Preply vs Duolingo: Can an App or an Online Tutor Actually Teach You a Language?

“Das Auto. Briefmarke. Briefmarke. Das Auto ist wirklich schmutzig.”

That’s a genuine string of sentences my husband’s Duolingo German app had him practising one evening: the car, a stamp, a stamp, the car is really dirty. He read it out to me, we both laughed and then I asked the obvious question: does any of that actually help you speak German? Or is it just words bouncing around in a random order?

That question is really what this whole piece is about. Between the two of us, we’ve now put a fair amount of time into both the Duolingo language app and a real tutor on Preply for two completely different languages and we’ve landed in the same place from opposite directions: is it better to learn a language with an app or a tutor? 

Is It Better to Learn a Language With an App or a Tutor?

Short answer: it depends what you’re actually trying to do with it. An app can keep a language ticking over with a few minutes a day, light and low-stakes. It won’t properly teach it to you. For that you need a real conversation with a real person who can hear exactly where you’re stuck. Here’s what that actually looked like in our house.

What Duolingo Actually Did for Each of Us

My husband’s been using Duolingo for a while now, learning German, which happens to be my mother tongue. His own feedback on it is honest: it’s really good for what he calls in-between learning, jumping on for a few minutes to pick up a couple of words or keep something ticking over but he doesn’t think you can properly learn a language through it. 

He got far more out of a single face-to-face lesson with a Preply tutor than he feels he’s gotten out of his accumulated time on the app.

Part of that is the format itself. Duolingo is heavily gamified with daily streak reminders, little nudges when you’re about to lose one and a social layer where you can see how friends are progressing and get a bit competitive about it. I actually think that’s kind of cool. It’s also kind of annoying, depending on the day, and none of it is really teaching a language so much as rewarding you for showing up.

It is free to use though, with paid tiers on top if you want extra features, which is a genuine point in its favour if you’re not ready to spend anything yet. The animations lean very childish with bright cartoon graphics, that owl mascot, which makes it feel less like something built for an adult seriously trying to pick up a language and more like something aimed at a much younger audience. 

Reviews of the app online are genuinely mixed too, which tracks with our own back-and-forth about it. Plenty of people swear by it and plenty of others land exactly where we did: fine for keeping a language ticking over, not much more than that.

I had used Duolingo for a refresh of my Spanish before a trip to Mexico a few years ago. It genuinely helped me remember a handful of words. What it didn’t do was get me anywhere near stringing more than one or two sentences together. It felt a lot more like memorising language than actually learning one, vocabulary sitting in isolation and without the structure or the pressure of a real conversation to make it usable.

Why Preply Covers Languages Duolingo Doesn’t

I am currently looking to try a Thai lesson on Preply before our next trip to Thailand in January. And I’ve already had a browse through Thai tutor profiles and it’s genuinely something I’m looking forward to. So out of curiosity, I also checked whether Duolingo even offered Thai. It doesn’t. And when I looked closer, the language selection is a lot more limited if you’re using the app as a German speaker than as an English speaker. 

As an English speaker, you get a longer list of options, but in German you’re down to a handful of the world’s biggest languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and a few others.

What you do get, oddly, is chess, High Valyrian and Klingon as course options, which says something about where the app’s actual strengths lie. It’s built for breadth and novelty, not for getting you to a real conversation in the specific language you actually need for an actual trip.

What a Tutor through Preply Adds That an App Cannot

I’ve written in detail here about what Preply lessons were actually like for my own rusty Spanish, the placement test, choosing a tutor by dialect, the video introductions, the moment vocabulary started coming back to me because a tutor could see exactly where I was stuck and prompt me through it rather than just marking an answer wrong. 

My husband’s experience backs the same point up from the other side: one real lesson, with a person who could hear what he actually knew and could pronounce and what he didn’t, that did so much more for his German than an extended run on an app ever did.

The difference isn’t really about effort or time spent. It’s that a tutor is listening to you fail in real time and adjusting to it. An app can only run you through what it already decided you should practise next.

