This is the kind of startup I believe and hope will survive when the current tech bubble bursts. They have a real technical solution to a real problem and are making their money by charging people for a service that is worthwhile enough to pay for. They're contributing to humanity in a meaningful way that's worthwhile.
All these social media sites that make their money off advertising or selling user data can all go bankrupt as far as I'm concerned. Their users are coming to their websites for the short-term dopamine rush brought by the novelty of social media interaction: these websites are not different in any meaningful way from drug dealers, and they're costing millions of people happiness and productivity. They sell themselves as communications platforms but in reality, they compromise on privacy and as a result some of the most important forms of communication are hampered by their influence. As developers I think we have an ethical imperative to work for organizations like Duolingo who are pushing humanity forward and not social media companies who are holding humanity back.
Yes, like Youtube, Duolingo has what it takes to function in a capitalistic system. For capitalism to work, you (very grossly) need 3 things: Capital (ships, factories, stamp machines, etc), Laborers (gardeners, secretaries, miners, etc ), and Customers (vinyl collectors, beer drinkers, tourists, etc). Many companies in tech confuse 2 or more of these things as the same. Twitter boasts of it's users, which one thinks of as customers, but those are in fact the capital. Twitter's real customers are who pays to advertize on it. Facebook is just the same, their customers are businesses. That bears repeating, FB is a business-to-business style enterprise.
Youtube, however, is better off. Laborers are the people that upload videos and workers at Youtube, Capital is the servers and all the software and somewhat the content creators, Customers are people watching and businesses trying to advertize. Though it is not as clear cut as a sandwich shop, it makes more sense than Yo or the myriad other tech startups out there that confuse these 3 key groups.
Duolingo is also 'unconfused'. Capital is the language service, website, and software of repetition. Customers are, again, the people using the service and other companies and people trying to get translations. Labor is, again, the people translating and the employees. In lieu of being paid for the translating, the users are 'paid' in the free service provided. Overall, I think it works pretty well, and, according to the OP, so do many other people.
Agreed. I do think YouTube will survive whatever collapses come, because they hold too much of a monopoly on video to fail (something similar goes for Facebook). But their profit model is still that of a social media company.
Well, you don't need a Google account to consume content on YouTube (yet), but without a Facebook account and a decent number of friends, there would be no impulsive need to check your news feed on Facebook.
That was how Facebook used to work but now they're basically an RSS reader, the sources being either your friends published content or anything and anyone else for that matter.
Good call! I had not thought of FB as that, but you are right. I guess the next step for them is to then try to transition into a bank or some other enterprise that tracks and stores value. That usually seems to be the way these things go.
You leverage your facebook profile to gain access to properties, be given permissions or access, and your value is measurable by the input output of your usage.
Travel around the world right now and show either your government identification or a printed copy of your facebook profile and wouldn't it be weird if a young person you meet takes more credibility from that printed page than the validity and authority of your government id?
But are these guys making money from solving the problem. Seems like its a free service and they are balking from chasing the profitability route. From the article
>>>> “The reasoning for this was that, though we could make it a profitable business, we realized we’d quickly become a translations business as we’d have to hire people focused on quality control, sales people, etc. and eventually businesses tend to pay more attention to the parts of the company that are profitable,” a spokesperson told us.
“We are an education company and are here to help bring education to everyone in the world and to make education more effective.”
<<<<<
Good intentions but does not seem to support your key point or am I mistaken?
> They have a real technical solution to a real problem and are making their money by charging people for a service that is worthwhile enough to pay for.
Are you referring to the $20 English certification? There isn't anything else that they currently ask their users to pay for.
Per the article, the translation service has been mostly ended. CNN are still using it, but they're not taking on new customers for that side of the business.
I am currently in Uruguay learning Spanish and Duolingo is one the the 4 tools I use on my phone for it. The other three are:
Ankidroid: A flashcard app for adding vocabulary I need and phrases I want to come more fluidly.
Spanish Trainer: A spaced repetition verb conjugation app as Duolingo doesn't give me enough practice with this.
Google Translate
What would speed things up for me is the ability to easily import translations from Google Translate into my flashcard app.
Duolingo needs to provide better user control of the spaced repitition input and some setting for the skills practice sessions. I would love the ability to make a certain drill or word as Finished or Very Confident so I don't have to waste time practicing stuff I already know. I would also love the ability to mark certain words or drills as important or useful so that they get repeated more frequently when practicing skills.
