Why is Duolingo Attacking JK Rowling in its German Lessons?
The world’s leading language app seems to have taken a highly partisan position on the trans debate.
To those who are unaware, Duolingo is now the leading language-learning app on the planet. It achieves this because it is very good at teaching languages. It is also one of the world’s most successful tech companies; its last twelve months’ revenue dwarfs Spotify’s by 2.5 times. It achieves this by having an extremely engaging app with customer retention rates most tech companies can only dream of.
A significant part of this success is because it appeals to both adults and children and, as a result, a lot of customers have family accounts. My daughter, 16, has a 1,122-day streak on her Spanish course on Duolingo. It’s trusted by parents and customers around the world to teach languages efficiently and effectively.
We don’t, however, pay Duolingo to peddle radical trans ideology to her. Yet this is what Duolingo seems to have been doing through subtle nudging for several years now.
Yesterday a colleague shared the following tweet with me:
It’s a paraphrase of the German below:
The actual translation is:
Magst du die Bücher mit Harry Potter als Figur?
(Do you like the books with Harry Potter as a character?)
Ja, aber meiner Meinung nach ist die Autorin gemein.
(Yes, but in my opinion, the author is mean.)
Ja, du hast recht! Ich interessiere mich für Sport.
(Yes, you’re right! I’m interested in sports.)
Since Gabby Koppel’s tweet yesterday, others have picked up on this including James Esses of this parish:
Now, any of us who have worked in the corporate world know that it can be very difficult for the head to know what various limbs are doing. There are legion examples of rogue activist employees and suppliers causing corporate blushes. So, if you were to give the Duolingo management the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are unaware of this — it being the action of a rogue employee and they couldn’t possibly really want to pick a legal battle with one of the world’s most wealthy and influential women through this sort of petty slander — then you may be being overtly generous: it turns out that this sentence has been on Duolingo since August 2024, with the following Facebook post praising the company for attacking Rowling:
And the agora of reason and nuanced debate that is Reddit:
Starting a thread which was full of visceral hatred aimed at the author.
So the ‘other side’ on the trans debate had clearly picked up on this 12 months ago and yet, as of yesterday it is still a feature of the German lessons.
Like many tech companies, Duolingo, founded by a Swiss, ended up a fixture of the American technical hegemony — the monoculture of essentially American professional-class coastal politics and liberal values. One of the issues such companies run into is that as they serve an international market they come up slap bang against other cultures where the politics of the Bay Area may not be appreciated or welcome. So last year, around the time when they were teaching students learning German that J.K. Rowling is a nasty, horrible person, they had to remove all their LGBTQ+ and “queer” content from their Russian version. I’m currently learning Arabic through the app and I have yet to run into the LGBTQ+ content there.
‘Pronoun tinkering’ may not be important in a language like English, but it is pretty important to get right in gendered languages like Spanish, French, Italian, Gaelic, Irish, etc. Tampering with grammar essentially makes the app useless for anyone using it for serious academic study.
What’s the big deal? Well, it is this: Duolingo is trusted by millions of people, and a lot of parents, to teach them and their kids foreign languages. That is all it should be doing. If such highly controversial politicised content as this attack on Rowling is permitted by the editorial team, then what do you think that does for parental trust?
If Duolingo are content to allow such content — and the fact it has been on their app for a year now suggests they are — then what else are they teaching, and more importantly, what are they teaching my daughter? Can I rely on them to teach Spanish objectively and professionally, or is my daughter being exposed to the political opinions and beliefs of their employees?
Duolingo have yet to respond to yesterday’s exposé on X. I have written to their customer services asking for an explanation and reassurance that their app is suitable for my family, and I am sure I am not the only one.
Duolingo is a phenomenal platform for learning languages; it is responsible for refreshing my schoolboy Latin and polishing up my Scottish Gaelic. However, it will rapidly cease to be the leading language app if the trust it has built with customers, and parents especially, is undermined.
So my questions are:
How did this happen?
Did you intend to personally attack J.K. Rowling?
It’s been on the app for 12 months, and you haven’t taken it down, why?
