Memrise vs Duolingo: which language app to pick
There is no shortage of language apps: courses, flashcards, dictionaries, grammar drills, games. That is not a bad problem to have, but it makes choosing harder than it should be. This post compares two of the best known, Duolingo and Memrise, and they turn out to be good at different things.
The short version
- Duolingo — a structured course. Strongest on sentence structure and grammar through repetition, weaker on vocabulary you choose yourself.
- Memrise — vocabulary first. Strong on words and phrases with native-speaker audio and video, much lighter on explaining how the language works.
If you are starting from nothing, Duolingo gives you the skeleton. If you already have the skeleton and need words, Memrise fills it in.
Duolingo
Duolingo is a course, laid out as a path of short lessons you work through in order. It teaches sentence structure and grammar alongside vocabulary, and it is designed to be done in five-minute pieces, with streaks and reminders to keep you at it.
It is a good way to start from zero. It is less useful if you already know some of the language, because the path starts at the beginning and the placement test only skips you ahead so far.
The main complaint has not changed: you learn largely by trial and error, and when you get something wrong the app does not always explain why. If you are the sort of person who wants the rule stated before the exercise, this will frustrate you. Some of the example sentences are also memorable for the wrong reasons — the app is famous for teaching you how to say things you will never need.
Every course is available free, supported by ads and a limit on how many mistakes you can make in a session. Paid tiers remove the ads and the mistake limit, and the top tier adds AI features such as explanations of your errors and conversation practice with a chatbot. There are courses for more than forty languages, though the smaller ones are considerably thinner than the big ones.
Memrise
Memrise is built around vocabulary. Its official courses lean heavily on short clips of native speakers saying the phrase you are learning, in an ordinary voice at ordinary speed, which is useful practice you do not get from synthesised audio. Reviews are scheduled by a spaced repetition system, so words come back at increasing intervals.
For a beginner it cannot replace Duolingo, because it does not teach you how the language is put together. Learning a hundred phrases without knowing how to modify them is a short road. But if you already have a base, it is a good way to add vocabulary quickly and get used to hearing the language spoken by different people.
One thing to know before you commit: the user-made community courses that many people used Memrise for were moved off the main app and website in March 2024 and now live on a separate site. Memrise has said it is not shutting them down and has been working on bringing user-created word lists back into the main product. If your plan depends on a specific community course, check where it lives now before you build a routine around it.
Memrise is free to use with limits, and a subscription unlocks the rest.
Which one?
- Complete beginner: Duolingo, until the basic sentence patterns feel automatic.
- Already have the basics and need words: Memrise, for the audio as much as for the vocabulary.
- Neither is enough on its own. Both are practice, not study. Sooner or later you need real material — a book, a podcast, a series, a person to talk to.
The realistic answer for most people is one of these for ten minutes a day plus something you actually enjoy reading or watching in the language.
The words you meet, not the words in the app
The limit both apps share is that the vocabulary is chosen for you. The words most likely to stick are the ones you ran into and wanted: in an article, a message from a friend, a menu, an episode.
That is the gap a translator fills. With Mate you can select a word wherever you meet it — on a web page, in a PDF, in any Mac or iPhone app, or in Netflix subtitles — and see the translation without leaving what you were doing. You get the pronunciation, the phonetic transcription, and the article with the noun in German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, so you learn the gender with the word rather than after it.
Anything worth keeping goes in the Phrasebook, organised in lists, synced between your Mac, iPhone, iPad and browser. Mate's browser extension can export a list as a CSV file, so a set of words you collected while reading can go straight into a flashcard app for review. The free Basic translation style covers all 248 languages; the Advanced and AI styles, which handle idioms and register much better, are part of Mate Pro.
A course teaches you the shape of the language. What you collect yourself is what makes it yours.
