After over 6 years of doing my lessons every single day, I finally finished the Spanish course on Duolingo. It was one of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2025, and on October 8th, I reached my goal. In this post, I will tell you what happens when you finish a course on Duolingo, and whether you can learn a language on Duolingo alone. I will also share my thoughts about the popular app, and my learning journey.

How I imagined finishing the whole course in Duolingo would look like

For the last few months, I knew I was getting close to finishing the Spanish course. I was curious what that moment would look like, and over time, a vision has formed in my head.

I imagined that after completing the final lesson, there would surely be some fancy animation. Then a big congratulations screen. Maybe even some motivational message. I imagine only a small percentage of Duolingo users ever finish a whole course, and I thought it would make me feel special if I saw a message saying I’m one of 0.5% users who do (I don’t know the actual numbers, but surely it’s a small percentage).

I also thought that there would be a special prize for finishing the whole course in Duolingo – perhaps some gems, an XP boost, or maybe even a few days of Super Duolingo trial? I received 3 days of Super Duolingo access as random awards from regular chests on the progress timeline several times, and it felt appropriate to receive a special award for completing the whole course.

I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I knew one thing: surely it would be special, right? After all, an achievement that took many years to reach deserves appropriate recognition. Well…

What it actually looks like finishing a Duolingo course

When I reached the final exercise of the final lesson in the Spanish Duolingo course, my heart was actually racing. After all those years of consistent studying, I reached the very end of the course. I took a deep breath and pressed the submit button on the last exercise.

Then, the usual screen with stats from the completed lesson showed up.

Then, an animation of Duo getting to language score 130 followed – the exact same animation that I saw when I reached scores 129, 128, 127 and so on, just with a different number.

Then, I got a chest with 50 gems in it.

Then…

I just got back to the timeline view.

No special animation. Not even a congratulations message. The only reward was 50 gems, something you’d occasionally get during regular progress in the course. For reference: a single entry to play a single minigame in the leaderboard section costs 100 gems. My reward for completing the entire course, which took me 6 years of daily learning, wasn’t enough to get me one attempt at the mini game. Wow.

To be honest, I’m not even that fussed about the gems or the Super Duolingo access. I have thousands of gems which I never spend, and Super Duolingo isn’t that great anyway. But I was really, really disappointed not to see a congratulations message. Something so easy and cheap to make, with no monetary value. I couldn’t believe that Duolingo didn’t officially recognise the achievement that I will now mention in every CV, job interview, “fun fact about me” games, and such. What’s more, in the feed, my friends didn’t even see that I completed the whole course either. They could see that I increased my language score to 130, but few people know that that’s equivalent to completing the whole course.

Call me salty, but I was dying with excitement for a couple of weeks before I finished the Spanish course on Duolingo, and Duolingo made sure to treat it like it was not a big deal at all. It’s been a few weeks now and I still can’t get over it.

For comparison, every year at the start of December, Duolingo comes up with a fancy wrap up of your year’s progress. It consists of several shiny, colourful screens filled with recognition and praise. It would be nice to get ONE colourful, shiny congratulations screen after finishing a whole course. Or am I demanding too much?

What does section 9 of Duolingo look like

When I was redirected back to the timeline view, after the most lacklustre ending to the core part of the Spanish Duolingo course, I could finally see what section 9 looks like. It’s called “daily refresh” and consists of just 6 lessons which change daily. Four of them are regular exercises, two of them are stories (reading or listening) – the pattern is the same every day, it seems. All of the exercises are a randomised review of old content, which tends to give me the same exercises several times a week. There is no new content in section 9 of Duolingo. There will be no more new Spanish words of grammar for me in Duolingo.

The last lesson each day is called “Unit 1 review”, which makes no sense. Each of the previous 8 sections in the Spanish Duolingo course had a Unit 1, but I don’t think the exercises are from any of those. Being a software engineer myself, I imagine that there is some spaghetti code underneath – section 9 doesn’t have Units as such, but the 6 daily lessons are probably stored as a “Unit” underneath, and the final one automatically becomes called “Unit 1 review”. Anyway, enough about questionable code quality. It just looks like Duolingo put very little effort into the endgame which is reached by so few users.

By the way, I don’t know how those “random” lessons are chosen, but I swear I get the same exercises all over again. They’re often labelled as my “weak skills”, which is surprising – they’re actually really simple, and I don’t remember ever making mistakes in them. On the other hand, there have been many grammatical concepts in the final Units of the Spanish course which I never fully grasped, but they don’t come up in the random review… I feel like for the past month, I’ve just been given a review of three or four old lessons in a loop.

