I stumbled across a Duolingo trick, and now I wish I hadn’t

I’m a bit addicted to Duolingo in the quest to improve my Spanish. I know he’s not the best tutor, but I’m too lazy to go to traditional classes. Also, I can go into the education app a couple of times a day and feel like I’m getting better. I joyfully embrace my mild addiction: How bad can a learning addiction be? Except I’m not addicted to learning Spanish, which is why stumbling upon this Duolingo trick kinda ruined the app for me.

Some of you might be wondering why I’m disappointed, but you probably want to know more about the Duolingo trick. I am happy to share it.

It’s more of a bug than a cheat, but it’s a way to generate XP pretty quickly and mostly without learning anything. You can see me blasting it in the video above.

In the mobile app, go to exercises section and choose talk practice This exercise is already a pretty easy way to get cheap XP. If your reading and pronunciation are good enough, you can pause the demonstration and repeat the text. If not, just make the same sounds the Duolingo character makes. Either way, the app doesn’t want to penalize weird accents, so you usually don’t need to be perfect to get the congratulatory ping.

The bug I discovered is that if you press Tap to talk immediately when the next question appears, it is too soon for the application to register it as interrupting the demo. The character on the screen steps forward and says the phrase while the voice recorder is running. With the app on the speaker, the microphone hears the correct answer perfectly spoken by the Duolingo character, and you get the win.

Then press continue and immediately strike Tap to talk again Rinse and repeat.

This does not involve you speaking more than completing the first question. You don’t even have to look at the sentence and you can complete the entire ten question exercise in about 60 seconds. With your 2x Boost enabled for 15 minutes (take one lesson before noon and one after 6pm each day to get them for free), you can rack up 500-600 XP in a quarter of an hour without much involvement in your brain

Tap to talk quickly is the important part, and I suspect that’s why I can’t use the method for the first question or recreate it in the desktop version. It might even be specific to phones that don’t run the app too quickly – I’m using my old OnePlus 10 Pro. Even if you can’t replicate it, there are other ways to cheat Duolingo on the internet if you want to find them. I wish I hadn’t found it at all.

Duolingo works pretty well for my Spanish, but mostly because the intentionally addictive aspects of the app keep me practicing. The bright colors and dopamine-inducing sounds have their intended effect, but it’s the XP leaderboards that trigger my competitive nature. Accumulating XP is my goal, and learning Spanish is a useful byproduct.

Now I have the option to skip the learning part altogether. It’s always tempting to turn to this method when I’m tired and just need a few more XP to seal a certain spot in the league. As useful as it is, the sense of achievement is not the same. Not only am I not compelled to do these crucial lessons when I’m not in the mood, I’m also less inclined to practice in general.

Players will be familiar with this feeling. I never look for cheat codes until I’ve completed a game because artificial enhancement, while fun, takes the fun out of it. I quickly lose interest after that. At least if you cheat in school exams, you might get grades. It’s completely useless if you’re doing it to beat an app designed for self-improvement.

Hopefully someone on the Duolingo team reads this. I doubt I’m running for any kind of bug bounty, but I’ll settle for the problem being fixed.