Violet Sky

I did it! I finally did it. 810 days into my Duolingo streak, I finally finished the Duolingo Italian course.

Working backwards on the math, it seems that I started this latest Duolingo quest back in March of 2023, a few months before we were scheduled to go on our very first trip to Italy. I remember that I had started Italian on Duolingo before this, but had been on and off and let my streak die several times. I can’t say that the streak motivated me – thankfully – but I instead let it serve as a reminder to myself to do a little bit of Italian language learning (almost) every day. I say “almost” because there were several times that I genuinely missed a day and was saved by a streak freeze, and a few specific days that I let lapse when they tried to start charging hearts for mistakes while I was in a Duolingo classroom.

I’d explain that last sentence more, but frankly most people are unlikely to find themselves in that situation, and if they do, they probably already know what I’m talking about. For everyone else, it’s not important. Suffice it to say: this was mostly a genuine 810 day streak.

What was my linguistic background?

I’m a native English speaker, which is hopefully apparent. I have enough receptive Spanish to get through transactional situations mostly fine, though my ability to produce Spanish is extremely limited. My true secondary language going into this was French, which I took for four years during high school and followed with an immersion French course my first term of college.

I consider myself very lucky, because I took French with a teacher who was truly passionate about the subject. She was a Korean-American woman who I think could safely be called a francophile. While she wasn’t the funniest or most relatable teacher, she was a really good one, and her passion for the language ended up transferring to me over the years. We were only required to take two years of foreign language to graduate from high school, but I enjoyed French so much that I signed up for it during junior and senior year, as well. I remember the French 4 class being pretty small, compared to how the class had been when we all started together, and it was rewarding to speak French with other students who seemed to really just enjoy learning it. Mademoiselle had really relaxed by that point in our relationship, and was more fun and personable than she had when teaching us un, deux, trois.

After high school, however, I mostly stopped engaging with the French language. When I decided to try Duolingo’s Italian course, I had a fair amount of latent French still sitting dusty in the back of my head, but nothing recently activated.

How did I approach learning with Duolingo?

There is apparently a thriving online community centered around Duolingo, its characters, strategies for approaching and succeeding at the courses, and so on. Since I initially downloaded the app in 2017, did maybe a couple of lessons of some language (maybe Italian, I can’t remember), and then forgot about it for several more years, I never really got into the community. So I just went through the app as you’d expect to: once I committed to learning Italian, I did a lesson a day, sometimes more if I was feeling it. I carried on with the app even when we were in Italy for our first trip, one lesson per day.

My husband finished the Duolingo Italian course long before I did, and moved on to an EdX Italian language and culture course. This ended up distracting me, and I tried juggling the same EdX course along with completing Duolingo each day. Eventually, I got frustrated that I didn’t have enough vocabulary to easily follow along with the EdX course, and moved back to Duolingo because it was easier.

Last year, we went to Ireland, so there was no rush to finish the Italian course any time soon. After that, we went to Québec City, so I added in an extra Duolingo lesson a day, except this one was in French. My French was rusty, though far less rusty than it had been thanks to the similarities to Italian. It was still more advanced that the early Duolingo lessons in French, however, so after the trip, I gave up juggling the two.

After that, I spent the rest of 2024 chugging along at the same pace of approximately one lesson per day, maybe two or three if I was really feeling it or if I got sucked into the gamification aspect and wanted to rack up XP on the leaderboard. In September of 2024, I booked our flights for our second trip to Italy.

At the start of 2025, my husband started asking how far along in the Italian Duolingo course I was. As a graduate, he was excited for me to finish and move on to different, better sources, and gently suggested that I could be moving faster through Duolingo, especially given our upcoming trip. I looked at the calendar and did some math on my remaining Duolingo units, and realized that if I did one unit per week, I could finish exactly in time for our Europe trip.

