I’ve been using Duolingo music alongside real piano lessons for four months – here’s what I’ve found
I started learning Hindi and Arabic casually on Duolingo – and I mean it terribly casually – almost a year ago. 316 days ago, to be exact, if my Duolingo streak is anything to go by. While I was learning, I found myself getting a little bored with the repetitive lessons, and actually only did one lesson a day, just to keep my streak going, hoping it would get a bit more interesting as I went along. I got further. I almost left the entire app – until Duolingo Music was announced.
At the end of last year, Duolingo launched its music learning program, initially focused on piano. The lessons focus on basic music theory, learning how to place notes on a keyboard, and building and improving your ability to read musical notes. This was incredibly lucky for me, as I had only started piano lessons a few months earlier!
It was a dream of mine to learn to play the piano, and although I felt a little intimidated by the idea of learning an instrument as an adult, I had a lot of fun. However, I’d been struggling with the theoretical side of things for a while, so I hoped Duolingo Music could help.
A good start!
The lessons start simply – here is a picture of three piano keys, the CD and E keys. The first two are labeled because the course starts with learning from middle C, which was a helpful reflection of the beginning of my personal piano lessons. At the time I almost felt insulted that Duo would throw this at me, but of course it’s aimed at absolute beginners.
But as I continued with the module, I realized that we had covered the basics quickly, as the app planned to layer more information on top of the basic notes, so that by the time you’ve completed the first module, you’ll have about five notes under your belt.
Three lessons into the first module, the app has you play short pieces of music on a virtual keyboard to help you recognize the notes and improve your timing, adding more notes and faster timings to keep you on your toes.
I found this much more interesting than the language courses, not only because it was fun, but also because I could immediately put what I learned into practice – within the Duolingo lessons, but also in my real lessons with my teacher. After a few weeks of using the app’s new music features, my piano teacher noticed how much better I became at reading new pieces we covered.
Can we please have real lessons?
Around this time I completely switched from learning languages on Duolingo to the music course, and within a month or two I was able to skip an entire beginner course that my teacher and I went through and move on to more challenging pieces.
I rode at the peak of this achievement for a while, but after a while I found myself frustrated by the stagnation of my progress in the app. I started the process by learning three notes, and now, four full months later, I’m at… seven notes. Considering I do the lessons every day, often multiple times a day, there isn’t much progress to be seen for the time investment.
Furthermore, once you get out of the introductory phase, the lessons start to feel more like a simple rhythm game, with no actual music theory content in sight as of yet other than “identify these notes.” No lessons were given on chords or scales, octaves and accidentals. Even when you start playing the more difficult pieces, the only major thing that changes from piece to piece is the speed at which you have to play, but even then it’s still nowhere close to what those songs sound like when played. a real piano.
The basic blocks at the beginning of the course can be very useful, especially if you have spent little to no time in formal music lessons. But as I got a few more sessions deep with my piano teacher, the app quickly fell behind everything we covered together.
Even now, as I continue to use it to keep my streak going (out of sheer pushiness, more than anything), I no longer find it useful in my weekly classes. I opted to buy actual music theory books instead, which have worked wonders compared to anything on the app. In fact, everything I learned in the app in four months was covered in just two pages of my textbook.
Would I recommend it?
If you had asked me early in my Duolingo music journey if I would recommend the app, I would have grabbed your phone and downloaded it for you myself. However, being able to compare the learning experience of the app to my hands-on music lessons has given me a good insight into how lame the app really is.
Even as you jump further into the app’s lesson plans, you’ll find the same kind of boring and repetitive exercises. For the sake of this article, I skipped four modules early this week and barely remembered skipping until Thursday when I was asked to “review” what I had previously learned. I didn’t need to revise what Duolingo taught me because I had learned it myself ages ago.
I browsed the Duolingo subreddit to see what other Duolingo enthusiasts thought about the new music lessons, and found that most people are as lukewarm about them as I am. Many users lamented the lack of actual knowledge of music theory beyond identifying notes on a keyboard, and the fact that you can’t play along on a connected electronic instrument instead of just tapping your screen – a feature that some special apps for music education do contain .
As for what could be done to improve it, I’m not entirely sure what to suggest. Perhaps more people would find it interesting and useful if Duolingo approached music education from a broader theoretical position rather than trying to make it a piano-specific experience.
It would also mean that the lessons would be more intuitive and have much more variety. Moreover, it would not be limited to only people who want to play the piano or keyboard. A few people in the Reddit threads I looked at who play other instruments wrote about the disappointment they felt when they realized they wouldn’t be able to participate in a meaningful way.
Overall, I can’t really figure out what keeps me on Duolingo’s music course. It’s probably just because I like having a pretty decent streak, but right now it’s nothing more than that. Now when I sit down to do a class, I do it with the TV on, barely looking at the screen for more than a few seconds. I used Duolingo music for four months – and I quickly outgrew it.