Is Duolingo good for learning Spanish? An honest review

What the Spanish course actually covers

It's enormous: roughly a thousand units and close to eight thousand lessons, organised into sections that now run to B2 on Duolingo's own scale (that extension arrived in 2026 for a handful of languages, Spanish among them). Around it sits more extra material than any other course has: about a thousand Stories, DuoRadio listening episodes, interactive Adventures, a podcast archive of several hundred episodes, and — on the paid tiers — short video calls with an AI character who chats with you about your day.

It teaches Latin American Spanish: ustedes rather than vosotros, the 's' pronunciation rather than Spain's 'th'. That's the right default for most learners and is understood everywhere.

What it does well

• The habit. Nothing is better at getting you to open a Spanish app every day. For the first months, that is most of the battle.
• The first thousand words, and more. The vocabulary is practical and the spaced repetition works. People who finish the course know a lot of Spanish words.
• Grammar by pattern, and it mostly lands. Because the course is so long, the patterns get enough repetition to stick: ser and estar, the past tenses, even the subjunctive late on. Better than any other Duolingo course at this.
• Listening. Stories and DuoRadio are real, graded listening practice that the small courses simply don't have.
• It's free. With ads and a cap on mistakes. Super removes both for roughly $7 a month on an annual plan, around $13 month to month.

Where it falls short

• Speaking, still. On the free tier, speaking means repeating a sentence into the microphone. The video calls on the paid tiers are a real step up — you do talk — but they're short, the character leads, and nothing corrects the sentence you actually produced. People with thousand-day streaks who can't order dinner are common enough that "Duo trains you to be good at Duo" has become a proverb on the forums.
• Recognition, not retrieval. Most exercises let you tap the right word from a bank. Recognising quisiera is not the same skill as finding it under pressure with a waiter waiting.
• It's slow. B2 on paper, at ten minutes a day, takes years. The course is a long road, and the road is mostly tapping.
• No one explains. Patterns without explanations work for many people and leave others knowing that estaba exists without knowing why. The explain-my-answer feature helps a little.

What the paid tiers add, and whether they're worth it

Super removes ads and the mistake cap and, as of this year, is getting the AI video call that used to need the top tier. Max, where it's still sold, costs around $30 a month and adds roleplay and the video calls. For Spanish specifically, Super is worth it if the ads and hearts are what make you quit; Max isn't, because the money buys more daily speaking elsewhere — a tutor hour, or a month of an AI conversation teacher. Prices change often and vary by store, so check in the app.

So is Duolingo good for Spanish?

Better than for any other language, and yes — as one part of a plan. It's a genuinely good backbone for vocabulary, patterns and listening, and the best habit-former there is. As the whole plan, no. The learners who get somewhere with it treat it as the ten-minute daily habit and put their real effort into two things it doesn't do: listening at scale, and speaking with corrections.

What to pair it with

If you keep Duolingo, keep it to ten minutes. If you drop it, you won't lose much as long as the listening and the speaking are daily. For the full method, see how to learn Spanish as an adult; for the head-to-head, SpeakingVibes vs Duolingo for speaking Spanish.