Graph is from Yahoo finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DUOL/?guccounter=1
Reuters news article: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/duolingo-prioritizes-user-growth-over-monetization-forecasts-softer-bookings-2026-02-26/
“The language-learning app has spent recent years fine-tuning monetization through more ads and subscription prompts, helping lift bookings per user. But that coincided with slower user growth.” Yes Reuters, that’s called enshittification.
It really depends on the language. For Chinese, there’s HelloChinese and other apps that are significantly better and don’t use AI to develop their lessons. They do sometimes use them for silly example art.
Yeah the new HelloChinese course images all have the piss filter
Then Superchinese is really into their AI chat features but they are optional (paywalled). Btw I keep sniffing misogynist vibes from the example art.
Hmm. How about Korean? I haven’t found any of the alternatives very convincing.
Unfortunately not familiar enough with Korean and haven’t tried to learn it myself. To be honest, while trying to learn Chinese, I think apps should only be supplemental anyway to help with things like proper pronunciation and speech. Actual textbooks have been significantly better for pretty much everything else. Both China and Taiwan have government crafted textbooks that target their language exams, so if something like that exists for Korean, that’s the route I’d recommend most strongly.
EDIT: It looks like it does exist and is called TOPIK, so there’s probably good textbooks that target those exams as a good baseline for the language.