Is the Duolingo Owl dead? No, it’s just a stupid PR stunt.

Duo, the Duolingo Owl is dead, as per a post to the company’s Twitter account. Except that there’s a LOT of evidence that suggests that this is just a cheap publicity stunt.

So, I woke up this morning to a feed of news that was saturated with the news that Duo, the mascot of language learning app Duolingo, was “dead”.

Here’s one. And another one calling the Duolingo Owl deceased. And another dead Duolingo Owl story. You get the idea. It’s only happened relatively recently, this thing will spread I’m sure.

OK, first and foremost, it’s a comic mascot. It cannot die the same way that the Coca Cola swirl or the Nike swoosh can’t “die”, but let’s get past that.

In a post on Twitter (no, I won’t link it, I don’t use Twitter any more because the owner is a… well, you already know, right?) but I’ve screenshotted somebody else’s screenshot of it, because this seems to be how the Internet goes about this kind of thing these days.

Sigh. 

Sure, that’s cute, and it does kind of fit with the company’s slightly-cheeky ethos, but this isn’t a rebrand, folks, far from it I’d say – without having any particular insight into their branding plans, that is.

How can I be so sure? Because they’re still using the owl as their site logo, and all over their app.

This is on the Duolingo website right now. So there’s three possibilities here.

1. It’s a dumb publicity stunt
2. Nobody told the web design team about some kind of rebranding, which would be monumentally stupid.
3. That guy is running towards a gently rotting owl corpse. Eww.

Super Duo is presumably a totally different bird. Or maybe it just takes off its glasses. Or perhaps IT’S SECRETLY THE MURDERER???

So either someone is terminally dumb at the branding side of Duolingo – I doubt it – or it’s a publicity stunt.

But you probably came here because I review tech, so I will, because I have used Duolingo on and off over the years, even though some might suspect I learned Japanese purely for retro gaming purposes.

Short review: Duolingo is fine for flash card style learning, but it’s far from infallible and there’s just no way that you’ll “learn” a language purely by using Duolingo.

You need exposure, proper dynamic human listening practice, repetition, proper feedback and dedication.

It can be part of it – and it can focus on some truly weird sentences, at least for the Japanese learning I’ve tried through it – but anyone wanting to properly learn a language will need a whole lot more than just one app to do so.

So yeah, PR stunt. I guess it worked, it got me cranky enough about its stupidity to write about it. Ah well, on with the day, and as the BBC used to point out back in the day, other brands of language learning apps do exist.

Go subscribe to my YouTube channel, by the way. I don’t teach Japanese, but do it anyway.

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