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.
| 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.
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.