What Duolingo Esperanto actually is
Duolingo's Esperanto course for English speakers opened as a public beta at the end of May 2015. It was built by a team of volunteers led by Chuck Smith, under Duolingo's old contributor programme, and it took off faster than anyone expected: the American Esperanto association's bulletin reported 25,000 learners in the first two weeks, more than some courses for far larger languages.
It is a standard Duolingo course in shape. Short lessons, tap-the-tiles translation, listening and typing exercises, a streak, leagues and reminders. What set it apart at launch was the audio: the fan-run Duolingo Wiki records that the course uses recordings of a human speaker rather than a text-to-speech engine, which for a language with no native accent to imitate is a sensible choice, and one that still sounds better than many of Duolingo's computer-voiced courses.
It is also, by Duolingo standards, small. The unofficial tracker duolingodata.com, which lists every Duolingo course, showed Esperanto from English at 69 units, labelled CEFR A1, with no stories, in its July 2025 snapshot. For comparison, Duolingo labels its large courses as reaching B2. The same tracker counted around 1.3 million learners on the course, a reminder of how many people have passed through it.
What happened to it
In March 2021 Duolingo ended its volunteer contributor programme, which had built dozens of courses since 2013, and said course creation would move to paid staff. That is a defensible decision for a company about to float on the stock market. It also meant the volunteer-built courses, Esperanto among them, lost the people who had been improving them, and the paid machinery went where the revenue was.
Since then the course has been what our how to learn Esperanto guide calls effectively unmaintained. It still works. Nobody has added a second half. And according to the fan-run Duolingo Wiki, the Esperanto courses for Spanish, Portuguese and French speakers were dropped from the public course list in 2023, which leaves the English-source course as the only one on offer.
None of this makes it bad. It makes it finished, in the way a pamphlet is finished.
What it does well
It is free, and properly free. There is no Esperanto-specific content behind the paywall. Duolingo's paid tiers remove adverts and add conveniences, but the course itself costs nothing.
It gets beginners to show up. The streak is a crude instrument, but for the first month of a new language showing up is most of the battle, and nothing does that better than the owl.
The basics are clean. The grammatical endings, the present, past and future tenses, the plural and the accusative -n are all introduced early and drilled repeatedly. Esperanto's regularity suits Duolingo's infer-the-rule method better than most languages do, because there are no exceptions waiting to ambush the pattern you inferred.
It is the front door. A great many of today's Esperanto speakers first met the language here. If you want to test whether it clicks for you before committing time, a fortnight of Duolingo is a reasonable and free experiment.
Where it falls short
The vocabulary is themed, not ranked. Duolingo groups words into topics: food, animals, family, clothing. That keeps lessons coherent, but it means you meet words in the order the syllabus finds convenient rather than the order you will need them. In any language the most frequent thousand or so words carry most of everyday text, and the case for learning them first is in our core 1,000 list and its sources. A themed course spends early hours on words you will rarely use.
The affixes get tips, not teaching. This is the big one. Esperanto's real speed comes from its 40 official affixes: learn mal-, -ej-, -ul-, -in- and friends properly and every root you know turns into a small family of words. The multiplier is the reason Esperanto learners overtake learners of natural languages. Duolingo introduces a handful of affixes in passing and leaves you to spot the rest, which is rather like teaching someone arithmetic by showing them receipts.
The correlatives are underexplained. The correlative table, kio, tio, io, ĉio, nenio and the rest of the 45 words built on the same grid, is the most efficient single page of grammar in any language, and it is best learnt as a grid. Duolingo feeds it to you word by word, so the pattern that makes it easy stays hidden.
It stops at A1. Past the tree there is nothing: no stories, no longer texts, no route onward. The community-run Duostories has translated 16 of Duolingo's English stories into Esperanto, which helps, but it is volunteers patching a gap Duolingo has not filled.
It is small on the small things too. The article la, and the absence of any word for "a", each deserve a paragraph of explanation, the numbers are a ten-minute job with a real system behind them, and the alphabet has six hatted letters worth ten minutes' deliberate practice. Duolingo gets through all of them, but only in the sense that they appear. Explanation is thin throughout.
Is it worth it?
As a first month, yes. It costs nothing, the habit machinery is excellent, and Esperanto's regularity means the inferred-grammar approach misleads you less here than it does in French or Spanish.
As a plan, no. You will reach the end of the useful material in a few months, and the risk after that is the one the community has a name for, eterna komencanto, the eternal beginner who keeps redoing beginner material because it feels like work. Our longer piece on how to actually learn Esperanto goes through that trap in detail. The fix is to leave while it still feels easy.
What to learn after Duolingo Esperanto
Esperanto is quick to learn by any measure: our estimate in how long does it take to learn Esperanto is around 150 to 200 hours to comfortable conversation. Duolingo covers the first stretch. Here is how to cover the rest.
A course that teaches the language's structure. lernu.net is the movement's own free portal, with a course, a dictionary, a grammar reference and forums in one place. Its course lineup is smaller than older guides describe, but the grammar reference alone is worth the bookmark. The other free option worth knowing is esperanto12.net, a short basics course with no sign-up.
The book. Complete Esperanto by Tim Owen and Judith Meyer, in the Teach Yourself series, is the modern English-language textbook: dialogues, audio, proper explanation and a sensible pace. If you want one paper spine for the next stage, it is that one. Our Esperanto books page ranks the rest of the shelf.
Reading, early and often. Esperanto rewards reading sooner than any other language, because there are no irregular forms to trip over. Gerda Malaperis by Claude Piron is the classic first reader, a short mystery written to introduce vocabulary gradually chapter by chapter. After that, the graded-reading route through the literature is laid out in our Esperanto bookshelf article.
People. This is what no app provides. The community runs regular online meetups and chat groups, Pasporta Servo lets you stay with Esperanto speakers around the world for free, and the annual World Congress, run by the Universal Esperanto Association, is the largest of many gatherings. Esperanto speakers are unusually patient with beginners, because every one of them chose to learn it. Spoken Esperanto covers what people actually say when you get there.
Our course, which we make. We built the Kilo Lingo Esperanto course for exactly the gap this review describes, so read this paragraph knowing whose it is. The curriculum teaches 3,000 roots in frequency order, most useful first. The 40 official affixes have their own track rather than turning up by accident, and the affix sandbox lets you build words from roots and affixes to see how far the multiplier goes. Every chapter closes with a graded story held to a strict vocabulary ceiling, so you never meet a word the course has not taught, and every structure has a grammar article. All the instruction is free to read with no account. The paid part, Kilo Lingo Plus, is the optional practice layer on top. If Duolingo got you started and you want the second half, that is what it is for.
The verdict
Duolingo's Esperanto course is a well-made, free beginner course that did a great deal for the language and has had no new teaching since the people who made it were thanked and sent home. Take the first month from it gladly. Then go and learn the affixes, read a short novel and talk to someone, because that is where Esperanto actually starts, and the owl will not take you there.