WARNING: there will be a bit of swearing involved...

Language learning apps...

I don't even know where to get started. I hate them. I hate this artificial screen staring, button tapping, vocabulary puzzle, grammar memorising, colour and sound triggering achievement streak bullsh*t.

The market is filled with this "new" and "revolutionary" way of "teaching"...

Let me start with a really basic question:

How many people do you know who have actually learned to speak a new language with Duolingo?

Listen, I'm sure there are people out there. I'm certain there is a specific breed of human who devours these language learning apps and speaks fluently. Maybe you're one of these mysterious individuals. Who knows...

But ultimately, I believe in today's day and age, where most of the content created is using AI, when AI writes our scripts, website code, landing page copy, generates YouTube descriptions and optimises our SEO titles. Most of you can't even write a single blog post without having AI wipe your text's ass all over.

That's how bad things have gotten.

But AI is great, right? It's modelled after a trillion bytes of information. Surely this makes AI the master, the future. Surely these language learning models are the ideal culmination of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of study. Surely I am not suggesting that a human knows more than an AI?

And yet, that is exactly what I am suggesting.

There's usually only one real reason we want to learn a new language: To speak it and communicate with it.

Now tell me, are you planning to learn the language to speak and use it with people, or with AI?

Exactly, so why are we chatting with a computer?

There's a dystopian future coming. A future in which I have an AI making content, and you have an AI watching this content. Then your AI will tell you what the content was about, and my AI will tell me what your AI thought about my content.

What a fumbled mess of a future that will be.

This is why I still write my blogs, my emails and my books by hand.

I type it out like a man.

But if you'd like AI to hold your hand, if you'd like Duolingo to be your Snapchat streak buddy. Then go ahead. Just don't be confused if the results look like nothing that you'd expect.

No one worth listening to has learned it by speaking to a computer.

Speak with people. Speak with yourself. Speak with your mother. Speak with the cashier at a supermarket you've never been to and never plan to return to. Speak to random people at the airport.

Speak to the inner b*tch that's telling you what you can and cannot do.

Before I wrap up this article and tell you that Duolingo and other AI apps are some monstrosity that should be avoided like the plague, let me actually emphasise that if you're looking to get started in a language quickly and playfully, some type of app really isn't all that bad a choice.

But please keep in mind the habit it will create for you.

When you use Duolingo, you're building a habit of logging in every day, doing a task or two, and leaving. You're not doing this to learn, you're doing it for your dopamine. Just like you scroll through TikTok videos at 2am when you should be counting sheep.

And since language mastery requires contextual knowledge of the culture of the language. You're best off immersing yourself in the culture, long before your first Duolingo streak attempt.

Maybe in the future I will pick up a new language. I like Italian and Spanish. I am intrigued by Japanese. And who knows, maybe I will meet someone from the least likely of cultures, languages and countries. Fall in love, and move there. You can never know. You can never tell. But you can experience that.

AI can't.

P.S. I've also recorded a video for you, like always. You can watch it here: