LangoDawg
What to learn after Duolingo
Short answer: after Duolingo, most learners need vocabulary, in volume. To read most everyday texts comfortably you need roughly 8,000 to 9,000 word families; for everyday spoken language, roughly 6,000 to 7,000[1]. Research supports two methods for building that: reviewing words with spaced repetition[3] and practicing recall[4]. Meeting words in real sentences, alongside reading and listening you enjoy, can help them stick.
How many words do you need to understand a language?
Researchers measure this with "coverage": the share of words in a text you already know. Paul Nation's widely cited study found that to know 98% of the words in a text (the level where reading feels comfortable), you need about 8,000 to 9,000 word families for written text and 6,000 to 7,000 for spoken text[1]. A word family is a word and its common forms: play, plays, played and player count as one. These figures come from English; other languages vary, especially those with many word forms.
For listening, a lower coverage of 95% may be enough to follow the main ideas, which corresponds to about 2,000 to 3,000 word families; in the same study, most listeners followed the texts even at 90% coverage[2]. So a few thousand words get you into conversations; many thousands get you into books, news and films without a dictionary.
How far does Duolingo take you?
Duolingo says its nine most popular courses (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese) now teach up to B2 on the CEFR scale, the upper-intermediate level, for most learners[5]. A 2021 study of adults who finished Duolingo's beginning-level Spanish or French content found their reading and listening scores were comparable to university students at the end of their fourth semester[6]. (Some of the study's authors were Duolingo researchers.)
That's a solid foundation. The step after it is usually the same for everyone: many more words, met many times, in real contexts.
What works for learning thousands of words?
- Spaced repetition. Reviewing a word at growing intervals, instead of cramming, improves long-term memory. A large review of 317 experiments found the benefit in most verbal learning studies, and the best gap between reviews grows with how long you want to remember[3].
- Retrieval practice. Trying to recall a word (a quiz, a blank to fill) builds memory better than studying it again. In a study with Swahili–English word pairs, repeated testing greatly improved recall a week later, while extra studying added nothing[4].
- Words in real sentences. A sentence shows how a word is actually used: its grammar, its partners and its meaning in context. Filling in a missing word combines this with retrieval practice.
- Lots of input. Reading and listening to things you enjoy brings words back again and again, and it gets easier the more words you know[1].
Your options after Duolingo
| Option | Good for | Keep in mind |
|---|---|---|
| Flashcard apps with spaced repetition (for example Anki) | Total control; any deck, any language | You choose or build the decks; many decks show single words rather than sentences |
| Fill-in-the-blank sentence apps | Many real sentences with one word missing, usually ordered by how common the word is | Check which languages are covered and how the sentences were checked |
| Reading and listening (graded readers, podcasts, series with subtitles) | Real language, the way people use it | Hard until you know enough words[1] |
| Tutors and conversation practice (online or in person) | Speaking and feedback | Costs per lesson; vocabulary still has to be learned |
| LangoDawg | Arcade games built on real sentences with one word missing, plus spaced repetition; 100 new words a day free on iPhone, Android and the web | A young app; we are still checking the sentences in some language pairs |
A common approach is to combine two or three: one way to learn new words every day, and one way to use them.
A simple plan for the next six months
- Learn new words every day, in sentences, with spaced repetition. Fifteen to twenty minutes is enough to start.
- Read or listen to something you like a few times a week, at a level where you understand most of it.
- Speak when you can, with a tutor, a friend or a language exchange.
At 30 new words a day, you meet about 5,000 new words in six months. (Apps count separate words, so 5,000 words is fewer than 5,000 word families.) Not every word sticks the first time, which is exactly what spaced repetition is for.
Questions learners ask
Is Duolingo enough to become fluent?
Duolingo's most popular courses now teach up to upper-intermediate (B2) for most learners[5]. Fluency in real conversations, books and films usually needs thousands more words and a lot of listening and reading[1].
How many new words a day should I learn?
A common starting point is 10 to 30 new words a day plus reviews. More is possible, but reviews grow with every new word.
How long does it take to learn 5,000 words?
At 30 new words a day, about six months to meet them all; learning them well takes repeated reviews over the following months[3].
Are games a real way to learn vocabulary?
They are if every game round makes you recall a word in a real sentence and brings it back later; that is retrieval practice and spaced repetition[3][4], with a reason to keep playing.
Duolingo and Anki are trademarks of their owners. LangoDawg is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by them.
Sources
- Nation, I. S. P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59–82. Open access
- van Zeeland, H., & Schmitt, N. (2013). Lexical coverage in L1 and L2 listening comprehension: The same or different from reading comprehension? Applied Linguistics, 34(4), 457–479. doi:10.1093/applin/ams074
- Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380. PubMed
- Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966–968. doi:10.1126/science.1152408. See also Roediger & Karpicke (2006), Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
- Duolingo blog, "Duolingo courses now teach advanced content" (2026). blog.duolingo.com; TechCrunch, 22 April 2026. techcrunch.com
- Jiang, X., Rollinson, J., Plonsky, L., Gustafson, E., & Pajak, B. (2021). Evaluating the reading and listening outcomes of beginning-level Duolingo courses. Foreign Language Annals, 54(4), 974–1002. Abstract