Why do most people quit learning a language?

When surveyed, more people blame a lack of time than anything else: 40% in a 2025 survey of 3,608 adults across six countries called it the single biggest barrier, ahead of motivation, habit, and cost. The barriers just behind it, staying motivated and building a habit, are what slow or boring methods tend to cause.

What percentage of people give up on language learning?

There is no single clean figure, but the proxies are stark. Education apps retain only about 2 to 3% of users 30 days after install, and even Duolingo sees roughly two thirds of its monthly users skip any given day. Among people who studied a language, more than 1 in 4 say they forgot it within a year.

Is a lack of time really why people quit?

It is the reason people give most often, but that is self-reported, not proof of cause. Much of it is really a lost routine or a method that stopped feeling worth the time. The practical takeaway is to make the time you already spend, like the hours you watch TV, count toward learning.

Original research

Why People Quit Learning a Language: The Time Problem

Name: Why People Quit Learning a Language: The Time Problem
Creator: LingoBinge
Published: 2026-06-29
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Huge numbers of people want to learn a language and start. Most stop. The reason they give, more than any other, is that it takes too long.

By Lachlan McRitchie, Founder, LingoBinge

Updated June 29, 2026

Language learning has a completion problem. The desire is nearly universal and the tools have never been better, yet the drop-off is severe. This study gathers the public survey and retention data on who quits and why. One barrier comes out on top across countries and age groups, and it points straight at how the time is spent.

40%

say a lack of time is the single biggest barrier, the most-cited reason of all

Preply, 2025

90% vs 75%

of Americans say a second language is important, yet about 75% speak only English

Preply; YouGov

70%

of people who never learned a language say they regret it

Preply, 2021

2 to 3%

of education-app users are still active 30 days after installing

Industry benchmarks

Almost everyone wants to. Almost no one finishes.

The intent is not the problem. In survey after survey, the overwhelming majority of people say learning a language matters: about 90% of Americans call it important, and 7 in 10 of those who never did it say they regret it. Duolingo alone reports more than 116 million monthly users.

Follow-through is where it falls apart. Roughly 75% of Americans speak only English, and among those who did study a language, more than 1 in 4 say they forgot it within a year, with the average learner lasting just two and a half years.

The barriers, ranked

When Preply asked 3,608 adults across six countries what most gets in the way of learning a language, one answer led every group. A lack of time was cited by 40%, ahead of staying motivated, building a habit, and knowing where to start. Cost came far down the list.

The barriers right behind time are telling. Motivation (32%) and habit (30%) are exactly the things that collapse when a method feels slow, and 13% said plainly that traditional methods do not work for them. Time is not just minutes on a clock; it is whether the minutes feel like progress.

Biggest barriers to learning a language (Preply, 2025, n=3,608 across six countries).
Category	Share citing it
Lack of time	40%
Staying motivated	32%
Building a habit	30%
Where to start	26%
Embarrassment	21%
Too old	21%
Too expensive	15%
Methods do not work	13%

Even the giants struggle to keep people

The retention numbers are brutal across the category. Industry benchmarks put education-app retention at only about 2 to 3% of users still active 30 days after install, among the lowest of any app type.

Even the market leader feels it. Duolingo reported 40.5 million daily and 116.7 million monthly active users at the end of 2024, a ratio of about 35%, which means roughly two out of three monthly users skip any given day. Keeping people showing up, not signing them up, is the hard part.

~35%

of Duolingo's monthly users open it on a given day: even the leader's users mostly skip

Duolingo, Q4 2024 (SEC filing)

Time, and what hides behind it

It is worth being precise about what the data shows. People say time is the barrier; that is a self-reported reason, not proof that a shortage of minutes is the underlying cause. Some of it is really a lost routine, or a method that stopped feeling worth the minutes. The honest reading is that time is the reason people give, and that slow, boring methods are the likely mechanism behind the motivation and habit failures sitting right behind it.

That is the opening. If the time problem is partly that practice does not fit into a life, then the answer is to make the time you already spend count. People already watch hundreds of hours of TV a year. Turning a share of that into understandable practice is a way to learn inside a habit you already have, rather than fighting for new hours you do not.

LingoBinge is built on this idea: it turns the shows you already watch into understandable practice, swapping the highest-frequency words first and saving them for spaced review.

Add to Chrome, it's free

Methodology and caveats

Barrier and intent figures come from Preply surveys: the 2025 barriers survey (3,608 adults across the UK, US, France, Spain, Germany, and Japan) is recent and reasonably sized; the 2021 US survey (1,078 respondents) used an online task panel that skews young and online, so it is weaker. Preply is a commercial language company, which we disclose. The monolingual figure is from a 2013 YouGov poll and is dated.

Duolingo's user figures are company self-reported but drawn from SEC filings. Education-app retention of 2 to 3% at day 30 is an industry benchmark that varies by vendor and cohort, so we cite it as a range, not a constant.

We deliberately excluded the widely shared claim that only a fraction of a percent of learners complete a Duolingo course. We could not trace it to any verifiable primary calculation, so it does not appear here. Where the evidence is self-reported or mixed, we say so rather than overstate the case.

Sources

This study and its data are free to cite and reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Please link back to this page.

Frequently asked questions

Why do most people quit learning a language?: When surveyed, more people blame a lack of time than anything else: 40% in a 2025 survey of 3,608 adults across six countries called it the single biggest barrier, ahead of motivation, habit, and cost. The barriers just behind it, staying motivated and building a habit, are what slow or boring methods tend to cause.
What percentage of people give up on language learning?: There is no single clean figure, but the proxies are stark. Education apps retain only about 2 to 3% of users 30 days after install, and even Duolingo sees roughly two thirds of its monthly users skip any given day. Among people who studied a language, more than 1 in 4 say they forgot it within a year.
Is a lack of time really why people quit?: It is the reason people give most often, but that is self-reported, not proof of cause. Much of it is really a lost routine or a method that stopped feeling worth the time. The practical takeaway is to make the time you already spend, like the hours you watch TV, count toward learning.