How am I, as a customer, meant to be reassured that you are teaching my family languages objectively and professionally, without politics, ideology or personal insults aimed at individuals?
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the UK’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack page.
Update: Duolingo has issued the following statement:
Thin gruel. Whilst the apology and action is welcome it does not explain how this happened, why it has been up for over a year and what else is Duolingo teaching kids and students.
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Thanks for this info, will cross them off the list if I am ever in the market for learning another language (think I would rather pay a human anyway, get some cultural stuff thrown in).
Love the updated acronym for “terf” tired of explaining reality to fuc kwits
Efficient and effective, eh? And the odd bit of subtle nudging built in to boot. Quite a few things seem to be marketed like that. But is it actually possible to devise a language course that is absolutely blank at some kind of cultural or political advertiisng? I never came across any when I was a teenager at school several decades ago, anyway.
Sounds like Russian is a safe language to learn.
Answer: because they can and the management feel better about themselves by doing it. Globalist monopolies are often managed and controlled by the left who hold these sorts of views and believe those who don’t share them are evil beings.
If I were Duolingo I would worry more about the impression the whole exchange gives.
“Yes, you’re right! I’m interested in sports.”??? How does this in any way relate to the two previous sentences?
It looks like a conversation between to mentally challenged people.
Forget the woke bit. The app looks like it’s dogshit.
And in any case, good luck learning a language through an app.
More free publicity for JKR. She’ll be pleased.
Students of the German language have been subjected for years to the imagined horrors of man made climate change and the utopian ideal of a German-led EU. What is for sure is that no one will be invited to disagree.
The so-called German government doesn’t even lead Germany, let alone the EU. That everyone in the anglosphere (including Gernany) has had +80 years of anti-German hatred drilled into him doesn’t change that.
I don’t hate Germany or Germans and I don’t know anyone that does. I am sad that Germany is in the state it is in (but then I am sad that England is in a bad state too, and for that matter many other countries that are part of White European civilisation, that are all going in the same wrong direction). I would rather live here than in Germany – but then I am English so I am biased.
I’d like to live in Bavaria. No wonder the movement to secede from Germany is growing there. I believe they are much more Austrian/Tyrolean in their outlook, but that’s probably true of most places in or close to the Alps – Alpine culture probably transcends national boundaries. I have heard of Bavaria being described as the “Texas” of Germany!
I’ve been to Oberstdorf a few times which is Alpine and yes seemed culturally similar to places I have been in Switzerland and Trentino Alto Adige (North Italy). Munich seemed pleasant the couple of times we stopped off there on the way to the mountains but it may have changed – that was more than ten years ago.
The reason for this is that Austria is a former part of the duchy of Bavaria which could separated from it for dynastic reasons some time in the middle ages.
Take Ursula v. d. Leyen as example. She’s a second-rate party politician from the German CDU who, after a disastrous ministerial career in relatively unimportant posts, most prominent one secretary of defense, got installed as head of the EU commission to find her a sinecure where she can’t do anything that’s going to embarras important German politicians in Germany anymore. The president of the EU commission gets nominated by the European Council (heads of government of the member states) by a so-called reinforced qualified majority vote which means 72% of the member states (20 members) representing at least 65% of the population. This nomination must then be approved by the EU parliament. The job of the EU commission is to prepare EU policy proposals which must then be approved by both the EU parliament and the council of ministers (with qualified majority vote, 55%/ 65%). The claim that v. d. Leyen is really the unelected dictator of the whole EU is a striking example of downright pathological hatred for Germans as it basically amounts to claiming that she’s the German-appointed successor to Adolf Hitler at the time of the German occupation of most of Europe, ie, 1941 – 1943, before… Read more »
I don’t think Juncker or most other politicians of most political persuasions would be well regarded by most of us here.
Insofar I remember this, this particular claim wasn’t made about him. His image was – rather more appropriate – that of a slightly geriatric pencil pusher whose disconnect from the living reality of the British (or, for that matter, any) people made for all kinds of useless, expensive and bizarre EU regulations about “wonky vegetables¹” and stuff like that.
