Duolingo Has Been Teaching Me A Language That Doesn’t Exist

I want to say this right away- I know how stupid this is going to sound.

But I’m sharing this because I don’t know what else to do. And because I think I made a mistake, long before I realized it was a mistake.

I’ve always been one of those average people who know they’re average. Not ugly enough to get noticed, not handsome enough either. Not dumb, not particularly smart. Not athletic. Not funny on purpose. The kind of guy teachers forget is absent until attendance time. The kind of guy who is always in group photos, but never in anybody’s favorite memories.

I had no hobbies, no notable pastimes that made me stand out. I only did what other average kids in my country do in their free time: doomscroll Instagram.

And it was during one of those doomscrolling sessions that I came across a viral video. The video showed Māori MPs in New Zealand stage a haka in the Parliament. The incident inspired protest from other Māori people, including a hīkoi that drew tens of thousands of participants. Every single one of these Māori haka videos had millions of views, and comments full of people saying the same things: powerful, beautiful, chills, warrior culture, etc.

And I remember thinking the most embarrassing thought I’ve ever had:

If I could learn this, people would think I was interesting.

That’s all it was.

I mean, everybody around me was doing the same things, talking about the same music, the same shows, the same career plans, the same boring futures. And here was this one thing that felt unusual enough that it could become mine. Maybe this will be the one thing that finally makes me a ‘cool’ kid in school.

The only way I could learn Māori in my country was using the Duolingo app.

The problem was that the normal version of Duolingo didn’t help me much. The free version only gave me the common languages, and the Premium version with Māori lessons had a subscription price too high for me to afford.

But I was desperate enough to scratch my Māori itch. That’s when I made the biggest mistake of my life:

I decided to download a modded APK of Duolingo.

I checked everything. I searched around. I found old threads, half-dead forums, random comments. Eventually, I discovered a Telegram channel where people shared cracked apps and region-locked stuff.

I asked if anyone had a Premium Duolingo mod with Māori unlocked.

No one replied, except for a guy called QIFAR.

That was the whole username. Just QIFAR, in all caps. He had a black profile picture that looked blank unless you turned your brightness up. He sent me a file, told me it was a Premium build, and told me to uninstall the original app first.

I did as I was told.

The first weird thing was that even though the app said Duolingo Premium, only one language was unlocked.

Māori.

At the time I thought that was kind of cool. I told myself that the modder must have done it for my specific use case. Like maybe he customized it because I had asked for something uncommon.

That should tell you what kind of person I was going into this.

The second weird thing was the app itself.

It opened in dark mode by default, which normally wouldn’t matter, except the dark mode looked wrong. I don’t know how else to describe it. It wasn’t just dark. The colors felt… dead. The green owl icon was there, the layout was mostly the same, the little animations were mostly the same. But the whole thing looked like somebody had rebuilt Duolingo from memory after not sleeping for three days.

I tried to go into Settings and change the theme.

The app immediately closed.

It did that every single time. Anything I clicked in Settings made it crash. Account page, audio settings, theme, help. But honestly, that didn’t even bother me that much, because mod APKs are like that sometimes. You install them knowing that some parts will be broken.

And the actual lessons?

They were incredible.

That’s the part I still can’t explain.

I learned absurdly fast.

I’m not gifted with languages. I struggle with basic grammar in the languages I already speak. But with this app, I was remembering words after seeing them once or twice. I was picking up sentence patterns without effort. Pronunciation drills felt natural. Within a couple of weeks, I was already repeating full phrases from memory.

There were a few odd things, though.

Some of the sample sentences were strange. A lot of them were about death, shadows, old people, doors, names, and things being watched. Not all of them, though. There were enough normal phrases mixed in that I could brush it off. But every few lessons, there’d be something that made me pause.

“The dead are standing outside.”

“Do not answer the voice behind the wall.”

“Your family must not speak my name.”

Stuff like that.

I figured that maybe Māori learning materials were just more ceremonial or metaphorical than what I was used to.

