I’ll get back to finishing up my autism blog series in the next blog post, but this week, I wanted to focus on another milestone in my life. A week ago, I hit the one-year mark on the Duolingo Irish course. This marks significant progress in something that has been a goal of mine for over 15 years.

I first decided I wanted to learn Irish in my teenage years, probably around 13, when I discovered Morgan Llywelyn’s mythological fiction, though my obsession with Ireland started much earlier. These books were my first introduction to Irish mythology. I loved how the Irish lore intertwined myth and history, but more than that, something about how the occasional Irish word in the book looked on the page spoke to my soul.

I was quick to find internet sources with the most stereotypical Irish phrases, póg mo thóin (that’s always first, isn’t it?), dia duit, and go raibh maith agat. But I had no idea how to properly pronounce most of the phrases I learned (only ever seeing them written down) and understood even less about how the language worked. I wanted so badly to know how the language worked.

By the time I was 17, I was determined to just buy a “Teach Yourself Irish” book and muddle my way through. Unfortunately, the book was dense, and the examples were incredibly awkward. I never got past the basic phrases I’d already seen online. Worse yet, although the book came with a CD of example conversations for you to listen to pronunciation and repeat yourself. But between the book, which laid out how phonemes worked in Irish written out using graphemes (which, even two English degrees later, I don’t understand at all) and the CD, which used a dialect that didn’t sound anything like what I thought the graphemes were telling me, I wasn’t making any progress.

The other part of my struggle comes down to aspects of the way my brain works that I wouldn’t even know about until many years later. See, learning languages has always been a struggle for me. I can read and understand things on a page and even learn to write decently in a language. But when I try to add anything social, my brain goes blank. And I’ve never been good at memorizing multiple forms. I’ll learn base words the first time I look at them, but I can’t remember how to conjugate them to save my life.

Now, in my thirties, I know that both of these things result from my combined autism and ADHD. My learning difficulties surrounding social structures make learning language extra challenging for me. At the same time, even for the things I do know, my social anxiety can make them unavailable when I need them most. The language centers of my brain literally shut down when I’m anxious. And speaking a language you aren’t proficient in in front of other people is always anxiety-inducing.

So, Irish remained inaccessible to me as a teenager, but I didn’t give up on it entirely. I never stopped wanting to learn the language. In college, I took a few more swings at it as language learning apps became more widely available. Still, with Irish being a more obscure language and its grammatical structure quite different from most European languages, I quickly found that the information on these apps was inaccurate or incomplete. This led to me giving up on each of them before making much progress.

It was only in 2020, right as I was starting school again for my master’s, that I discovered that Duolingo had an Irish course and that it was actually built out pretty well. Unfortunately, after less than a week of using it, I quickly realized I couldn’t keep up with that and the work for my master’s, so I set it aside again.

Finally, in late 2023, after finishing my master’s and catching up on other hobbies, I turned back to Duolingo, deciding to see what it had to offer. Duolingo’s format of gamifying language learning worked really well for me. It was better than any language class I’d ever taken. And because it was just me and my phone working through the sentences and learning the words, it took the pressure off in a way that allowed me to retain more than face-to-face language lessons do.

Of course, Duolingo’s Irish course isn’t perfect. There are many downsides to Duolingo’s learning method that are built in (i.e., present no matter what you’re trying to learn), and, despite being well built out, the course still contains a lot of gaps.

So, let me break it down for you. After over 365 straight days of using Duolingo to learn Irish, here are my main takeaways.

1. Gamification

As I’ve already said, the gamification aspect is huge for me. This is the motivating, fun factor my language classes in high school and college lacked. Nothing can match the dopamine rush of seeing your name move up the leaderboard during a tournament or the haptic feedback and little animations when you do a good job.

But the gamification isn’t there only to help you learn. In fact, it’s not even primarily to help you learn. Its true purpose is to keep you hooked on the app and get you to spend more money on in-app purchases. (Money they’re using now to make webcomics for some reason??)

The fact that it can also help you learn the language is secondary to their business model (but primary in their marketing), and this becomes more obvious as, even with a paid annual subscription, you’re constantly bombarded with messaging aimed at getting more money out of you.

If you complete Daily Quests, you get XP Boosts with limited time, but don’t worry! You can use gems to extend that boost. Aren’t doing well in those timed quizzes? Why slough through making mistakes until your sightreading gets better? Just use gems to buy a Timer Boost, so you never run out of time! Missed a day and don’t have a Streak Freeze to save the arbitrary reward system for logging on every day? Buy one with gems! Don’t have enough gems to do all these things? Just buy some with real money! And be careful; if you don’t spend all your time, effort, and money on our app, you might fall behind in the tournaments!

If I’m already paying for a service, I don’t want to then be manipulated into spending more to get a good experience. It should be a part of the paid experience. I’m so sick of subscription culture and in-app purchases.

But I digress. I have complicated feelings about the gamification aspects of Duolingo. Because, while it is the very thing that makes Duolingo a successful platform for language learning for me, it’s also how they manipulate you for commercial gain.

2. Variety

Another thing that Duolingo does very well is the variety of different practice styles. Some practice problems involve translating sentences from pre-loaded words, while others have you type the whole sentence yourself. You also have sentence translation with text and audio or audio only, adding further variety. These forms can be English to Irish or Irish to English, or, in the case of audio transcription, Irish audio to Irish written. This helps you practice different aspects of the language in multiple ways. Recognizing words written out or aurally and even spelling the words yourself. The fill-in-the-blank problems offer similar practice. Then, they have word-matching practice that helps with sight reading and gives words in multiple conditional formatting to help with familiarity.