¹ The often repeated claim that “EU regulations” had prohibited selling these seems to be wrong: While British supermarkets never sell them, Polish supermarkets in the UK do.
I honestly think you are exaggerating whatever tendency exists. If this sounds condescending, it’s certainly not meant to be. Just don’t want to see a fellow sceptic suffering more than we are already destined to.
I am more angry since 2020 than I was before and I imagine that is not uncommon. Perhaps the difference in how these two figures may be perceived is partially due to that.
Have a good day!
I realize the example is fairly poor and that there are valid reasons for seeing this in a different way, the one you mentioned among them. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that v. d. Leyen would have much less verbal vitriol thrown at her if she wasn’t German. Not that I’m particularly happy about defending this woman, because she’s the epitome of an incompetent politician damaging everything she touches. But the claim that she’s something like the “Blofeld of the EU” is just laughable. She couldn’t be that if even she really wanted to.
Yes if there are “Blofelds” I think they will be hiding in the shadows.
Not correct. Stop whinging.
That you happen to agree with this contrafactual boilerplate statement whose (repeat-)appearance got triggered by the word ‘German’ in an article despite it has absolutely no relation to its content doesn’t make it true.
Eh??
This comes across as paranoia. I had anglo German family members who fought on opposite sides in both world wars. A truly terrible thing. I have a degree in German language and history from a British university and a diploma from the EU loving, Umwelt obsessed Goethe Institute. Try being a eurosceptic or a belittler of Germany in those institutions and you might learn a thing or two outside your own comfort zone.
Appeal to authority with oneself as authority is a particularly poor substitute for arguments. Your comment has zero relation to the topic of the article which used a German sentence as example for (according to the author) inappropriate politcization of the content of a language-learning app. As opposed to what you suggest, embedding climate change propaganda in all parts of the curriculum is not a German agenda. An example of this would be past articles by Jack Watson on this site which complained about the exact same thing in French lessons in his English school. As other recent articles on this site pointed out, the notion of CO₂ as a pollutant was invented in the USA about fifteen years ago. US-satellite states like the so-called Federal Republic of Germany, whose establishment politicians ardently copy everything the US democrats do in the USA will thus ‘naturally’ have picked it up from there. Political decision-making in the EU happens in the EU parliament and the Council of the EU. The present EU parliament has 720 members, 96 if which are German. That’s the largest number of MEPs of any member state but only 13⅓% of the total number of MEPs. The council… Read more »
Apart from anything else, DuoLingo is garbage software. It does not teach language properly (ie using immersion).
There was an article in the Speccie saying just that. Turned me off, but is useful for learning words. Grammar not so much.
I’ve been doing German on Duolingo for a few years now. I’ve not come across the Trans Propaganda yet, but they do have a number of characters and “lessons” which push the L and G inclusiveness message.
Oh, and all the black/ethnic minority characters are either highly qualified or highly aspirational … usually doctors.
Yes, I agree. I haven’t yet come across the JKR stuff but have been suspicious of the numerous coloured characters. Not too many native Germans, that’s for sure.
The reason they have a high retention rate is that they nag you to death. I had to unsubscribe because I couldn’t stand it. Even then they sent reminders. I used it as a back up to the German classes I attend at college. If they ask me to renew, I won’t. There are plenty of free options.
They are not alone in this insidious agenda-pushing in language lessons.
Both Babel and Memrise pushed vaccines, masks and social distancing during the lockdown.
Trans and racist (anti-white) lessons soon followed. I’d rather stay monolingual than follow that crap. All these apps have now been deleted.
I dropped Duolingo for just those reasons.
I used it for a year to learn Italian, the continuous use of LGBTQ and woke themes was annoying, being “forced” to say his husband or her wife, among several examples.
Got fed up of its hectoring and didn’t renew, a shame because my Italian was coming along quite well, but being badgered (unsuccessfully) into using pronouns and woke in my own native language is bad enough!
They deserve to go broke if they are going to use the platform to promote woke.