The Duolingo XP Ramp Up Challenge is something that recently popped up with the last update of Duolingo as an opportunity to earn 40 XP in just 2 minutes instead of the regular 10 XP. It is only available at certain times within the League tab in Duolingo.
Where to Find the Duolingo XP Ramp Up Challenge
It is a small purple lightning symbol that shows up when you are in the league tab of Duolingo (the one that looks like a shield). If you haven’t completed any lessons that week though, you will see the screen shown below and need to complete at least one lesson before being able to compete in the league.

Is Your Duolingo Ramp Up Challenge Gone?
If you haven’t completed any lessons for the week, you will need to do that before you can see if the Ramp Up Challenge is available for you.
If you have already done that and the Ramp Up Challenge is gone, don’t worry! It’s not meant to be there all the time, but just as a bonus incentive to get you to earn more points and do better in the leagues.
If the Ramp Up Challenge doesn’t show up when you are in the Leagues tab, just check back the next day. I have noticed that the challenge is there more often towards the end of the week when the leagues are getting close to finishing.
Version 1 of Duolingo Ramp Up Challenge
Once you have completed at least one lesson, a purple bubble will show up in the bottom right hand corner of the tab. At first, this bubble was a lightning bolt and looked like this:

After clicking on the purple lightning, you got a chance to win up to 40 XP in just 2 minutes by completing a challenge.

However, when I checked my app today (I’ve been taking a bit of a break from Duolingo so I can write all these blog posts!) the XP Ramp Up Challenge looked different!
The version I mentioned above may still be what you see on your app, which is why I’ve included it. However, this is what I’m now seeing on my app.
Version 2 of the Duolingo XP Ramp Up Challenge
The newer version of the Duolingo XP Ramp Up Challenge looks a bit more complicated. Instead of the Purple Lightning bolt symbol, you are looking for something like this:

With this newer version, you complete timed lessons to get to the 40 XP lesson (instead of just completing the 40 XP lesson at first like the last version).
The first time that you do the challenge, you can do it “for free” which basically means that you don’t need to upgrade to Duolingo Plus or use any of your gems.

In the first challenge, you have 5 minutes to complete it and at the end you earn 10 XP (sounds lame, but trust me this challenge is worth it later on!).

Pro Tip: I recommend you go into this version of the Duolingo XP Ramp UP Challenge with at least 300 to 400 gems since each challenge after the first one costs 50 gems to continue.

More XP, Less Time & Increasing difficulty
After the first section of the challenge, each lesson will earn you a more XP. The time you have to complete the challenges gets shorter and the material that you cover in the lesson gets progressively harder as it goes on.
For example, I completed this challenge in Italian and we started out practicing the names of animals.
Then the lessons progressed to plurals and then in the last few challenges it progressed to plural forms of possessive pronouns (which are difficult but super fun in Italian, you have to conjugate basically everything to match!
Like “my butterflies” would be “le mie farfalle.” Just trying to convince you to learn Italian lol (; ).
What if you mess up?
Like I mentioned before, each time you go up in XP during the challenge, you get a little less time on the lesson. However, the first time I ran out of time, it offered me an extra minute to finish!

As far as getting answers wrong, I think you make as many mistakes as you want as long as you can finish all the material within the time frame.
I imagine that if I had run out of time again I would have had to pay a few more gems to keep going in the challenge, so be quick!
40 XP Unlimited Lessons
So you might be wondering at this point if it is worth it to complete all those lessons that only earn you a few XP each time, but here’s the best part about this challenge.
Once you get to the 40 XP lesson, you can complete as many as you want (until you run out of gems or time of course!).

Don’t Leave the XP Ramp Up Challenge!
Now that you’ve made it to the 40 XP lessons, you have 1 minute and 45 seconds to finish each lesson in order to earn 40 XP. You can do this as many times as you want! However, you can’t leave (dun dun DUN!)
Once you’ve gotten to the 40 XP challenge, you must stay there and complete as many as you can because if you leave (exit the session) then you will have to start the challenge over from scratch!
Meaning you will need to complete the 10 XP lesson again and all the rest all while paying more gems for them.

This is another reason why it’s so important to go into the challenge with a ton of gems, because then you can earn A TON of XP once you hit that 40 XP mark!
If you want to figure out a few more ways to get XP super fast on Duolingo, check out this post!
Language Learning Must-Haves
- iTalki Language Classes: The #1 reason why I’ve been able to learn languages from home. Take conversation classes from a native speaker for only $5-$10 an hour.
- How to Be Fluent Books: Two of my favorite books about language learning have definitely got me super excited about learning a language and I highly recommend reading both!
- Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
- Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World
- A Language Planner: Keep track of your scheduled language classes, set language goals, and organize your study schedule with my favorite planner ever.
- Harry Potter in Your Target Language: Reading a beginner book that you’re familiar with is an incredible way to learn vocabulary quickly!
- The Perfect Language Notebook
More about language learning:
- How to Find Out Your Duolingo Language Level (Are you a level 25?!)
- The Perfect Study Plan for Duolingo
- How to Use Italki to Learn for Free
- Why You Should Be Using iTalki
- How to Change Your Daily Goal on Duolingo


Dayna Brockbank is a travel and language-learning blogger who has lived around the world but has now settled in Nice, France. She speaks 3 languages at varying levels of fluency: Spanish, Italian, and French, and graduated with a Bachelor’s in Spanish Education. She and her husband focus on making travel part of life by living cheaply and traveling on a budget.
Claire
Tuesday 23rd of March 2021
This is really interesting! Do you happen to know if this feature is only available for the more popular languages? I'm doing the Gaelic course and have never seen this ramp-up challenge (and I've been using Duolingo every day for more than a month). Might explain why some people in my league (Ruby) are earning 1,000+ XP a day... Thanks for all your posts about Duolingo btw - I just stumbled upon your blog today and find it really helpful :)
admin
Tuesday 30th of March 2021
That's a really good question! It is usually only available within the League tab itself and it shows up a little more often towards the end of the week (when the League competition ends). I just logged into the Navajo course and there isn't an XP ramp-up challenge, but when I switched to French, there was one! I think you might be right, they probably don't have enough material in the less popular courses to have the challenges. And thank you so much, I'm so glad you like the Duolingo posts! I love writing them! lol
Dante
Sunday 24th of January 2021
This helped me a lot. Now im 7500 xp in Silver league and have 10 times as munch as number 2 lol