Also, every time I completed a level, the screen would glitch for maybe one or two seconds.

Not a normal lag. Not pixelation. More like a pattern.

Thin branching lines, pale grey on dark grey, spreading across the screen and then vanishing. It happened so briefly that I convinced myself it was a GPU issue on my phone.

Then again, I ignored it.

Because I was learning.

And around the same time, everything else in my life started getting worse.

My parents had one of those marriages that everybody pointed to as ‘the perfect couple’. They were always together. Always on the same side. Even when money was bad, even when relatives were awful, even when life was unfair, they were a unit.

Then they started fighting.

Not once in a while. Every single day.

It happened so fast that even now it feels fake looking back. Small arguments turned into screaming matches. My father started sleeping in the other room. My mother started crying at weird times, like while folding laundry or making tea. Within weeks they were talking about separation, then divorce, like they had both been waiting for permission to say the words.

At the same time, my older brother had an accident.

He was the one keeping us steady financially. Not rich, obviously, but dependable. The person everybody quietly leaned on. Then one night he got hit by a truck while coming home. He survived, but his leg was badly injured. After surgeries, the doctors said he wouldn’t be able to do his old job again.

So my house became this miserable place almost overnight.

Nobody talked normally anymore. There was always tension in the air. My mother blamed my father. My father blamed the stress. My brother stayed silent, in a way injured people do when they don’t want pity.

And me?

I spent more time on the app.

Because as pathetic as this sounds, that was the only part of my life where I felt progress. The only thing I was good at. The only thing getting better instead of worse.

So I doubled down. I started showing off.

Not in some huge public way. Just casually at first. Saying phrases out loud in front of friends. Correcting people when they mispronounced the new word I just uttered. Acting like I had stumbled into this niche, impressive thing nobody else understood.

Most of my classmates made fun of me for it. Fair enough.

A few were genuinely impressed.

A couple of them tried checking my words on Google Translate and said the translations didn’t fully match. I told them Duolingo was teaching me a tribal dialect. I said it confidently too, like I had any idea what I was talking about.

And somehow, that worked on enough people.

Including Lamia.

I’m not going to be dramatic and call her the love of my life or anything. She was just one of those girls everybody notices immediately. Pretty without trying. Quiet in a way that made people lean in when she talked. She had Pacific roots through one side of her family, and when she heard I was learning Māori, she was actually interested.

That felt huge to me.

Then one day she told me her grandfather was visiting. The man had grown up around Māori speakers.

I should have made an excuse right there.

I didn’t.

I was too deep into the performance by then.

So I met him.

He was polite at first. Old, sharp-eyed, the kind of person who can make you feel childish without raising his voice. Lamia asked me to say something in Māori, and I did. I said one of the longer phrases from the app. I even said it confidently, because by then I’d repeated it so many times that it felt natural in my mouth.

He stared at me for maybe two seconds.

Then he laughed.

Not nervously. Not kindly. Just a real laugh, like he thought I was joking.

He said that wasn’t Māori.

Not even close.

Lamia looked embarrassed. I tried to explain that maybe I was learning a dialect. He stopped laughing then, but only enough to shake his head and say, “No. That is not a dialect.”

I tried saying another phrase. Then another. Then another. And by the time I exited her house, Lamia’s entire family was laughing.

I left feeling like my skin had been peeled off.

It was exactly the kind of humiliation I deserved, which somehow made it worse.

That night, I went back to Telegram to find QIFAR.

The account was gone.

Deleted, banned, changed, I don’t know. The username no longer existed. But the channel still had old subscribers hanging around, so I started messaging people. People who had replied under the message where I originally asked for the APK.

Most ignored me.

Three answered.

One was from Brazil, one from Turkey, one from somewhere in Eastern Europe. All three had gotten different versions of the same app from QIFAR. All three had been trying to learn unusual languages. Not Māori. One wanted Ainu, one wanted Cornish, one wanted something I’d never heard of and still can’t spell correctly.