I put an appointment on my Google calendar for “Italy hour,” and for almost all of the year thus far, I’ve done at least one Duolingo lesson per day and a full hour of Duolingo lessons every Tuesday. I worked ahead on purpose once, knowing that I was going to be in Mexico City for a week, and worked ahead several other times simply because I was on a roll. The slog was real, but each week, I started getting more and more excited to finish the course.

On a Tuesday in June, after an hour of Duolingo, I found myself partway through the very last lesson. Of course, I could have chipped away at the remaining lessons throughout the rest of the week, but the idea of finally finishing this multi-year project was too exciting. Also, I thought that 810 was a fine number upon which to end my streak. I blasted through a few more lessons, took the final unit test, and I was done!

Side note: for all the animations they do as you work your way through the course, the end of the entire course has zero fanfare, zero celebration, just a switch from the path through the course into a little daily review section. Disappointing!

How much Italian did I learn?

This one is a tough question to answer. At its core, Duolingo is a vocabulary app. It does a very poor job teaching grammar, because there are no explanations. Every grammar rule, you need to be able to divine from the patterns they throw at you. If you can’t figure out the pattern and how to apply it broadly by the end of the unit (sometimes two, depending on the subject), then you’re mostly out of luck, as they move on to introducing and hammering at new concepts. So Duolingo’s real strength is their ability to throw vocabulary at you over and over while it tries to teach you other things, which is not without value. I still remember being in Italy and having a bus roll by with an advertisement that featured a shark. I turned to my husband and said, “Lo squalo! See, Duolingo was good for something.”

I do feel that I had a distinct advantage going into the course, because French grammar and Italian grammar is extremely similar, moreso than that of Spanish and Italian. For the first half of the course, it honestly felt like Italian was just French with easier pronunciation rules. Later, as we got into the more complex tenses that didn’t map as easily to French, it was harder, but a fair amount of my progress was possible thanks to my French background.

I also was either intentionally or passively consuming Italian language content for a good portion of my learning period. My husband and I were watching television shows in Italian, we were listening to Italian language music, and I was occasionally reading Italian. My Italian reading was split between content aimed at learners and my (extremely on-brand) subscription to the ItaliaPersonalFinance subreddit. Neither of these were huge difference makers, but in line with the idea of practicing a little each day, I didn’t usually have a week that went by without some minor additional exposure to the Italian language.

So, to take a stab at answering the question: I learned enough to stumble around written sources with frequent peeks at a dictionary. I did not learn enough to watch Italian language content without English subtitles, though I was more often able to tell when the subtitles had diverged from what was actually being said. I haven’t yet tried listening to podcasts aimed at beginner to intermediate Italian language learners, but I imagine the experience would probably be somewhere in between my reading and watching-with-subtitles experiences. Without the advantage of my French background, I suspect that I would have learned much less than I did.

Do I recommend Duolingo for learning Italian?

It’s almost embarrassing to say this with an 810 day streak, but not really. In combination with other ways to learn Italian, sure, it could be part of a toolbelt of resources assembled for free or low cost to pick up the language. But as a standalone resource intended to bring the user from no Italian to A1 (which is what the app suggested once I had finished the course), it’s not up to the task. If I wasn’t very much a completionist at heart, I would not have finished the course and would have moved on to more serious options.

What’s next?

Even as I write this blog post, I’m going through the University of Bologna’s online MOOC beginner Italian course. This is a shorter course and should only take a month or two to go through. I’ve started EdX’s beginner Italian language and culture course twice now, and my husband highly recommends it for a better introduction to grammar, so it falls high on my list as far as Italian content. I’ve also had the idea of studying to take the A1 language test, just for fun.

On the other hand, we’re planning to go to France next summer, so it’s more likely that I’ll do this University of Bologna course and then fully switch over to strengthening my French for that trip. I would also love to take the A2 French language test (and, depending on how that goes, the B1 some day) so I plan on preparing for that simultaneously. So a realistic answer to this question is: a little more Italian, a trip to Italy, and then swinging my primary focus over to French for the next year or so. And after that, who knows?

Probably more language learning, though.