Learning to let go of things that no longer serve me

This is a big deal to me, probably not to many people but to me this has been a major shakeup in my daily routine. Something that should be part of my day just isn’t there anymore and I often find myself looking for it on my homescreen, and it’s just not there.

Yes I’m talking about Duolingo, that language learning app with the psychotic green owl mascot that literally threatens you if you don’t keep your streak up. Well, I’ve had enough. Enough of the threats, the constant harassment to upgrade my membership and the constant pressure to be doing lessons. I have finally freed myself of my linguistic learning shackles.

Now why is this such a big deal you ask, well I’ll break it down for you. I was that one person keeping their duolingo streak at the pub, in the club and panicking at 11:55pm at the thought of losing it. It was a streak that clocked in at a whopping 1322 days, that’s a little bit short of 4 whole years. It watched me graduate, travel the world and outlasted my longest relationship. Maybe my longest relationship was with that dastardly green owl? I am a known quitter, I am notorious for quitting and giving up on things, but not my Duolingo streak, oh no. Maybe it’s because I have some sort of addict gene but seeing that number climb day-by-day genuinely got my heart racing and it just had me by the throat so I kept coming back. If we look at my finishing stats (because it tracks things for you, obviously) over that period of time I had accumulated 98,239 XP, reached the diamond league multiple times (it really preys on those with a competitive nature) and I have a Japanese score of 50 (whatever that actually means.)

This isn’t to say it didn’t serve me well, it did. I gained a solid foundation very quickly and learning was fun and engaging and something that I could spend more than 10 minutes of a day doing, and it came in handy for a quick German refresher when I visited Cologne last year. But it really does get to a point where you have to ask yourself, what am I doing this for? Is there actually a purpose? Am I just wasting my time? Primarily, I was using it to learn Japanese and at first it was great, but as time progressed and the lessons got harder, the kanji gained more strokes and Duolingo itself had changed. It kind of became sort of unusable.

I started to notice the decline in lesson content, ads became more frequent and the switch from losing a heart when you made a mistake to just constantly losing stamina made it impossible to get to the end of a lesson without shelling out gems, which were now also harder to obtain without opening your wallet. The aim of Duolingo was no longer to make language learning accessible but for the company to make a quick buck by berating the people who had innocently tried to pick up a new language as a hobby. Late stage capitalism, amirite?

In 2025 the company decided that it was going to go forward with an “AI-first” approach, which resulted in mass layoffs of human translators and it was probably around this time that the app began its descent into uselessness. Translations were often wrong, parts of the app became locked behind a paywall and when I actually did bother to attempt a lesson, it was usually something repetitive that I had done ten times before. Boring! The gamelike model of language learning was no longer fun, it became overexaggerated and irritating. Even the once loveable rogue Duo, became something I detested. Reduced to nothing more than constant marketing stunts that were tired and overused. AI had destroyed my hobby.

It actually took me a couple of months to get used to the idea of letting go of my prized streak and when I finally let go there was nothing, just silence. In the end it was nothing more than a number. This is not to say I have given up on learning, I will make time for it. But from now on, I think I will stick to the textbooks.