And the similarities got really uncomfortable, really fast.

All of them had started learning fast.

All of them said the app felt “off” in ways they couldn’t explain.

All of them had gone through some personal disaster after starting it. Death in the family. Sudden breakup. House fire. Job loss. Illness. Different details, same pattern.

And all of them talked about the app, the same way addicts talk about the one thing that still makes life bearable.

Like it was the only thing still working.

One of them thought I was just exaggerating. Another one said I was just embarrassed, because I got called out for pretending to know a language. When I pressed too hard, he accused me of wanting attention and blocked me.

But the third person stayed.

She was a woman from Turkey. I won’t mention her name.

She told me she’d also started wondering if the lessons weren’t what they claimed to be. She said the translations felt slippery, like they changed their meaning depending on context. She said the level-up screen on her app also flashed with branching grey patterns.

Then we started exchanging screenshots.

I still get sick thinking about that part.

Because even though she had been learning a completely different language, our lesson screens were the same.

Not similar.

EXACTLY THE SAME.

Same lesson order. Same sentence count. Same achievement titles. Even the same weird example phrases appearing at the same stages, just dressed up as different words.

One screenshot from her app matched one from mine exactly, down to the punctuation marks in the English prompt.

We were not learning two different languages.

We were being taught the same sequence through different masks.

I was typing a reply to her when my phone buzzed.

It was a notification from the app.

It simply said: Final Lesson Unlocked !

That was it.

No lesson number. No cheerful icon. Just those three words.

I deleted the app immediately. I sat there staring at the empty spot on my screen, like that should mean something.

An hour later, Lamia called me.

I almost didn’t answer, because I thought she was calling to laugh about what happened with her grandfather. Instead she asked me, very quietly, what app I had used to learn that language.

I told her.

There was a long silence.

Then she said that her grandfather stopped laughing after I left.

He had apparently asked her to repeat exactly what I said. She couldn’t, obviously, so he wrote down the sounds he remembered. Then he got upset.

He told her it wasn’t Māori, but it sounded close to something much older, something he only knew about from stories passed down through older relatives. Something that was impossible for me to have uttered, because that language is officially extinct.

There are no living speakers. There is no normal way for some random schoolboy in South Asia to know even a fragment of it.

The app has been teaching me a language that does not exist.

She asked me what else I had learned from that app.

I lied and said not much.

I don’t know why I lied. Maybe because hearing fear in her voice made the whole thing feel real.

So that’s why I’m posting this here.

Not for attention. If attention was all I wanted, I got punished for that already.

I’m posting because I need to know if anyone else got an APK from QIFAR, or from somebody using a different name. Especially if you asked for an uncommon language. Especially if the app only unlocked one course. Especially if it crashed whenever you opened Settings.

And if any of this sounds familiar, do me one favor.

Delete the app, before you reach the last lesson.

Because ever since I received that notification 10 days ago, I have been hearing someone muttering in my hallway.

Not loudly. Just under their breath.

A low muttering, steady and rhythmic, like somebody trying to remember something line by line.

Last night, without even meaning to, I recognized some of the sounds.

Not because I understood them. Because I had repeated them before.

Into my phone. Into my headphones. Into my own mouth.

I’ve checked every room. I’ve checked the roof. I’ve checked outside with a flashlight like an idiot.

Nothing.

I know what some of you are going to say.

Stress. Lack of sleep. Grief. Guilt. Suggestion.

I would honestly prefer that.

But there’s one thing I can’t explain.

When I’m lying in bed and the muttering starts, I sometimes know what sound is coming next before it comes.

Like I’m not hearing a stranger speak.

Like I’m remembering a lesson.

I deleted the app 10 days back.

And something in my house is still speaking to me like it did.

Tonight, it started earlier than usual.

And it doesn’t sound like it’s in the hallway anymore…

It sounds like it’s on the other side of my bedroom door.

Credit: Dr_AK_Myst

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