - Unless you spring for a paid subscription, which grants unlimited hearts, there are only four ways to regain health: (1) Watch a pre-lesson ad, which appears unreliably and only gives you one heart anyway. (2) Wait five hours to regain a single heart or twenty-five hours to refill all five hearts^note. (3) Cough up a lot of gems to buy a full lives refill from the store. (4) Complete a practice lesson you most likely don't feel like taking to get a single heart (at least this can be done repeatedly). Needless to say, none of these are particularly tempting when you just want to retry a difficult lesson right away.
  - The game is picky about when it'll actually reward you for practicing. No matter how much you practice, you can never get more than five hearts. If you review old stuff before tackling new concepts, the lives system acts as if you've never practiced at all.
  - Running out of hearts will kick you out of the lesson you're working on. The only way to prevent this and keep playing is buying a full lives refill right then and there—and the game of course jacks up the price. There isn't even a way to buy one or two extra hearts, even though that'd probably be enough to complete the lesson if you've made it far enough to consider paying for a second chance in the first place. If you refuse the offer, you'll have to restart the lesson from scratch later.
- The company loves performing A/B tests. Before rolling out new features (which could mean adding a Scrappy Mechanic or removing useful features) to all users, they give them to a subset of users and compare user retention and completion to see if the change was for the better. This is supposed to improve the overall experience. Unfortunately, this can also be quite annoying: there's no in-game indication that the tests are even going on. Many players don't know about them, and end up confused as to why someone else has a feature they can't find anywhere. Even if you do know about the tests, you can't opt out or even change your group. All you can do is get a new account and pray that one ends up in the group you want. And even that risks being a temporary fix—there's a chance that the version giving you an inferior experience somehow had slightly better user retention/completion, so you'll eventually be stuck with it anyway.
- The crown update forced many players to redo easy lessons an unreasonable number of times just to regain the gold status of their trees.
- The game doesn't always convey context well, nor does it make clear whether it wants a literal translation or not; this gets especially awkward if you prefer to not use the cards for visual hints. These two issues combined means some later questions become Paranoia Fuel, as it gets harder and harder to tell if the game wants you to give a literal, unnatural-sounding answer or a natural one—such as "Simple pleasures" vs "Small pleasures"—especially if the intended meaning/use of some words is different from what you've been taught until that point. ^{For example}
- One of the new experimental features consists of the phrases being read by different voices for every character instead of the default male and female voices. It uses custom text-to-speech fonts and, according to Duolingo's art director, it's supposed to "bring more personality to the app". However, many learners have expressed their dislike for some of these new voices. Notably, Junior's voice in the Spanish lessons was criticized for sounding too breathy and for having weird intonations all over the place. Fortunately, this particular voice seems to have been changed, and as of now the feature is only on some courses.
That One Level:
- The Italian course has two categories that are known for being major causes of confusion; first there's Clitics 1, which has a tips section but is still considered one of the more difficult and confusing sections of the whole skill tree (enough to warrant a two-part guide on the forums) and then there's Modal Verbs, which has no tips section (on desktop anyway, the mobile version has one), changes previously established grammar rules without explaining why^note, uses previously unseen forms of infinitives^note without explaining when they are used, the aforementioned context issues tend to show up more^note, and the hover "hints" the game gives you tend to not be the words the game wants you to use.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
- Most of the redesigns were met with serious backlash. In particular, the 2017 redesign of the website's lesson/practice feature aimed to bring together the code for the website and the apps so that they could be worked on as a unit was derided as bland and uninteresting with too much empty space.
- In early 2022, several of the language courses underwent revamps which rearranged the skill trees and created more lessons. While this was largely an improvement in many ways, it did cause some confusion for the players whose lessons were unexpectedly upended; because of the way the skills were rearranged, some of the new lessons involved terminology or grammar which the player had not previously learned.
- In late June 2022, the Welsh course—which had previously had a single, placid female voice with a natural Welsh accent—was given more voice acting. Compared with the woman who had been narrating the lessons up to this point, some of the new voices come across as very jarring and even somewhat out of place. Happily, the devs seem to have realized this themselves, and (as of September 2022) have largely reverted to the original voice.
- As of September 2022, some—but not all—mobile users have found that the app has been redesigned. The new interface is supposed to be more user-friendly, but several people have complained on the official Twitter that their progress has been hurt by the change. Much like the level revamps from early 2022, those who have been switched are sometimes finding that their level exams now contain words which they hadn't previously been taught. The most recent announcement on the subject is that all users will be switched to the redesign in November 2022.
- Each month there is a challenge, which previously had always been to earn 1000 XP in the course of the month, be it on the app or on the website. In summer 2022, Duolingo began—seemingly arbitrarily—to assign different challenges to different players; some still receive the 1000 XP goal, but others have to complete thirty "quests" before the end of the month. Since only three "quests" can be completed each day, it's not possible to complete a quest-oriented challenge in fewer than ten days. Later months saw forty- and fifty-quest goals being given out as well, presumably based on each player's frequency on the platform.
Viewer Species Confusion: Due to his green coloration, ability to produce human speech, and diurnality, Duolingo's bird mascot is often interpreted as a parrot instead of an owl.

YMMV / Duolingo

Edit Locked