Duolingo’s AI Frenzy: 148 New Courses, or How to Make a Billion People Feel Guilty for Not Practicing
Duolingo just dropped its biggest flex yet: 148 new language courses, more than doubling its offerings in one AI-powered swoop.
Hold on to your streaks, folks — Duolingo just dropped its biggest flex yet: 148 new language courses, more than doubling its offerings in one AI-powered swoop. Yes, the green owl that’s been passive-aggressively haunting your phone for years has now officially gone from “mildly threatening” to “multilingual menace.”
According to Duolingo, this launch marks the largest expansion in the company’s history — which is corporate-speak for “we figured out how to automate the pain away.” It took them 12 years to build their first 100 courses; now, thanks to generative AI, they banged out 148 more in under a year. Somewhere, a team of human curriculum designers is softly weeping into their unused lesson plans.
Luis von Ahn, Duolingo’s co-founder, proudly declared, “This is a great example of how generative AI can directly benefit our learners.” Translation: we fed a large language model a buffet of grammar drills, conjugation tables, and “Where is the library?” exercises — and voilà, instant guilt trip in 28 UI languages!
Want to learn Japanese from Spanish? Korean from German? Mandarin from Italian? Congratulations, there’s now officially no excuse not to start. Even Asia gets a major upgrade, letting Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin speakers learn each other’s languages — because what we all need is more in-app reminders that we’re slacking on personal growth.
For those wondering, these courses cover the beginner levels (A1–A2), meaning you’ll soon be able to confidently order a coffee, ask where the bathroom is, and still panic when a native speaker answers you at normal speed.
And let’s not ignore the real genius move here: Duolingo didn’t just expand. They expanded the guilt market. With over a billion potential learners now covered, Duo the Owl can screech across even more time zones, ruthlessly pushing notifications like: “It’s been 3 days since you practiced Korean! Don’t make me come over.”
Of course, more advanced content is “rolling out soon,” which is corporate-speak for “give us a minute, the AI is still working on it.”
So, hats off to Duolingo — the company that figured out how to weaponize AI, guilt, and gamified streaks into a global language empire. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go not open the app for the 14th day in a row.