(Edited for formatting and the friendly grammar red cross :))
This is a really cool product. I am surprised at both the quality of translation and the seamless integration into the page. I am definitely going to be using this.
The in-line translations come from Google Translate. People often dismiss Google Translate but it's very good between English and the other major European languages. The quality isn't as good for less popular languages, or if one of your languages isn't English.
If you aren't satisfied with the translation, you can refer to another dictionary in the reader sidebar (or a popup window in the Chrome extension). The default for Spanish-English is WordReference, but users can customize this if they have another favorite (http://blog.readlang.com/2013/11/07/custom-dictionaries.html).
On top of that, you can edit all the words you translate, and if in future you click the same word, you'll get your personally edited version instead of Google Translate. So you're effectively building up your own large translation dictionary. One idea for the future is to use all these edits to crowd source better translations, but there's plenty of lower hanging fruit to get through first!
> I would love the ability to make a certain drill or word as Finished or Very Confident so I don't have to waste time practicing stuff I already know.
It's my understanding that Duolingo (and similar tools) aren't quizzing you just to make you prove that you know a word. It's actually part of the process of ensuring retention, and the act of recalling the word is actually part of the process of storing the information more permanently in the brain. Therefore, the ability to mark a word as "learned" may be counterproductive long-term. Of course, the algorithm isn't perfect, but it's more advanced than simply checking off a box that you've learned the word and never need to practice it again.
That being said, I do agree that more customization would be helpful.
I don't need to have certain words drilled into me because I've known them for over a decade. I also know what words come easily and immediately when I am trying to speak and thus are drilled into me by constant use.
The two other spaced repetition tools I use (which I mentioned) allow me to specify how well I know the answer and use when I have a high level of confidence in my knowledge, the words will come less frequently.
Do they make you write your answers? I find that to be a crucial feature.
Also memrise doesn't understand language the way duolingo does. The latter actually uses words in context, both in fragments of sentences and full sentences. These count as repetitions for the individual sentences, and there always seem to be some fresh sentences.
I think these differences make Duolingo a much superior tool as far as there courses go.
> Duolingo needs to provide better user control of the spaced repitition input and some setting for the skills practice sessions.
I disagree. I think what Duolingo needs is to do a better job of automatically detecting people's personal spacing and on which words (this isn't a trivial problem, BTW). Putting this burden on the user means that the user spends a lot of time tinkering with the platform instead of actually learning the language. This is a problem I ran into with Anki.
Seconded :) . I wonder whether might have enough HN users to have a meetup here.. (are HN meetups still occurring on other places? Maybe I should Ask HN).
I used similar materials, and I found The Foreign Services Institute's course workbooks (1989) [0] as a helpful supplement for learning Spanish – and they have courses for 37 other languages, all free (PDFs and MP3s).
They courses were intended for international diplomats preparing for exams or relocation that require (at the least) conversational proficiency in their destination's local language. So, you learn the basics as quickly as possible without compromising understanding for rote memorization.
> I would love the ability to make a certain drill or word as Finished or Very Confident so I don't have to waste time practicing stuff I already know.
Do you know what you know, though? It's easy to spend an hour practising a bunch of words and feel as though you've learnt some of them, but come back a week or month later and actually not be able to recall them.
Some Spanish words are almost exactly the same as their English or Dutch equivalent, in which case I really don't need them repeated. I think this is the case for others too.
("What sped things up for me" or I suppose you could say "What speeds things up for me;" hope this is received well by commenter HN community in the spirit of helping someone learn/improve their language)
That isn't a correction. Both "sped things" and "speeds things" are both legal English and both mean similar things (although as another commenter correctly notes, the tenses are subtly different).
In this context 'legal' can only mean 'having to do with the law' as there is no statutory definition of the English language (well not British English at least).
I would have used the form, "What sped things up for me." when describing something that happened in the past. "What speeds things up for me" is a different sense - it's talking about the present.
Since there are so many Duoling fans here, I have to ask: am I the only one who finds the app almost unusable because there's no theory?
For German I used to try the exercises on my commute, but suddenly the app expected me to use "dem" instead of "der" without any explanation. I can't be the only one with this problem, right? Or is there a "new concepts" tab that I've never seen?
Some lessons include a "Tips and notes" section below the lesson segments. It's often positioned below the fold, and there aren't many indicators that there is more content if the user scrolls down.