The main advantage of this variety for me is that it keeps things fresh and engaging. My ADHD brain gets bored quickly, and I cannot force myself to pay attention when things get monotonous. Having lessons that incorporate multiple learning styles, plus being able to hop between different practice styles, allows me to choose whatever works best for me at that moment. All in all, this variety helps me memorize more words faster.

3. Lack of Context

While the gamification and the variety are largely positive experiences for me, there is one way in which the Duolingo style of language learning falls short. Their language learning model is based on immersion methods. Immersion learning is well-known and often touted as the fastest, most effective way to get speaking a language. But, if you haven’t heard of it, it’s pretty simple. It refers to learning a language by “immersing” yourself in the language. Some people will do this by literally going to a place that speaks the language and fumbling through until they learn enough to get by. Language learning software that tries to emulate this will provide sentence examples and define base words for you but give minimal or no grammar lessons to explain why it works that way.

This style reportedly works very well for many people, though I have to guess it’s primarily people who do not have learning disabilities tied explicitly to language learning. In fact, there are examples of people like Des Bishop learning Irish this way.

However, my mastery of language has always relied heavily on understanding its rules. That’s why, even before I got my bachelor’s degree in English, I had way more knowledge of English grammatical rules than most of my classmates.

But Irish and English are incredibly different. So, without that base understanding of how sentences are formed or why certain words (especially prepositions) are used one way in one sentence but in a seemingly contradictory way in the next, I struggle to keep the language straight in my mind.

In the end, I ended up supplementing a lot of other resources that I found online (focloir.ie, teanglann.ie, Bitesize Irish, and this one random grammar workbook I found on Etsy) to help make sense of the things I saw in Irish lessons on Duolingo. But it’s hard to find the resources you need when all you have to go off of is seeming inconsistencies in examples. For many Irish grammatical rules, there’s no English equivalent.

4. Over-Engineered UI & Under-Engineered Performance

Another area where Duolingo lets me down is in its design. It seems contradictory to say that a software is both over- and under-engineered, but they’ve managed it. The company seems to spend a lot more time and energy on the app’s look, with constant updates to make it flashier and add more unnecessary animations than they do, ensuring it works properly.

Almost every day, when I review the lessons in my current unit before starting something new, I get a review lesson for my previous unit. The only fix I’ve found is to scroll back up to the previous unit and then back down to my current one, almost like I’m showing the app, “No, I’m not on that unit. I’m on this unit.” Only then do I get reviews for the right lessons.

Several times, I’ve started a new unit and not gotten the “new word” highlighting or any new word practices. It starts out like I already know the words instead of a new lesson.

Another issue I run into frequently is lag. Honestly, I think it’s because of all the extra little animations they keep adding. The lag causes audio in lessons to fall way behind. Most of the time, it’s not a big deal, just annoying that you’ll finish entering your answer, hit submit, get the answer, and then another second later, finally get the audio that was meant to go with the practice. But in the timed review games, this can force you to lose a round, lose progress, and (in the case of their Ramp-Up challenges where you move down a level any time you get something wrong) can hinder the progress you’re making in your learning.

But the most aggravating issue I’ve found is definitely with the user dictionary. It doesn’t actually include all of the words I’ve learned. I’ve compiled a notebook with all the words I’ve learned as I do each lesson to make it easier to reference them as I practice. However, for some lessons, huge chunks of the new vocabulary introduced never show up in the user dictionary. I only realize they’re missing when they come up again in the review, and they aren’t on my list. Either the team building out the dictionary has done an abysmal job compiling the words they introduce (unlikely), or something isn’t initiating right as you open new units to release the words.

5. Inaccuracy

Finally, we have the same issue I’ve found with all Irish language learning courses in mainstream apps: the inaccuracies. Duolingo actually does better in this arena than a lot of programs. It’s probably the best one I’ve tried and has gotten significantly better over the years.

From what I’ve deduced online, Duolingo started with a small team building the Irish course with actual Irish speakers recording audio. Eventually, that turned into a team of community course builders who worked on the course together (aka Team Gaeilge). Still, as early as the spring of 2023, users found the original audio swapped out for AI. From then on, there were rumors that Duolingo would gut the whole thing, and in August 2024, a team member confirmed that Duolingo would not be using them to build out the course anymore.

Duolingo claims they are hiring a new internal team to run the course, and the previous group met with one individual to discuss plans for the course, but nothing is set in stone. I have little confidence in the course getting a makeover when they’re already cutting corners using AI.

The most common inaccuracies I see right now are little things like hints that don’t correctly conjugate words for you, causing you to get something wrong even after you used the hint for help. And this could probably be filed under the software issues I described above.

But the voice work isn’t great either. Based on the weird, stilted, or garbled way they often sound, the company used the original voice actors’ recordings to train a new AI, so what you hear is a mixture of the humans and newly modified AI. They’re often hard to understand, and struggle to combine sounds the way you need to to speak Irish properly.

Wrap Up

All in all, I’d give Duolingo’s Irish Course a middling grade. It’s not awful, but it’s not amazing. Most language learning apps don’t even have an Irish course, so I give them props for making an effort. And if you’ve got a tight budget (every other option I would love to try is outside my budget), it might be your best option. I would just caution you by saying, you should be using it in conjunction with other resources.

But regardless of what I think, I will need to find something new because I’m on the last section of their course, with about 5 units to go. So, in about another month or so, I won’t have anything more to learn from Duolingo. And even if the new team they claim to be building keeps adding to it, I think it’s time for something with more structure. The hard part is finding something that I can afford that won’t have social requirements that are too overwhelming.

If anyone has a suggestion, please send it my way, but for now . . .

Go raibh math agat as leimh agus slan go foill!