Advent Calendar – 10

German Learning Advent Calendar 2025 - Day 10

“Duolingo, but it doesn’t suck”

Hello everyone,

a bit late today, but welcome back to the German learning Advent Calendar 2025, door number 10.
And behind this door is the first recommendation for a language tool for this season.

LingoDeer

Yeah… I know… LingoDeer, lingopie, langotalk, lingodies, langodas.
There are so many apps now that the names start getting confusing.

But today, I want to tell you about LingoDeer because it’s basically what Duolingo could be if they took the idea of teaching someone a language seriously.

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Bit of backstory first because why not.

LingoDeer contacted me last spring, asking me if I would want to do a review and even offered me a small amount of money.
So I checked out their app and thought… okay, this is just like Duolingo. They have a linear learning path, with mixed topics and some cartoon character. So I wrote them back saying that I don’t really know what to say other than “It’s like Duolingo” and they then sent me a sort of self-review, but ultimately I rejected to do the review because I just wasn’t too convinced of the product.

Until I actually downloaded Duolingo again.

Yes, a few weeks later, I thought “Oh, let’s download Duolingo and learn some Russian.” I have been trying to learn Bulgarian for a while now and I am failing because I am lazy and unmotivated and don’t vibe with the language very much. So I thought I’d try Russian and use Duolingo to see where they’re at with their multi-billion dollar product. Surely it’s the perfect app if they have that kind of funding available.

Well… this current iteration of Duolingo is the worst of all the ones I have seen. Like… It was so much worse than what I imagined it to be. I can’t get into that now though because that would end up being just a rant about Duolingo. That’s for some other time maybe.

But yeah, I kept testing out of levels eventually skipping 90 days worth of learning because it’s just so ungodly slow.
And I hated every second of it.

So I thought… hey, why not try out LingoDeer again.

And guess what happened after a few days:

I ACTUALLY BOUGHT A PAID ACCOUNT!

How stupid am I?
They offered me a free lifetime account, plus a bit of money plus a give-away account for you and I said no, because I didn’t know what to say other than “It’s like Duolingo”. Not realizing just how far Duo has fallen by now.

I reached out to the team now but I think they’re offended by what I said back then. They’re from Korea as far as I know and I was my German direct self so yeah… no freebie today.

But that whole story makes this all the more authentic.

Lingodeer is a great App

Lingodeer Logo

 

If you’re looking for an app that offers you:

  • a guided learning path
  • with incremental but steady progression, not just a progression-simulator
  • bite sized lessons that you can fit in easily
  • lots of exercises
  • audio
  • progress tracking
  • a nice interface and a professional team
  • AND grammar explanation

… then LingoDeer might be what you’re looking for.
It basically has all the good things of Duolingo, and some of the things that people miss on Duolingo. Particularly, proper grammar explanations and actual progress.

LingoDeer is much harder than Duolingo, in that you can’t just breeze through the learning path as fast. Like… I could not test out of any levels on LingoDeer and I COULD test out of levels in Chinese on Duolingo, because it was just so easy (I don’t know ANY Chinese).

So you have to actually “work” to get a ahead and sometimes you’ll get stuck, but that’s much more like real language learning.

Now, as expected, I have fallen off the language learning train again, so I can’t really say how well LingoDeer does long term, but from what I have seen, I think it might actually be a good base method for self study, that you then supplement with other things here and there.

I’ll just link you the website here and you can take a look for yourself. You’ll find the links to their apps in the app stores there as well:

LingoDeer – Homepage (German Learning Section)

If you’re looking for an app that gives your learning structure, this is definitely a recommendation.

Sorry that I can’t offer a freebie for you, that’s on me and my stupidity.
But yeah, I hope you find this helpful.

If you have experience with LingoDeer, please please share them in the comments. And also, if you have another app in mind that does something similar in a similar format, please share. The fewer people that use Duolingo just due to a lack of awareness of better alternatives out there, the better.

So yeah, that’s it for today.
I hope you enjoyed it, have a great day and wir sehen uns morgen!

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