I probably have a different perspective than most, but here's why I enjoy Duolingo's style:
The first foreign language I began learning was Spanish. I took it throughout high school and college. I was taught theory first, so I could understand most of what I'd read or hear following the new lesson. Running the input through the theory I'd established in my brain worked, but it was very slow and took a lot of practice to speed up my speaking and understanding.
When I was visiting my wife in Brazil while we were dating, I learned Portuguese very differently. Although they were aware that I didn't speak Portuguese, many of her friends and relatives did not let that reason hold them back from speaking it to me anyway. So I was bombarded with the language, and slowly began to understand more and more. First, I'd only understand one word in a phrase, then 25% of it, then 50% and so on until I reached a critical point where I understood enough of what was being said that I could use the context of what I did understand to infer the rest and learn that too.
Learning Portuguese was so much quicker for me. I still know more Spanish theory, but I still speak and understand it too slowly to consider myself fluent. On the other hand, Brazilians tell me all the time that they're impressed with how well I speak Portuguese.
I think the jumping right into the deep end style of learning Duolingo offers is fun, but may not be the best for everyone.
No, you're not the only one. Duolingo does throw you into the cold water and expects you to pick up new concepts within a new lesson. The only support Duolingo offers for new concepts is through the comment section where other learners and native speakers explain or link to explanations of those concepts. It's not ideal, but it was good enough for me to complete the spanish course.
But they definitively go well together. You see a few examples of case usage, then you read the theory, then after you use it again, it magically "clicks" (for me at least), and things make a lot more sense.
The 'explicit' reinforcement /'implicit' learning couple is a great way to learn I think -- you grasp it intuitively and yet if you are faced with a new or tricky example where your experience will fail you'll be able to make a principled choice by explicit reasoning ("Oh the case here is * such and such * because of * this * therefore the pronoun here must be * that one *").
It is arguably the best way to learn the language; after all, it was the way you learned your first language. I think a great deal of people find 'theory' boring, and would otherwise not be interested in learning a language. Duolingo is fun and practical.
> It is arguably the best way to learn the language; after all, it was the way you learned your first language
It took me ten years to be as proficient as a ten years old kid in my first language. So I don't think the way we learn our first language is necessary the best way to learn language in general.
You've got multiple advantages to learning a language as an adult as well, and there's really no reason to go through the extremely inefficient method of learning a new language the same way you did as a kid
1) You have the ability to translate. You already know the concepts and ideas - you don't have to abstract meaning from noises - you already know the meaning, you just have to correlate it
2) You understand grammar concepts. It may be quite different in your target language - I have been learning 日本語 for some time, and grammar is wildly different from English - but there's still a lot of things you only need to learn a few differences of, vs. having to learn the concepts from scratch
With our first language, we have to sit there and learn by what sounds right vs. what sounds wrong. This is so hilariously trial and error and completely inefficient that it makes the entire process far slower than it would be if we had any other way to do it.
How long does it take you to figure out verb conjugation the way you learn a first language? Quite some time. You probably don't get it fully right in all cases until you later enter classes that go over the grammar rules. In Japanese, I was conjugating verbs, including irregular and negative forms, at multiple politeness levels, in about two hours of learning conjugation. And I rarely made mistakes after that. Why? Because I already understand verb conjugation. It's a concept I have a solid grasp on in my native tongue, and only needed to learn a few new rules to graft onto the existing framework.
I think the pendulum's swung too far in the other direction: a proper mix of theory and practice is self-evidently the way to go--especially when immersion is not feasible--and the only part worth debating is exactly what mix to use. I never used Duolingo much because you have to type on a phone which is pure pain, but here's another reason I'd avoid it, and ultimately a more important one.
(Also, in case you haven't yet worked it out or looked it up somewhere else: you need to use "dem" with masculine and neuter indirect objects, often translatable into English using "to" or "for", and with certain prepositions. It is the dative masculine/neuter definite article.)
I had done about 12 months of German with an actual German teacher before duolingo. The theory was enough the get me started, and I then continued learning a lot with duolingo. But as for getting started from zero, you milage will vary according to how many languages you know.
As for what you're asking, I guess it's really hard for english-speakers. I'm bilingual, and coming from spanish and being fluid in english, it's a lot easier. The main thing is: nouns have a gender, and the article ("the") do as well. Do "die" is feminine, "das" neutral, and "der" masculine.
Verbs also conjugate differently according to gender.
