DUOL shares have fallen more than 78% from their May 2025 high, and that’s before its nearly 25% fall in premarket trading today.
I've said before that one of the very few good things generative "AI" may do to the world is accelerating the enshittification cycle so much that it kills stuff that was already terrible and a drain on society (social media; platformization; curation algorithms…). Speaking as a linguist who speaks 4 languages and has read the literature on second language acquisition, it has always been my position that the Duolingo method is useless—it feels like you are learning a language, but you can spend infinite hours with it and gold a full tree and you'll still get nowhere, and if you put a fraction of the time in about any other method, including doing pen-and-paper drills with old-fashioned paper-based textbooks, you'd have progressed much faster.
And old-fashioned grammar drills suck, too. It's just that Duolingo really, really sucks.
(Methods that work better: 1) Find an intensive "conversation"-type course, or anything that is labelled as "natural" or "immersion" or "storytelling" methods; or get tandem partners; or online coaches such as in italki; failing that, join a conventional language course, the more "intensive" the better; work on these until you absorb basic grammar and vocabulary, focusing on spoken language not writing; 2) Once this bootstrap period is over, start talking to people, watching media, or reading stuf that interests you, in large quantities and every day; do not wait until you're "good" to move into the input stage, start actually using the language for things you wanted it for, as soon as possible, which is sooner than you think; partial comprehension is fine.)
Of course I hope Duolingo dies horribly in a fire after it backstabbed its workers with the "AI memo", but even if it didn't, the world is better off without it.
One lesson we can get from this: Consider that overnight 25% drop in investment, which may well prove to be the coup the grâce. It was not caused by Duo losing users or enshittifying with "AI", but by the opposite: investors mass panicked at the company setting its target revenue too low, as in a mere… 1.22 billion, rather than the 1.26 billion the investors wanted. Now the reason Duolingo is not chasing that higher goal is that they're seeing the writing on the wall, and went into damage control mode: they're pulling down a bit on squeezing their current paying users and trying to improve the experience of the free tier, in an attempt to reverse the bleed and bring in more customers.
In other words, Duolingo tried to slow down the slightest tiny bit on enshittification—3% less cash—and this already got swift punishment from the market gods. With capitalism, there is no long-term thinking: you're expected to provide the richest people on Earth with infinite growth of their ever-increasing profits squeezed from customers paying every month more and more, now and forever, or you'll be taken out and replaced by someone willing to try.
With Japanese some of it is just a matter of accepting not being that good. We should allow ourselves to kinda suck when you're studying a linguistic isolated by yourself and outside of the country. I'm a Japanologist and you'd be surprised at how many serious scholars of Japanese I've met who have never read a full book, or who can read books but can't hold fluent conversation. Someone may be very competent as a translator of Taishō I-novels who has worked on that for decades, and still be unable to follow 50% of the chat at the mixer. As I'm sure you aware, Japanese folk will respect your grit for even trying in the first place; you don't have to be perfect in Japanese to do things with Japanese. In my experience, the culture is exceptionally accommodating to conversation even when you have imperfect skills.*
If you see yourself as an educated adult intellectual etc. it stings a bit, but you have to remember that personal worth is not measured by competency—you don't have to be good at things to be liked. Anthropologists who learn isolated minority languages will almost always suck at it and say funny wrong things periodically. A common strategy is to lean into that and be a good-humoured class clown. Everybody loves a fun person. Probably more than they'd love an arrogant academic flexing their intellectual prowess, in fact.
During my first stay in Japan I wasn't exactly seen as a source of comedy—maybe because I was in Ōsaka, it's hard to compete when any random two passersby are fluent in manzai performance—but one day I found out, to my great amusement, that I had accrued a reputation for being this like, calm and collected conversation partner who's a great listener and thinks well before she speaks. I was like no lol that's just because my vocabulary sucks, I have to stop and think about how to phrase what I want to say and then use simple phrases, in Portuguese I'm actually known to be a chatterbox and people complain I give them no space to talk, and all the girls were all like, eeee mirrorwitch-san?? a chatterbox?!? sonna ariehen yarō, etc.
The bigger lesson is that your identity as a speaker in your third, fourth… languages won't be the same as in your native tongues, and that's OK.
* I mean there's also that infamous type which refuses to talk to you in Japanese like, at all, no matter how much Japanese you throw at them, merely because you look gaijin. But these people are in the minority, and give the country a bad rep—for all the memes I find it much easier to chat in imperfect Japanese in Japan than with imperfect German in Germany, for example. In any case that attitude is unrelated to skill level; this type of guy refuses to talk even to native Japanese people, if the native Japanese speaker happens to be Black or otherwise look foreign. I did most of my research in tiny Tōhoku villages where one might expect xenophobia, but my grandmas were actually super relieved as soon as I said kon'nichiwa, because they were so intimidated at the prospect of having to speak English that any Japanese at all was cherished.