For about a year, I learned foreign languages with Duolingo. I spent extensive time working on Spanish and Japanese, and I dabbled in Welsh, Hebrew, and Italian. Duolingo is an effective and often fun way of learning a new language, despite some annoyances. For starters, Duolingo likes to send way too many notifications. Almost every day without fail, I would get a notification before 7:30 in the morning calling me out for not already spending hours on the app.
But there was another thing I noticed early on about Duolingo: there was an awful lot of gayness in the lessons and exercises. I
wrote about it last May:
Here’s an example: on Saturday morning, I did a speaking lesson. The way those work is that you have 10 sentences that you have to listen to and speak back. Duolingo has these cartoon characters (which are politically correct enough that one of them wears a burka) that you encounter throughout your journey on the app or website, and they’re the ones to speak what you must speak back.
In this particular lesson, two of the exercises had male characters talking about “mi novio” (my boyfriend). Another male character spoke about “mi esposo” (my husband), while a female character said something about “mi esposa” (my wife). If you’re keeping score, that’s four out of 10 exercises dealing with same-sex relationships.
Lest you think that this is some special phenomenon for Pride Month Advent, I’ve noticed several gay and lesbian exercises throughout my time using the app. While none of the characters are explicitly gay in and of themselves — though I have my doubts about one of them — many of the characters will blurt out a sentence about a same-sex relationship from time to time.
I also wrote about the reading comprehension stories that featured lesbian characters. As I advanced in my language learning, I noticed that there were a lot of sentences about men buying skirts. (Come to think of it, there was a preponderance of exercises about people of both sexes buying skirts. Do people travel to Spanish-speaking countries for the express purpose of buying skirts?)
For months, I didn’t think about it as anything other than something to make fun of. But this weekend, I stumbled on a tweet that Libs of TikTok posted on Friday, which exposed the truth: all of the gay content in Duolingo is by design. The tweet includes screenshots of a blog post crowing about how Duolingo is all about “normalizing queerness.”
The word “queerness” is what triggers my spidey senses. I don’t remember if I’ve written this here at PJ Media, but I’ve often said out loud that my definition of “queer” is “gay with an agenda.” So to see the emphasis on “queer” characters tells us what we need to know.