How long it took me to finish the Spanish Duolingo course

My Duolingo streak at this point is over 6 years, but I wasn’t fully committed to learning at the start of that journey. I originally typically did just one lesson a day, and it was usually an easy lesson I had done several times before. I started making regular progress through the course around 4 years ago. As of today, I’ve stayed in the Diamond league for over 220 weeks, or 4 years. It requires a decent amount of XP to stay in the top league, and I’ve been consistent for over 4 years now.

I’m sure it’s possible to speedrun the whole course a lot faster than that. If you have a lot of spare time and pay for unlimited lives/energy, you can probably finish the course in half the time I needed. However, my timeframe feels realistic for an adult with a full-time job and a busy life overall.

Can I speak Spanish after finishing the Duolingo course?

Well, not quite. Duolingo alone isn’t going to make you fluent in a foreign language.

It doesn’t teach grammar very well, and because it often repeatedly serves you the same sentences, you end up memorising those sentences without paying attention to their grammatical structure. And then, when you try to construct a sentence in Spanish from scratch, your mind goes blank.

I found Duolingo good for learning vocabulary though, and I’m able to understand Spanish quite well now, especially in writing. Coincidentally, one of my favourite singers is Spanish and he released a new album the same week when I finished the Duolingo Spanish course. Listening to songs I hadn’t heard before, I was able to catch a large number of words and understood their general context. I think that’s pretty decent!

I’ve only been to Spain once (15 years ago), and I have no Spanish friends. In other words, I had no opportunities to practice speaking Spanish in real life yet. I’m sure I would struggle quite a lot. I sometimes attempt to think in Spanish, and it doesn’t go too well.

What’s next for me

Duolingo gave me a good foundation in Spanish. My vocabulary pool is quite wide, and I think I would survive if I got lost in a Spanish speaking village one day. But I don’t want to stop here!

Ideally, I’d like to improve my Spanish skills, especially when it comes to generative skills like writing and speaking. I’m considering taking classes, though it might be difficult due to my frequent travels. Language classes in London are also rather pricey, unfortunately.

For now, I’m continuing to do the daily review lessons in Duolingo every day. I also found my Spanish textbook from high school, and plan to organise my grammar skills with its help. The textbook uses European Spanish, which will also be helpful – Duolingo is American, in both Spanish and English, and it leaves us Europeans with some gaps. For instance, European Spanish uses slightly different grammar, and I’d like to learn it.

Another thing I’m doing, mainly to further expand my vocabulary, is watching films and series on Netflix with Spanish subtitles if available. I’ve already learnt a few words thanks to them, and I get to see more natural sentences than those from Duolingo.

Another idea I have for the future is to periodically pick a theme, write 10-15 words in that theme in English, and then search for the Spanish translations. I’m thinking animals, household objects, plants and so on. Common words that didn’t make it to the Duolingo course. And then, the goal would be to memorise and review regularly.

Overall, I have a lot of ideas which I’m going to implement and test over the next few months, and then write a separate guide for progressing language learning after finishing a Duolingo course.

Are paid subscriptions worth it?

Throughout my long Duolingo journey, I have never paid for a Duolingo premium plan. However, I was granted a free trial of Super Duolingo several times and I wrote about my thoughts in this post.

It’s worth noting that a significant change was made in Duolingo since I reviewed the paid plan. In the free version of the app, they changed the hearts/lives to energy. Previously, if you made no mistakes in your lessons, you could do unlimited lessons. You could learn for a few hours without a break, only watching short ads after each lesson.

Now, with the energy system, you lose an energy point with each exercise, even if you make no mistakes. This usually means that you’re completely out of energy after 2 or 3 lessons. To recharge the energy points, you need to watch additional ads, and those can be really long. We’re talking 90 seconds long in extreme cases (I measured it). To fully recharge the energy bar from 0, you need to watch around 6 ads. Effectively, if you want to use Duolingo for an hour as a free user, be prepared to spend up to 50% of that time watching ads. Sigh. This might make Super Duolingo more worth getting, which is exactly why the energy system was introduced. My advice is to do the lessons while you do something around the house, so you can put down your phone during the ads and do something productive instead.

Final thoughts

Overall, I’m still excited and proud of myself for finishing the Spanish Duolingo course. I know many people who use – or used – Duolingo, but I’ve never met anyone who completed the whole course. In fact, when I shared my achievement with some of my colleagues, they were surprised to hear that Duolingo courses had an end at all!

I wish the app celebrated that achievement better. A shiny animation would have made me happy, and the lack of acknowledgement for the major achievement was rather disappointing.

Whilst I’m not fluent in Spanish, Duolingo gave me a good foundation to build on. Now, the ball is in my court. I need to find ways to maintain the knowledge I already have and further expand my skills.

Also see:

• Life
• Misc