However, it's important to realize that Duolingo's approach is intentional, and one also used by Rosetta Stone and many (most?) language schools and teachers. It's proven to be very effective.
That said, especially for German I would've liked more theory too. And some people just seem to have a preference for learning in a more formal/theoretical way.
Yea I tried German for a while, never got into it and I think that's why. At the time the tablet app (android) didn't have a very good UI around accessing tips + hints and comments (I think comments were excluded completely but can't quite remember).
If you ever use Rosetta Stone, they call it "Immersion Method". They says we can learn anything as we can learn them when we were a child. We don't study grammar etc when we learned our first/mother language.
Learning another language as I learned my first would mean hiring two native speakers to act as my parents, some more native/fluent speakers to act as my primary school teachers and a bunch of non-natives learning the language at the same time as me to act as my friends. Together, they would need to surround me for the majority of my waking hours and after 10 years, I would still be incapable of reading anything more complex than Harry Potter.
Of course, we do study grammar in our own language. We do it at school.
completely agree. i went from loving the app to absolutely hating it just around the moment when the difficulty ratcheted up to the point that grammar/theory became necessary, but of course was absent.
The differences between the iOS app and the web page were startling about a year ago when I first started using it. In particular how different the iOS's coach was and the "on-track" concept on the web. I was excited that they wanted to make it more similar, but then they just cut the coach which I had vastly preferred.
I have a similar problem getting the hang of Spanish conjugation. The app is still very useful, but it shouldn't be the only thing you use to learn the language.
The best site I've found for translations and conjugations (through the duolingo comments) is spanishdict.com [1]. They have verb conjugations for every tense and offer a wide variety of example usages.
I'm like you that I prefer to learn the theory before brute force memorizing. Just get a good grammar book and use it besides Duolingo, and you're golden.
So you might ask “how can you make money giving away a learning app?” This past week DuoLingo answered that question with the commercial release of the DuoLingo Test Center.
The DuoLingo Test Center is currently free but it won’t be for long. Give it a try if you’d like to see how it works. Once the DuoLingo Test is accepted at schools and employers, the company plans to charge $20 to take its test.
There’s an established incumbent (monopoly) in this market called TOEFL. If you’ve come to the US to study, you’ve probably taken this test. It’s a lot more expensive than $20 per test and DuoLingo is out to prove it can do this testing less expensively and better.
I hope they succeed in taking away some market share from TOEFL. The TOEFL test is ridiculously overpriced for what they provide and your results expire (no joke) after 2 years. Since clearly you will have forgotten everything you knew about that language in 2 years time... Go Duolingo!
>Since clearly you will have forgotten everything you knew about that language in 2 years time...
They are not wrong. I passed Duolingo Spanish course (it might have been extended since then) and barely remember anything now. I was also studying German in school, and later French by myself to the point where I could even speak with native speakers a little. Hardly remember anything either. English is the only foreign language that I haven't forgot because I use it constantly. But if you're not using a foreign language, after passing the test you will completely forget it in 2 years.
There is no way to permanently learn a language if you're not using it. I have known coworkers who grew up in the US for the first 20-something years of their life and then moved to other countries and have begun the process of forgetting English. Their first language. The one they were taught as babies.
Remember this: everyone is taught their perfect grammar and spelling and quizzed on it for years in school. How many people can say what a past participle is, or even what an adverb is? How many people who passed geometry can still do that level of math from the top of their heads?
Of course you can't permanently learn something. You have to keep it in practice.
That's not true. Memorization is the most efficient way of learning a language, but it often comes in forms which aren't as obvious. For example you can look at reading foreign texts as a kind of repetition for every word you encounter.
It's hard to master and complete a Duolingo course without getting a grip on the language. You'd have to pretty much ignore the "Strengthen your skills" button and never repeat anything.
Even after finishing a course you should use the repetitions for weeks and months to keep refreshing your memory. That's the only way it may stay forever.
And while that may be the case, it is ultimately a free Rosetta Stone. So if it fails to work you're only out just time, with Rosetta Stone you're out time and also hundreds of dollars.
I'd love to see a independent study into its reliability/retention. But even if it is completely useless, it is still no more wasteful than any other mobile game people play daily.
There is one referenced on their homepage. On average, 34 hours of study in the Spanish course would be equivalent to a full semester of language education in college. For me that would be about a month of practice.
I have seen the effects myself. After a month or so, even though I had learned some spanish before, native speakers suddenly slowed down (in my perception).
