linguafolks vs Duolingo
frlisez n'importe quoi à votre niveau exact
Duolingo gives you a course to complete. linguafolks gives you your own reading, rewritten to a level it measured.
Duolingo is the best-known language app in the world: a gamified course you work through lesson by lesson.
Comparing linguafolks to Duolingo is a category comparison rather than a feature one. Duolingo is a course. Somebody designed a path, and you move along it: short lessons, streaks, immediate feedback, a great deal of thought given to getting you to come back tomorrow. At that job it is extraordinarily good, and it has brought more people to language learning than everything else in this list combined.
linguafolks is not a course and has no path. It starts by measuring roughly how many words you know, then takes material you chose (a URL you pasted, or a line describing what you feel like reading) and rewrites it to sit at that level, with the original beside it. The words you did not know become drawn scenes; the grammar underneath them becomes short exercises.
The two are not really substitutes, and plenty of people will sensibly use both. The reason to add linguafolks is the complaint people most often make about course apps: that after a year of lessons, real text is still out of reach. Reading actual material at a level chosen by measurement is the part a course cannot do for you, because a course does not know what you want to read.
Three things Duolingo doesn't do
- A course cannot know what you want to read
- Lessons are written in advance for everybody. linguafolks has no lessons: you supply the material (a news article, a recipe, a blog post) and it is rewritten to your level, so the thing you practise on is the thing you actually wanted.
- Progress is measured in lessons, not vocabulary
- Position in a course tells you how far along the path you are, not how much language you have. linguafolks estimates your vocabulary size directly and expresses it as a CEFR band placed to Lower, Mid or Upper, then updates it as you confirm new words.
- The gap to real text stays open
- The common experience of course apps is that native material remains hard long after the lessons feel easy, because lesson language and real language are not the same register. linguafolks works on real material from the start, meeting it halfway rather than deferring it.
One minute, then a real number
estu nivel, medido
Fifty words, forty real and ten invented to catch over-claiming, give an estimated vocabulary size and a CEFR band placed to Lower, Mid or Upper. Everything downstream reads that number. And it keeps moving: each word you confirm you have learned is added, so the level follows you without a retake.
Read anything at your exact level.
frlisez n'importe quoi à votre niveau exact
The text is rewritten to sit within reach, hard enough to grow and easy enough to finish, with the original beside it so you can see what changed and check yourself against it. Tap any word to find out what it means and keep it.
FrenchLe café se trouvait quasiment déserté à pareille heure. Des effluves de café chaud imprégnaient la salle. Quelques clients s'entretenaient à mi-voix près de la devanture.
Elle tergiversa longuement avant de passer commande. Le serveur patientait près du comptoir, sans hâte aucune. Elle jeta finalement son dévolu sur un chocolat chaud et une part de tarte.
Il consigna la commande d'un hochement de tête. Au-dehors, la pluie ne faisait que commencer. Elle ouvrit son livre et fit abstraction du reste du monde.
EnglishThe café was almost empty at that hour. A smell of hot coffee filled the room. A few customers were talking quietly by the window.
She hesitated a long time before ordering. The waiter waited by the counter, in no hurry. She finally chose a hot chocolate and a slice of pie.
He noted the order with a nod. Outside, the rain was just beginning. She opened her book and forgot the rest of the world.
FrenchLe café était presque vide à cette heure-là. Une odeur de café chaud remplissait la pièce. Quelques clients parlaient tout bas près de la fenêtre.
Elle a hésité longtemps avant de commander. Le serveur attendait près du comptoir, sans se dépêcher. Elle a enfin choisi un chocolat chaud et une part de tarte.
EnglishThe café was almost empty at that hour. A smell of hot coffee filled the room. A few customers were talking quietly by the window.
She hesitated a long time before ordering. The waiter waited by the counter, in no hurry. She finally chose a hot chocolate and a slice of pie.
Read about what's interesting to you.
delies, was dich interessiert
Pick something ready-made, paste any URL and get what the page actually says, or describe in one line what you feel like reading and it gets written. Not a library you have to want something from.
Italiancurated stories and articles, sorted by topic - every one at your level
Das Festival beginnt heute Abend.
The festival starts tonight.
Germanpaste a link - the page arrives side by side, simplified to your level
A chuva caía devagar sobre a esplanada.
Ela escolheu a mesa junto à janela.
O empregado trouxe-lhe um chocolate quente.
Portuguesedescribe a text in one line - AI writes it, at your level, on your topics
Where Duolingo wins
No product is better at everything, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is worth nothing to the person reading it.
What Duolingo does better
- Habit formation. Nothing else here comes close at getting you to practise daily.
- A free tier that genuinely teaches, across far more languages than we cover.
- Speaking and listening practice, which linguafolks does not have at all.
- Enormous polish, and a course path that removes every decision from beginners.
Where linguafolks falls short
- Grammar exercises exist in French and English only. The other four languages have reading and vocabulary.
- There is no audio and no speaking practice anywhere in the product.
- We generate texts rather than curate them, so there is no hand-edited library to browse.
- Six languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and English.
- It is a new product, without the years of polish the established apps have.
Plainly, then
Choose Duolingo if
- You are starting from zero and want structure and momentum.
- Daily habit is the thing you struggle with most.
- You want speaking and listening practice, or a language we do not cover.
Choose linguafolks if
- You have done the lessons and real text is still out of reach.
- You would rather read things you chose than complete a syllabus.
- You want a measured level rather than a position on a path.
Questions
- Is linguafolks a Duolingo replacement?
- Not for beginners, and not for speaking. It is better thought of as what you use alongside or after a course, when the goal becomes reading real material.
- Is there a free tier?
- The placement test is free and needs no account, and the grammar exercises are open to everyone.
- Does linguafolks have streaks and gamification?
- No. There is no streak, no leaderboard and nothing to maintain. It is a reading tool.
Find your level first.
It takes about a minute and needs no account. Whatever you decide afterwards, you will at least know where you actually are.
This page compares how the two products are built rather than cataloguing Duolingo's features, which change often. Either way, check theirs before you decide. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.