Here’s How to Maximize Your Duolingo XP (2024)

Duolingo is a great tool for learning new languages thanks to its friendly interface and responsive content. Unfortunately, its challenges and leaderboards, and their obsession with experience points (XP), can make it hard to focus on learning. Here’s how to maximize your XP while still getting a great educational experience.

What Is Duolingo XP, and Why Do You Want It?

Duolingo lets you master over thirty languages, grouping hundreds of lessons into separate units. When you complete a lesson, the app awards you a certain amount of experience points (XP), based on the type of lesson, with bonuses for getting most of the questions right.

The app then uses these points to calculate your place on a Leaderboard. These leaderboards are divided into leagues, and you can make your way up from the Bronze League to the top-tier Diamond League with patience and dedication. Some Daily Quests, and your weekly Friend Quest, may also ask for a target amount of XP.

XP isn’t required to use the app at all. But it serves as an indicator of how much you’re using Duolingo and whether you can actually gain anything from it. After all, language mastery takes regular practice.

Duolingo uses XP to motivate you, gamifying the task of language learning. But the downside is that, at times, it can feel demoralizing and overwhelming. We’ve all looked at the leaderboard and seen people who have racked up a seemingly impossible 2,000 points in a few hours. Or felt the sting of dropping down a league just for being a few points short.

Fortunately, there are ways to maximize your points gain, so you can maintain your streaks and leaderboard positions with minimal effort, all while mastering your target language.

It’s Not Cheating to Optimize Your Duolingo Practice

When you optimize your Duolingo usage, you’re still using the app exactly as its designers intend. Duolingo gives you XP bonuses according to an algorithm, hoping it will keep you using the app.

When you tweak your behavior to take advantage of these point bonuses, you’re using the app just how Duolingo wants you to. So, yes, it’s okay to treat your Duolingo learning like a game and try to “win” it according to the rules.

Most importantly, as long as you’re still doing your daily lessons and making progress in the course, you’re not cheating yourself out of an education. You still need to use Duolingo as a language learning tool to get any of these XP Boosts.

How to Earn Point Bonuses

Duolingo’s distribution of XP Boosts can feel rather random, but there are certain activities that you can rely on to gain the most XP.

Early Bird and Night Owl

Completing any exercise on mobile between 6 a.m. and 12 p.m. earns you the Early Bird boost, which you can access any time between 6 p.m. and 12 a.m. That will give you 15 minutes of double XP.

Complete a Duolingo exercise any time between 6 p.m. and 12 a.m. for the Night Owl boost, which you can access at any time between 6 a.m. and 12 p.m.

Lesson or Unit Completion

When you finish every lesson in a group, filling the entire circle, you get an XP Boost for the next 15 minutes. This applies to lessons that have multiple parts—usually four or more. It also applies to finishing a unit too—those are the lessons indicated by a little winged trophy of the Duo mascot.

If you finish all the exercises in a lesson except for the last one, you can save it for the next time you log in. Then, complete that final exercise to finish the lesson and pick up the XP Boost, using it to start the next lesson with extra points. Leave the final lesson undone, so you can save it for next time. This way, you’re still making progress on your Duolingo journey while getting double points.

Friend Quests

Every Tuesday through Saturday, Duolingo will pair you with one of your friends for a Friend Quest. The reward for finishing one is pretty good: a one-time, 30-minute XP Boost you can activate whenever you want. Select “claim in shop” when the option comes up, so that boost will stay in your shop until you're ready. Use it whenever you have a half-hour to spare to supercharge your Duolingo usage.

How to Combine and Maximize Point Bonuses

The time you choose to use your XP Boosts and the lessons you take are just as important as earning the bonuses in the first place. Most exercises on the Duolingo app will only earn you 10 points, but if you choose the right lessons at the right time, you can earn as many as 90 points with the same amount of usage.

XP Happy Hour

The first hour after you login on Saturday is Happy Hour, granting a five-point XP bonus to every single lesson on mobile, no matter how short it is. The five points are appended to your mistakes reviews as well, so a two point lesson suddenly becomes a seven point lesson during Happy Hour. So it’s best to clear out your mistakes as soon as you earn them, rather than saving them up.

You can also combine the five-point XP bonus with an XP Boost in regular lessons. An XP Boost doubles the five-point bonus to 10. So your 10 point lessons are now worth 20 points and the five-point bonuses add 10 points, meaning you’re racking up a lot of points during Happy Hour.

Unit Reviews

Unit Reviews are the lessons that can earn you the most points in a single blow, as they’re normally worth 40 points. Try to save these up for when you have an active XP Boost. Or save your Friend Quest XP Boost to activate when you reach the end of a unit. That 40 points becomes a whopping 80 points; during Happy Hour, your yield can go as high as 90 points.

Practice Sessions

Unit reviews are great for earning points, but they’re also harder than the typical Duolingo lessons and only come up at the end of units. If you’re in the middle of an XP Boost, head on over to the Practice tab and select Conversation: Speak. These are practice sessions where the app will present you a sentence in both text and audio, for you to repeat back.

The Practice sessions use fairly forgiving voice recognition, so it’s hard to make mistakes. If you skip the listening part, you can also finish these lessons fairly quickly. Best of all, the speaking exercises grant 20 points instead of the usual 10. These things combine to make them perfect for maximizing your 15-minute XP Boosts. If you do it quickly enough and the app doesn’t stall out on you, it’s possible to earn something in the neighborhood of 500 points.

This isn’t technically cheating, but I still wouldn’t advise doing this all the time. You aren’t making any progress when you spam the Practice features and, after a while, it stops being fun or educational.

If you start finding your Duolingo usage a drag, feel free to explore other features, even if they won’t earn you a gazillion points. Remember, the purpose of all this is still to have fun learning, points or not.