We live in the era where a lot of people use applications for language education. It is Duolingo for example. The app offers small lessons where a person learns new vocabulary, try pronouncing words and sentences, match translations to originals. In return, they receive points for leaderboards. Is this way of language education effective? Does it achieve educational targets? Or is it just a scam with human psychology from spineless IT engineers being helped by graduates of humanities desperately looking for a job?
Carry on reading to find out.
The classic way
During classic language learning, people use textbooks with grammar, create texts, listen to the radio and speak. It is a way how to recall vocabulary, not just do some matching. It is more difficult to recall a word from memory than doing matching between question and given answers. People can also draft up their own grammar flashcards or write down lists of words. It is good because people reformulate and create new knowledge. During writing, motor skills are used which means another sense takes part in a learning process. It rises the probability of material being studied to last longer. When speaking, people talk to real persons as teachers, colleagues and schoolmates. These people give the person studying a language a feeling that they are not alone and give social support.
The way of app
When an app like Duolingo is used, users of the app pass small lessons where they click and match answers and responses passively. They neither create nor reformulate knowledge. While working on the lessons, they collect points. The points help users to feel like achieving something. The app is full of nice animations and the Duo owl. However, are users able to recall anything from the lessons after they finish them?
Zeigarnik effect
These apps optimize human psychology in order to keep users using these apps as long as possible. Notifications are a great example. Users receive notifications telling them there is an unfinished lesson which must be finished. The underlying psychological phenomenon under this is the Zeigarnik effect. It is a human urge to finish what is unfinished, because it keeps nagging them. What if doesn’t it have an end? It forces users to incessant returning to the app to do more lessons.
Adaptive errors levels
When people learn something, the difficulty of stuff being learnt can be neither to easy nor too difficult. If it is too easy, people get bored. If it is too difficult, people get frustrated. Duolingo and similar platforms make use of this psychological effect. Deliberately, they keep the error rate/level between 10 to 20 %. This rate/level keeps users in flow.
Users are neither frustrated nor bored, because they achieve “great results”. Unfortunately, users are kept at this error rate all the time. Thus, it bars them from moving up to the higher level of knowledge, skills and precision. It also doesn’t make possible for users to fall to the realm of boredom. This type of an adjustment of an algorithm based on human psychology is excellent for keeping users using the platform as long as possible.
Gamification and leaderboards
There are leaderboards in such apps. Users collect points for finished lessons. All users of such apps do it. It places them to the leaderboards and allows them to compare themselves with others.
However, the leaderboards are reset each week. That means users must carry on working and finishing lessons to get points to be positioned in the leaderboards in order to be able to compare with other users.
Thanks to the reset of the leaderboards, users are forced to carry on doing and finishing lessons. It is quite a sophisticated way of gamification in education. Is it good or bad?
If it serves to improve knowledge and skills (In this case to learn a language), it is good. Unfortunately, the users’ target is not to learn a language, but has been moved to gaining points to be better than others. In this case, it doesn’t sound like a reason why you started using such apps in the first place. The target has been changed.
The middle way
Perhaps there is a middle way – a solution in between the aforementioned approaches. People can create their own lists of vocabulary with example sentences and then upload them automatically to flashcards app (In this scenario, the user is in charge of which content is being served.) Thanks to the flashcards, users actively try to recall vocabulary. An electronic dictionary is used instead of a paper one. It is just quicker to use the electronic one to look up words than browsing through paper pages. Listening to online radios (BBC 4, Al Jazeera, CBS Studio One) via a Online Radio Box (for Apple here) app.
They can use the Internet to find a social event (English speaking club) which they attend in person. The other variant is talking to an AI (For which the word love is just a pile of tokenization and probability without the true knowledge about the substance/essence/nature of the word.)
Conclusion
Which is the correct approach? What are your opinions about these apps? Share your point of view in the discussion below this article.
Sources
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- THE OPEN UNIVERSITY. The Open University. Open.ac.uk. Online. 12 January 2026. [Accessed 4 March 2026]. Available from: https://research.open.ac.uk/news/can-you-learn-language-app-what-research-says
- MEHEDI ABH. Language Learning Apps vs Traditional Methods: Why Traditional Learning Still Works – Language School in Singapore. Language School in Singapore. Online. 14 January 2025. [Accessed 4 March 2026]. Available from: https://www.lingo.edu.sg/blog/language-learning-apps-vs-traditional-methods-why-traditional-learning-still-works/
- REGINA – GLOBINO BLOG. Why and how language learning apps are reshaping modern education? Globibo Articles & Research. Online. 13 June 2025. [Accessed 4 March 2026]. Available from: https://globibo.blog/why-and-how-language-learning-apps-are-reshaping-modern-education/
- UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD. The power of language apps in a multilingual world. The University of Sheffield. Online. 14 August 2025. [Accessed 4 March 2026]. Available from: https://sheffield.ac.uk/research/power-language-apps-multilingual-world
- CHAN, Sergey, WESTFALL, David , JONES, Logan and JOSHI, Drumil . Featured: Connecting Publishers with Subject Matter Experts. Featured.com. Online. 2025. [Accessed 4 March 2026]. Available from: https://featured.com/questions/behavioral-science-tactics-duolingo-attract-retain-users
- WIKIPEDIA. Zeigarnik effect. Wikipedia.org. Online. 6 May 2022. [Accessed 4 March 2026]. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect
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