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Many of the [Duolingo] "courses" are so heavily underdeveloped to the point of being useless. You lucked out that Spanish is one of the actually legit ones (French being the other main one).
Reddit u/chiraagnataraj, August 2022.

I checked for Chinese, and it goes to "Unit 4". Some of the sentences in this unit, are really quite simple (e.g., "Duo is a smart owl", "Duo has green feathers"). While Duolingo looks fun for beginners, I doubt you could get past elementary level Chinese this way.

It sounds like Spanish and French are far more fleshed out than Chinese. Thus...

Question: How developed are Duolingo courses for each language?

I'm wondering if there is data available which compares Duolingo languages. If necessary, assume the L1 language is English. I didn't immediately find any data on this. I found this website but couldn't figure out what "phase 1" etc. means.

Rebecca J. Stones
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  • Hi Rebecca, I'm a bit concerned about this question being rather broad (by covering Duolingo language courses in general) and vague (by what criteria would a course be considered sufficiently developed?). – Tsundoku Aug 11 '22 at 11:19
  • I don't know what data is (and isn't) available; any reasonable way of measuring development is fine (e.g., number of course units, developer time). I'm not after "sufficiently developed" but after a relative comparison: which languages are more developed than others. By the looks of things, Spanish, French, and English are quite mature, but other languages are not up to that level. – Rebecca J. Stones Aug 12 '22 at 01:24
  • I agree that your question is overly vague & broad. Here's a blog post that I think gives an allusive & balanced critique of Duolingo as a language learning resource. Perhaps it'll help you to narrow down &/or refine your question: https://ginsengenglish.com/blog/duolingo-and-english-fluency – matbury Aug 17 '22 at 12:39
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    You could just sign up for each course and see how far it takes you. Roughly length = maturation. It's not perfect, but this information isn't easily attainable. –  Aug 23 '22 at 02:54

1 Answers1

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I speak 7 languages, and I've learned 4 of them heavily on DuoLingo.

Outside of the "main" languages, like French and Spanish, many of the other languages started with reduced content, but that content has been expanded and added to.

For example, Arabic language which I first studied in 2020 seemd to have a very limited course, but has since been expanded.

Turkish language, which was also quite limited in the beginning (cant remember when I first tried it, probably 2016 to 2018) is also much more extensive these days.

The answer is: outside of the main languages, the duolingo courses are smaller in scope in the beginning, but they tend to be expanded on over time.

vikingsteve
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  • Wow thanks for mentioning about the turkish course. I remember I finished around the same time as you, and now that accounts to only 2 sections, and there are 2 more! – Al.G. Nov 28 '23 at 16:41