Preply vs Duolingo

	Duolingo	Preply
Format	Self-guided app, gamified exercises	Live one-on-one video lessons with a real tutor
Cost	Free tier available; paid tiers roughly $7-13/month	Pay per lesson, tutor sets the rate – roughly $4-40+/hour
Course availability	Limited by your account’s base language and far fewer options for non-English speakers	Tutors available across a huge range of languages and dialects regardless of your own first language
Speaking practice	Some AI conversation features, no real-time human feedback	Full conversation practice with immediate correction
Best for	Daily top-ups, light vocabulary maintenance, keeping a language ticking over	Actually learning to speak or getting a rusty language working again
Commitment	Low – a few minutes a day, cancel anytime	Higher – scheduled lessons on a rolling 28-day billing cycle

Preply’s 2026 study

Preply has published several studies examining the effectiveness of one-to-one language tutoring compared with self-directed learning.

Preply published its own research in 2026: 113 Spanish speakers in Spain who spent 12 weeks on a self-learning app and then 12 weeks with a Preply tutor. The headline numbers are striking: motivation reported as roughly nine times higher with a tutor, the share of people likely to recommend it rising from 30% to 71% and goal achievement rising from 27% to 56%, alongside reported gains in speaking, pronunciation and reading.

Preply’s 2025 one-to-one tutoring study provides another useful data point, reporting that learners progressed up to three times faster than typical timelines for reaching recognised language proficiency levels.

Worth being upfront about the limits of that, since everyone did the app first and the tutor second, so it can’t prove the tutor alone caused the improvement rather than just more time spent learning overall.

Most of the strongest numbers are self-reported, the sample is small and specific and it’s research Preply itself commissioned. I’d weigh it as supporting alongside our own experience, not as proof on its own.

So Which One Should You Actually Use?

Neither of us would tell you to skip an app entirely and neither of us would tell you it’s enough on its own. An app is genuinely useful for in-between learning a few minutes a day, light vocabulary upkeep, something to do with a language you’re not ready to properly commit time or money to yet. 

What it won’t do, on its own, is get you talking. For that, you need an actual conversation with an actual person who can hear exactly where you’re stuck and work with you on it, which is the entire gap a tutor fills and an app, by design, can’t.

Quick FAQ

Is Preply worth it for learning a language? In our experience, yes, especially if you already have some grounding in the language or need to get speaking before a trip. A single lesson with a tutor who can hear exactly where you’re stuck does more than weeks of app exercises on their own.

Is it better to learn a language with an app or a tutor? It depends what you’re trying to do. An app can keep a language ticking over with a few minutes a day. A tutor is what actually gets you speaking, because a real person can hear where you’re stuck and adjust to it. That’s something no app has managed for either of us.

What are good Duolingo alternatives for real conversation practice? Preply is the one we’ve both actually used: real tutors, one-on-one, built around speaking rather than app exercises.

How much does Preply cost? Tutors set their own rates, generally from a few dollars an hour up to US$40+ for a 50-minute lesson. After your first trial lesson, you buy lessons in a package with a specific tutor rather than paying a flat platform fee.

Final Thoughts 

After a few trial lessons with multiple tutors, my husband has just signed up for a proper run of German lessons with a Preply tutor, a couple of weeks of them before we fly out to Germany for Christmas. He’s genuinely excited about it, which says a fair bit on its own given how little his time on Duolingo moved him forward.

I’m excited for a different reason. He’s not telling anyone it’s coming, but my mum and my sister are about to get a pleasant surprise. We live in Australia and because of that I know his culture inside out, while until now it’s mostly been a one-way thing. He’s never quite had the language to properly step into mine. If a couple of weeks of real lessons get him to actually understand what’s happening around him at Christmas, not just nodding along and picking up the gist, that’s the thing an app was never going to get him to. It’s his side of the language barrier actually closing. And I think it’ll bring him closer to my family in a way, all that time on Duolingo never managed to.

So that’s the honest answer to the question this whole piece opened on: an app can keep a language ticking along. A tutor is what gets you to a conversation that actually matters to you. 

If you want to try it yourself, whether that’s brushing up before a trip like mine was, or learning your partner’s language properly before you’re sitting at their family’s table, you can trial Preply here. 

This post was created in partnership with Preply. All opinions and experiences shared are my own.