What to do after Duolingo: switch to reading real things

Short answer: keep Duolingo for five minutes a day if the streak helps you show up, and move the rest of your time to real things in the language. Reading first, because you control the speed. Where to start depends on where Duolingo left you, and the app already tells you that.

Where Duolingo actually left you

Duolingo shows a Duolingo Score next to your course flag. It runs from 0 to 160, and the company maps it to CEFR levels in its Duolingo Score post. The reading column below is a plain-English version of the CEFR global scale.

Duolingo Score	CEFR	What you can read
30–59	A2	Short, simple texts about everyday things
60–99	B1	The main points of clear text on familiar topics
100–129	B2	The main ideas of complex text, abstract topics too
130–160	C1–C2	Duolingo courses don't go here

The ceiling moved recently. In April 2026 Duolingo announced that most learners of nine courses (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese) can now go through B2, a Score of 129. Before that, most of those learners could only finish content up to A2, a Score of 59.

So "I finished Duolingo" means two different things now. Finished before April 2026? You likely stopped around A2. Went through the new sections? You're at B2 by Duolingo's own measure.

Will you be fluent after Duolingo?

Not from the app alone. Duolingo's own post describes B2 as being an "independent user" who can "understand certain complex texts". That's real progress. It's also a long way from reading a novel without stopping.

The gap people describe after Duolingo is nearly always the same. You can do every exercise and still stop on every line of a real article. A lesson is a handful of sentences written for learners, built from words you've seen before. A real article is several hundred words written for natives, full of words nobody put in a lesson. Only volume closes that gap.

Step 1: read things written for natives, at your level

One test for everything: read a paragraph. If you stop on more than one or two words per line, it's too hard for now. Go one step easier and come back in a month.

• A2 (Score 30–59). Graded readers and easy news written for learners. They feel slow, but you finish them, and finishing is the habit you're building.
• B1 (60–99). Easy native content: news for kids, Wikipedia pages on topics you already know, Reddit communities in the language. What you know about the topic fills in the words you miss.
• B2 (100–129). Normal news sites and the blogs you'd read anyway. A newspaper takes more words than most people think, so expect a few lookups per paragraph for a while.

Don't look up everything. Look up the words that block the sentence and let the rest go.

Step 2: add listening you can follow

Same rule as reading: you should understand most of it. Podcasts made for learners first, then shows you've already watched in your own language. A podcast you can't follow, playing while you cook, is background noise.

Step 3: keep reviewing, but review your own words

Duolingo reviews Duolingo's sentences. After it, the words worth reviewing are the ones you met in your own reading, saved with the sentence they came from. Anki works if you'll make the cards. If you won't, you can get spaced repetition without Anki.

What app should you use after Duolingo?

Pick by what you'll actually do every day.

If you want to	Use
Read real articles and keep the words	A reading tool: LingQ, Readlang, or a browser extension
Watch shows with two subtitle lines	Language Reactor, free core
Talk	A tutor or a language exchange partner
Keep a light daily habit	Duolingo itself, five minutes

Comparing reading tools? Start with the LingQ alternatives. For video, the Language Reactor alternatives.

Mossglen (full disclosure: ours) is one of the browser options. It's a free Chrome extension: open any article and it becomes a clean reading view, tap a word for the meaning, and it's saved with its sentence for FSRS reviews. 8 languages, no account needed.

After Duolingo, by language

The plan is the same. The reading material isn't.

• Spanish: free Spanish reading, from easy news to novels
• French: French texts by level, A1 to C1
• German: German texts by level, A1 to C1
• Japanese: graded readers first, then reading sites from N5 up
• Korean: Korean reading, from Hangul to the news
• Italian, Portuguese and the rest: the general ladder in how to start reading in a foreign language

A first week after Duolingo

Day	Do
1	Note your Duolingo Score and find your row in the first table
2	Find one reading source at that level and read one piece
3–4	One piece a day. Look up only the words that block you
5	Try one episode of a learner podcast
6	Review the words you saved this week
7	Keep what felt fine, drop what felt like homework

Keep the streak if it gets you to open the app. Just stop counting it as the whole plan. For why reading can carry most of the load, see can you learn a language just by reading.