My Duolingo renewal date is this month. I used to love Duolingo, but I have gotten so tired of how they completely screwed up my progress on the Mandarin course several times that I now canceled my subscription. I will probably keep doing a minimal one lesson a day for now, but am close to ditching it entirely.

It’s understandable and good that they revise and update the Mandarin course. But you would think they could do it in a way that takes advantage of knowing what words and concepts I already learned. It seems like what they are instead doing is saying “You were about 30% through the course, so we will arbitrarily force you 30% into the new course despite that we completely rearranged it and added tons of words and content.” Because of how the app works, it is extremely tedious and painful to try to manually go back and learn from prior lessons that it says I have completed but that I actually have never seen. And you get a tiny fraction of the “XP”, completely killing the gamification. And all the ancillary content like speaking and listening reviews and other games are impossible now that they contain more than half words I don’t know.

This happened multiple times now. Last time or two I resorted to completely deleting and restarting my Mandarin course. It took the better part of a year to get caught up again, only to have to reset again to restore the functionality of the app. I’ve found other people complaining about this on Reddit many times, and the company does not care.

Side note, it’s annoying how all these posts on Reddit keep getting deleted when users close their accounts, huh?

From [deleted by user] : r/duolingo, I had posted 7 months ago:

I also completely reset my Mandarin course last year for this reason (https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/1ah6ppn/comment/l6o56af/), and felt dread just now as I started a lesson and didn’t know any of the words in any of the sentences. What the HECK DuoLingo ugh. All this talk of using AI to make everything smarter than a human ever could sure shows in how they handle course updates.

Sigh. I don’t have the time or energy to invest in a new language learning system for now since I am trying to study for medical school. I’m just a bit sad about what could have been!