Learning a new language doesn’t come naturally for everyone, and you may need help to dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s” of a foreign language.
These days, many language students turn to online language-learning solutions, such as Duolingo and Rocket Languages. Both of these apps are immensely popular, so I just had to check them out and do a thorough comparison.
I have all the details for you if you are wondering which one you should use for your language-learning journey. So which is it, Duolingo or Rocket Languages?
Let’s find out.
What Is Duolingo?
Duolingo was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. It is one of the most popular language-learning platforms on the market because it offers a totally free version, meaning you don’t need to hand over your banking details to learn.
Duolingo, a unique and engaging language app, offers a colorful journey through more than 30 languages.
Its playful, game-like lessons are filled with varied activities targeting vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.
Users enjoy tailored learning experiences, daily quests, and achievement badges, making mastering a new language both fun and rewarding, with a focus on all key language skills.
When you use Duolingo to learn a target language, it’s like playing a game with the points and rewards you get, the Leagues, and fun characters.
Key facts and highlights about Duolingo
- Created by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, Duolingo has its origins at Carnegie Mellon University.
- Offers a diverse range of over 30 languages, including endangered and constructed languages.
- Known for its engaging, game-like approach to language learning, encouraging regular practice.
- One of the world’s most downloaded education apps, with millions of active users globally.
- Continually introduces new features like Duolingo Stories, podcasts, and AI-driven learning paths.
- Went public in 2021, showcasing significant growth and expansion in the edtech sector.
PROs
- Freemium version for learning multiple languages
- Bite-sized lessons for on-the-go learning
- Guidebook offers overviews and basic grammar tips
- Natural progression with continued language learning
CONs
- Limited grammar explanations
- Lack of conversation practice
- Inaccurate feedback from the speech recognition tool
- The app may experience glitches
Duolingo's Approach
With its game-like approach to learning, Duolingo is all about ensuring you enjoy your time on the app while you learn a new language. However, Duolingo’s teaching methods are research-backed and aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).
Duolingo ensures that your language education is on an international standard and you aren’t wasting time – unless you choose to muck around.
There are five tenets to learning a target language on Duolingo:
- You learn by doing via interactive lessons, podcasts, and stories.
- Your learning journey focuses on what matters, so you learn phrases and sentences you’ll use most often.
- With the bite-sized lessons, rewards, challenges, and gamification features, you’ll feel more motivated to learn.
- The personalized exercises focus on improving your weak spots.
- When you enjoy learning, you’ll feel more confident.
Duolingo teaches you via memorization and translation, offering very little grammar and language-based explanations. You’ll mostly improve your listening, reading, and writing skills.
Duolingo’s Target Audience
Duolingo appeals to various users, from kids to adults. When you register or create your family profiles, you have to share your age so the app ensures the content you learn is age-appropriate.
The language-learning solution is best for beginners and those who dabble in learning languages. If you are an intermediate student, like I am with Turkish and Italian, then Duolingo can be a great resource for revising the language.
What Is Rocket Languages?
Rocket Languages was created in 2004, and its headquarters are in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The language-learning solution started out with Rocket Spanish and Rocket French, and now it offers many more languages that you can learn.
Rocket Languages offers interactive online courses in 12 languages, emphasizing practical conversation and cultural understanding. It features audio lessons, language and culture lessons, voice recognition for pronunciation, and reinforcement activities. Ideal for learners seeking a comprehensive approach, it includes survival kits for travelers and personalized progress tracking for a tailored learning experience.
The website gets roughly 433.6K monthly visitors, and most of its users are from the United States, followed by the UK, Germany, and Spain.
Rocket Languages has won various awards, such as the PC Review Editor’s Choice Award, and it’s the language-learning app of choice for companies like Deloitte and Pentel.
Key facts and highlights about Rocket Languages
- Rocket Languages began as a digital language learning program designed to offer an in-depth learning experience.
- Provides courses in 12 languages, focusing on widely spoken languages such as Spanish, French, and Mandarin.
- Combines interactive audio lessons with language and culture lessons, reinforcing real-world conversational skills.
- Integrates voice recognition technology to help users improve their pronunciation and accent.
- Offers a one-time purchase for lifetime access to course materials, distinguishing it from subscription-based models.
- Designed to be accessible for learners of all ages and backgrounds, with a focus on self-paced, comprehensive language mastery.
PROs
- Free trial access to some lessons in each language
- Comprehensive practice in each lesson
- Native speaker-recorded audio
- Unique inclusion of American Sign Language
CONs
- Limited language options
- Longer time commitment (15-30 minutes) per lesson
- Lack of personalized feedback on pronunciation
- Culture lessons lack depth
Rocket Languages' Approach
According to an interview with Jason Oxenham, one of the founders, Rocket Languages uses the latest and best language-learning research and methods.
The app uses advanced technology to make your language-learning adventure easy and fun, and that’s evident in the state-of-the-art speech recognition software, Rocket Record, that evaluates your pronunciation.
Rocket Languages’ aim is to get you conversational while “training your ear” to the new language.
You learn mostly via downloadable audio lessons, making learning online and offline possible. These contain explanations, guidance, and exercises as you listen to the audio track.
Rocket Languages teaches mostly via translation and memorization (like Duolingo), and the app focuses on listening, comprehension, pronunciation, and speaking skills.
Rocket Languages’ Target Audience
Rocket Languages with its grown-up interface isn’t suitable for kids. It’s ideal for teens and adults who are beginner and intermediate students. Advanced learners can benefit, too, but the platform mostly offers additional practice and won’t help you become (more) fluent.
