What Are the Best Duolingo Courses?

The best Duolingo courses are Spanish for English Speakers and French for English Speakers. However, there are lots of reasons why I’ve come to this conclusion!

In this post, we’ll go over the different criteria for the best course on Duolingo: the courses with the most updates, number of lessons, shortest and easiest to finish, and the highest number of language resources that Duolingo provides for that language.

At the end, you can decide for yourself what the best course on Duolingo is.

Duolingo Courses with the Most Updates

The best Duolingo courses according to the criteria of most updated would have to be the following courses:

• French for English Speakers
• Spanish for English Speakers

Although Duolingo is constantly improving and adding resources (like Duolingo Stories and Podcasts), they will always be adding those to French and Spanish first since those courses have the highest number of learners.

If you want to learn a language faster than ever, I highly recommend reading Benny Lewis’s book on how to learn a language in JUST 3 months.

For example, a year or so ago I had earned my Golden Owl on the Spanish for English Speakers Duolingo tree. This meant that I had earned at least 1 crown in each skill.

However, since Duolingo is constantly updating that course and adding more crowns and skills, I actually lost my Golden Owl! I would have to go back and complete those extra skills in order to earn my owl again.

Obviously, I’m not upset about this because I love that Duolingo is adding more lessons and constantly improving.

According to the Duolingo app statistics, there are currently 142 million users learning Spanish and 101 million users learning French. However, there are 399 million users learning English.

So why isn’t English listed as the best Duolingo course? Well first of all, these users would be separated into different courses based on their native language. Second of all, ad money might be playing a role here.

Sometimes when I open Duolingo for Spanish, the owl pops up and lets me know that there are more people learning Spanish on Duolingo than there are students in public school in the USA.

This shows another facet of why Duolingo would update some courses more often than others (aka why some courses are better).

Since Duolingo is a free app (here’s how they make money) that means that they need ad money to keep their app going.

Since ads targeted at people living in the USA pay more than ads for other countries, this explains why Duolingo keeps the courses for English speakers updated more frequently.

This is super unfortunate, however, I do think that Duolingo is trying to keep all of its’ courses as great as they can be. But they gotta make money somehow!

We’ll see later on, however, that Duolingo is prioritizing certain courses for those learning English. Keep reading to find out which ones!

The Duolingo Course with Podcasts

Duolingo currently has three official podcasts, which is a pretty good giveaway for which courses it considers to be the most important and therefore the “best” courses on Duolingo:

The three podcasts are Duolingo Spanish, Duolingo French, and English for Spanish Speakers.

If you’re super into language learning, or maybe just want to get into it, you should definitely check out this book on Amazon about how to stay fluent in a language over time without EVER losing fluency!

The Best Course According to Number of Lessons or Crowns

Another way to tell which course is the best is by how many crowns each course has, which tells you that Duolingo has produced more content and lessons for that course than other courses.

For example, in the French course there are 792 crowns available currently and Spanish has 797 crowns, but a course like Welsh only has 590 crowns (which is actually super impressive! This is why I still love Duolingo, so many lessons for free!)

If you want to calculate the number of crowns for yourself, head to this blog post for the instructions on how to find the number for any course on Duolingo (it’s in the second half of the blog post!)

So according to this criteria, the winners are yet again Spanish and French for English Speakers!

The Duolingo Courses with Duolingo Stories

Another argument could be that the best Duo courses are the ones that have Duolingo Stories included. Duolingo Stories are super fun and also an awesome way to earn XP really fast.

• Portuguese for English Speakers
• Spanish for English Speakers
• French for English Speakers
• Italian for English Speakers
• German for English speakers
• English for Portuguese speakers
• English for Spanish speakers
• English for Chinese speakers

This gives us a bit more insight on what Duolingo’s Top 10 Best Courses would look like! Obviously, this also gives us a hint as to which courses have the most of those 399 million English language learners we talked about earlier.

According to the list above, I would guess that the best courses for those learning English on Duolingo would be for Portuguese speakers, Spanish speakers, and Chinese speakers.

I seriously would not be able to learn languages without italki (I’m taking 3 classes per week right now) try out a class and you’ll thank me later. They’re usually $9 or less!

The Course with Duolingo Audio Lessons

UPDATE: Duolingo no longer has Audio Lessons.

There is currently only one course on Duolingo that has Audio Lessons AND Stories and that is (drum roll!): French for English Speakers!

This is a relatively new update but a super exciting one! I’m guessing that according to Duolingo, French for English Speakers is the best course and therefore they have provided the highest amount of language learning resources for that course.

I imagine (and hope!!) that they will be adding Audio lessons to other courses as well, but by adding it to French first shows that they are prioritizing that course.

Shortest (Easiest to Finish) Duolingo Courses

Another way to judge the best Duolingo courses would be the ones that you can finish the fastest and therefore, the easiest courses.

These might be considered the best for those who want to earn a Duolingo Golden Owl quickly or love the feeling of accomplishment that comes with completing an entire Duolingo course.

This post goes over the shortest courses on Duolingo in detail, but here I’ll just mention the shortest ones by number of lessons and crowns:

• Navajo
• Esperanto
• High Valyrian
• Turkish

Do you agree? What do you think the best Duolingo course is?