Lexo vs Duolingo: lessons or books?

Duolingo and Lexo are both apps for learning a language, but they’re built for different jobs. Duolingo is a course: short lessons that teach words and grammar a step at a time, with points, streaks and reminders to bring you back each day. Lexo is a library: classic novels rewritten at your level in the language you’re learning, narrated from start to finish, with every word a tap away.

We make Lexo, so weigh this page with that in mind. We’ve tried to describe Duolingo the way its own users would recognize it, and to be plain about what Lexo doesn’t do. Everything here was checked in October 2026. Both apps change, so check Duolingo’s site for its current plans and features.

The short answer

If you’re starting from zero, or you want a few minutes of structured practice every day with listening and speaking exercises, Duolingo is built for exactly that, and you can start for free. If you already know the basics (roughly A2, where you can follow simple sentences about familiar things) and you want to read whole books, that’s what Lexo is for. They don’t really compete. A course gives you structure. Books give you the hours of reading a course can’t fit in. You may well want both.

At a glance

	Duolingo	Lexo
What it is	A course of short, game-like lessons on a step-by-step path	A library of classics rewritten at your level
What you read	Sentences in exercises, plus short Stories (dialogues with audio and questions) in its larger courses	Whole books: Treasure Island, Pride and Prejudice, Sherlock Holmes and others, about 100 in all
Levels	From complete beginner; courses designed around CEFR, with content up to B2 in its most-learned languages	CEFR A2 to C2, chosen per book
Help with words	Hints on words in exercises, and explanations of your mistakes in several courses	Tap any word: its meaning in this sentence, base form, part of speech, idiom, and a translation of the sentence
Audio	Throughout the lessons, plus DuoRadio audio episodes in many courses	The whole book narrated, with character voices and word-by-word highlighting; any word can be played on its own
Speaking practice	Yes: spoken answers and AI speaking practice, with more on paid plans	None
Review	A Practice tab for words, mistakes, listening and speaking	A saved Words list you can go back over; no spaced repetition
Motivation	Streaks, XP, leagues and friend streaks	The story
Platforms	iPhone, iPad, Android and web	iPhone and iPad (iOS 18 or later)
Account	A free profile saves your progress	None; purchases go through your Apple ID
How you pay	Free with ads and a daily Energy limit; paid plans such as Super remove ads and limits	$4.99 a book, or Lexo Plus at $4.99 a month for two book credits (planned US launch prices)
Beyond languages	Math, music and chess	Books only
Can you use it today?	Yes	Not yet; in beta, launching on the App Store soon

What Duolingo does well

Duolingo’s great strength is that it gets people to show up. Lessons take a few minutes, the path always tells you what to do next, and streaks, XP and weekly leagues give you a reason to come back tomorrow. For a beginner, that matters a great deal.

It’s free to start, and to keep going. Duolingo’s courses are free, with ads and a daily Energy allowance; paid plans remove the ads and limits and add extras.

It covers a lot of ground. More than 40 languages, and in 2025 Duolingo launched 148 new courses built with generative AI, which more than doubled its catalog and made its most popular languages available to speakers of many more languages.

You hear and speak from the first day. Exercises mix reading, listening, writing and speaking, and in 2026 Duolingo added spoken answers for most exercises and free AI speaking practice. DuoRadio adds podcast-style listening episodes in many courses.

Its Stories are a real first step into reading. In its larger courses, Stories are short dialogues written for learners, with audio and comprehension questions along the way, built into the path and collected in the Practice tab. They’re short by design, and a good warm-up for longer reading.

Progress is mapped to CEFR. Duolingo designs its courses around the CEFR, and tapping a section’s Duolingo Score shows which level it covers. Its most-learned languages now reach B2.

It runs on phones, tablets and the web, and the same app teaches math, music and chess.

What Lexo does

Lexo is for the moment you want to read something longer than an exercise. You choose a book, such as Treasure Island, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or any of about 100 classics, and a level from A2 to C2. The book has been rewritten at that level in the language you’re learning: the same story, told in words and grammar you can follow. At C1 it’s close to the original, lightly condensed. At C2 it’s the complete novel. Our levels guide explains what each one feels like to read.

Tap any word and a card shows what it means in this sentence, its base form and part of speech, the meaning of any phrase or idiom it belongs to, and a translation of the whole sentence into your own language. You can save words to a Words list. Press play and the chapter is read aloud, with different voices for different characters and the text highlighted word by word. A sentence-by-sentence mode shows one sentence at a time with its audio and translation, which is useful when a passage is just above your level.

Lexo covers about 80 languages, with explanations in your own language (in seven of them, including Irish and Welsh, narration is still to come). Books download to your device, so you can read and listen offline, and there’s no account to create. The editions, glosses and narration are produced with AI models, guided by the CEFR level descriptors and checked automatically. Most editions are written on request: if you’re the first reader of a book in your language and level, chapter 1 is ready in a few minutes and the rest follows while you read.

Lessons and books do different jobs

A course teaches you the pieces. Reading gives you volume. Stephen Krashen (1982, Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition) argued that we acquire a language by understanding messages in it, which he called comprehensible input. A course gives you a steady supply, in short sentences built to teach one point at a time. A novel gives you page after page of connected sentences, held together by a story you want to finish. Day and Bamford (1998, Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom) make the case for reading a lot of material that’s comfortably within your ability, which is much closer to reading a book than to doing an exercise. Our pieces on comprehensible input and extensive reading go further.

The catch is level. Hu and Nation (2000) found that readers needed to know about 98% of the words in a story to understand it adequately without help, and Paul Nation (2006) estimated that reaching that coverage in ordinary written text takes 8,000 to 9,000 word families, far more than any beginner course sets out to teach. That gap is what Lexo’s levels are for: the story stays the same, and the language meets you where you are. See the 98% rule for more.

Using both

There’s no need to choose. One way to combine them:

1. Keep your daily lessons for structure, new grammar and speaking practice.
2. Start a book when simple sentences stop being a struggle. Try A2. If you’re tapping more than a word or two in most lines, the book is too hard for now; keep going with the course and try again in a few weeks.
3. Read and listen. Play the narration and follow the highlighted text. It keeps you moving through sentences you’d otherwise stall on, and it pairs each word with its sound. Our piece on reading while listening explains why that helps.
4. Move up a level when the book feels easy, not when you’ve finished a set number of lessons.

Who should choose Duolingo

• You’re starting from zero. Lexo’s easiest level is A2; Duolingo starts with your first word.
• You want a daily habit. Short lessons, reminders, streaks and leagues make it easy to practice every day.
• You want speaking and listening practice built in, with spoken answers and AI conversation practice.
• You want grammar in small, ordered steps, with someone else deciding what comes next.
• You’d like to start free, or you learn on Android or a computer.
• You’re curious about more than languages: math, music and chess are in the same app.

Who should choose Lexo

• You know the basics and want to read real books. Lexo starts at A2, and each book exists at five levels, so you can keep climbing.
• You want stories, not drills. There are no points, streaks or leagues. The reason to open the app is to find out what happens next in Around the World in Eighty Days.
• You want long listening. Books are narrated in full, with the words highlighted as they’re read.
• You want help in your own language. Word meanings, idioms and sentence translations appear in the language you speak, across about 80 languages you can learn.
• You’d rather buy books than subscribe. You can buy one book at a time, or use Lexo Plus if you read a lot.
• You read on iPhone or iPad, including offline.

Lexo is in beta and launching on the App Store soon. Get notified at launch. If you’re weighing other reading apps, see the best apps to learn a language by reading and Duolingo alternatives for reading real stories.