You also need to be a native English speaker or highly proficient in the language since the language of instruction is English.
However, if you speak Spanish, you can learn English since Rocket Languages offers that option.
Duolingo vs Rocket Languages: Which Languages Can You Learn?
Duolingo offers the biggest variety of languages you can learn. The app has 42 languages in total, but what you learn depends on your native language (or what you are very proficient in).
That means that if you speak English well, you can learn 39 languages, while if you speak Greek or Hindi, for example, you can only learn one language – English.
Some languages you can learn via Duolingo are Turkish, Zulu, Swahili, Indonesian, Hebrew, Vietnamese, Scottish Gaelic, Navajo, Catalan, and Hawaiian.
Duolingo also offers two fictional languages: High Valyrian and Klingon.
On the other hand, Rocket Languages offer 14 languages, including American Sign Language (not available on Duolingo).
On Rocket Languages, you can learn Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, French, English, German, Italian, and a couple of others.
What Prices on Duolingo vs Rocket Languages?
There is a huge price difference between Duolingo and Rocket Language.
Duolingo
On Duolingo, you can study any language (and as many as you’d like) for free. So whatever content Duolingo offers in the target language is accessible to you at no cost – but you need patience to put up with the ads after each lesson.
You can, however, sign up for Super Duolingo at US$47.99 per year or Duolingo Max at a monthly US$30.
Rocket Languages
You need a much bigger investment to learn a language on Rocket Languages. You can access the free trial and check out a couple of lessons, but if you want to really learn Spanish, Russian, or Chinese, the platform offers a subscription per language.
So you need to buy a subscription for every language you want to learn, but you’ll have lifetime access.
In general, you need to choose the level you want, so Level 1 is for beginners, Level 2 is for intermediate students, and Level 3 for the advanced ones.
The costs for Rocket Spanish, for example, are US$149.95 for Level 1, US$299.90 for Levels 1 and 2, and US$449.85 for all three levels.
Duolingo's Pros and Cons
Pros
- The freemium version, so you can learn as many languages as you’d like at no cost.
- You progress naturally the more you learn a language on Duolingo.
- The bite-sized lessons are ideal to learn on-the-go or if you don’t have hours to dedicate to learning every day.
- The gamification of Duolingo keeps you entertained and motivated, and the app is pretty addictive.
- You can learn a target language from scratch, take a placement test, or skip ahead if you know the material.
- The Guidebook in each Section gives you an overview of what you’ll learn and basic grammar tips.
Cons
- While there’s some grammar explanations, it’s not enough, and learning becomes a tad too complicated when trying to figure stuff out, making extra resources a must.
- While you practice listening and reading skills the most, you miss out on true conversation and speaking practice.
- It doesn’t help that the audio you learn from is animated and that pronunciation between the characters change.
- The speech recognition tool isn’t great; there’ve been plenty of times that I apparently got the pronunciation right even though I didn’t speak or mispronounced words.
- The app glitches the further along you are in your learning journey.
Rocket Languages' Pros and Cons
Pros
- You can try a few lessons of each language (and whatever Level is available) for free.
- The language packages are yours – always. You get lifetime access, so while the once-off or pay-over-6-months investment is pricey, you don’t have to keep paying for a yearly or monthly subscription.
- You get a lot of practice when you start a new lesson, ensuring you truly understand, can pronounce, and use the language you’ve learned by the time you take the lesson’s quiz.
- The audio is recorded by native speakers, which is a huge benefit for correct pronunciation.
- Loads of extra features like making notes while you learn, getting a Rocket certificate, learning offline, and the forum to ask questions.
- The leaderboard feature helps keep you motivated.
- There aren’t many multi-language-learning apps that teach American Sign Language, and Rocket Languages does.
Cons
- Rocket Languages only offers 13 languages (14th is English for Spanish speakers), while Duolingo offers 40+ languages.
- You need to be very proficient in English if you want to use Rocket Languages to learn a new language.
- While you can commit as little as 5 minutes (or less) for a lesson on Duolingo, you need a minimum of 15-30 minutes for one on Rocket Languages, and that only accounts for the audio lesson, not the extra practice. But you can break up the audio lessons into bite-size sections – if you have a good memory and can easily pick up where you left off.
- No personalized feedback when you practice your pronunciation, but the software is better than Duolingo’s.
- The culture lessons don’t cover the culture of the language, which is disappointing.
Excited to learn more? Explore my reviews listed below:
Verdict: Which Language Learning App Is the Best for Me?
Only you can decide which language learning app is best for you, because that depends on your reasons for learning a new language, your goals, your budget, and how much time you have to commit each day.
Choose Duolingo if:
- You want to learn a language for fun or don’t have the budget for a subscription.
- You are a newbie or want to spruce up your skills.
- If you want easy and quick lessons with no fuss or grammar explanations.
Choose Rocket Languages if:
- You are serious about learning the language.
- You are a newbie, intermediate, or advanced student.
- If you want quality, intensive conversational language lessons that immerse you in the language.
I like Duolingo because it suits my busy schedule, but Rocket Languages offers a lot more value in terms of what you learn with the grammar explanations and how much you practice the target language’s vocab.
Of course, never rely only on an app to teach you a language. Supplement your learning with as many native resources as possible!
If you enjoyed my article, please feel free to share it. Have any questions? Don't hesitate to email me!
Disclaimer: I select and review independently. If you buy through affiliate links, I may earn commissions that help support my testing at no extra cost to you. Please read my full disclosure for more information.
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