An important clue: Use the "Strengthen your skills" button frequently to keep the tree golden. Duolingo itself doesn't nag you enough to do that, but it's essential for mastery of the language.
"But if you're not using a foreign language, after passing the test you will completely forget it in 2 years"
You usually take this test because you will have to speak this language, so the case where you take the test and then do nothing with it seems pretty unlikely.
Also, I disagree with your assumption that you will completely forget another language in 2 years (even when not used). I cannot confirm this from my own experience.
When I took the TOEIC (it was mandatory to get my diploma), the people in charge of the exams said that the TOEIC score is only valid one or two years (can't remember which) and if we spend some time in an English speaking country it was advised to take a TOEIC again as our score would be likely to increase.
I was thinking at the time (it was in 2005) that they were really out of touch with common sense, and right now I wonder if anybody outside academia gives some credibility to the TOEIC or the TOEFL.
I don't know about the US, but internationally it's not a monopoly by TOEFL. When I was looking at foreign uinversities for my Master's several programs were accepted. For Sweden it's: TOEFL, IELTS, Cambridge Michigan Language Assessments, Pearson PTE Academic, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations and possibly more (I got accepted with an old IB A2 degree).
They have a business model where they sell translation services to CNN, etc.
I don't have a business model but I'm trying to bootstrap an iOS language software company. Duolingo is really good but I think language learning is difficult enough that there are other good ideas worth pursuing.
Anyway, if anyone is learning another language, I'd appreciate any feedback on my apps. Here's my Spanish app:
> As a company spokesperson told me, the company actually tabled its ambitions around translations about a year and a half ago and hasn’t scaled the businesses or accepted new clients (it’s still working with CNN, though).
That makes sense to me. Automated translation software has made huge strides in the past decade, so Duolingo's crowdfunded approach (as cool as it is) will likely be obsolete in the fairly near future anyways.
Well, that gives me a little hope. Consumers don't part with their money as easily a business does. People want technology to change education but they don't want to spend any money.
Nah, they definitely provide value. Have you used it before? For someone who only took a few years of a foreign language in high school, it's a great refresher. If they could also structure the lessons to teach in a similar way to the classroom (e.g., actively showing different conjugations instead of just assuming you'll remember or pick up on it yourself) then they'll be golden.
They've found an effective solution for self-study. Anything contextually different (eg. for classrooms) might need a vastly different solution.
Suppose they even managed to come up with that classroom solution for language learning. How does what they currently have help them? Teachers, schools & government education departments make the purchasing decision for classrooms, so what students use in their time outside class isn't especially helpful in driving more sales of a classroom solution.
If they came up with something good for classrooms, they might as well axe or install paywalls into their existing stuff.
It helps the user better understand the language, which I believe is their goal to begin with. For example, their current approach presents a conjugated word in the context of a provided sentence or phrase. When I'm refreshing a language this isn't a big deal, but if I'm starting from scratch I don't have the foreknowledge to understand exactly when and why the word appears as such. I don't really need to argue that learning the language structure is much easier than memorizing a large list of words and phrases.
More simply a better tool for learning, is a better product on their end. They don't have to sell it to schools, but if teachers see that it can work in tandem with their curriculum then it will translate to more users.
> If they came up with something good for classrooms, they might as well axe or install paywalls into their existing stuff.
You're only looking at monetizing and forgetting about growth.
> You're only looking at monetizing and forgetting about growth.
Because of the valuation size, and because I think they've succeeded at growing quickly and becoming the most well-known language learning solution. Everything else about Duolingo looks really good, but the monetization side of things seems to be the elephant in the room.
What I'm also pointing out is that the growth among language learners cannot be easily translated into growth in institutions. To grow in institutions they will still need sales teams, and their consumer userbase doesn't necessarily gain them much of an advantage in that game.
All that said, in this article they hint at having plans beyond the $20 certification they've announced. To achieve the valuation they've now got, I think it's fair to say they do have a solid plan that they just haven't made public knowledge yet. It's probably something that will be a bit controversial among their userbase, like paywalls.
Same here. I took two years of Spanish in high school, and two semesters in college. I never put much effort into those classes, as I knew I couldn't commit the time to becoming fluent (I was taking them to fulfill core requirements at the liberal arts college I attended). Now, I'm finding myself slowly reactivating and building on that knowledge using Duolingo, to the point that I should be able to strike up basic conversations fairly soon.
Not really. The course can be free, but the certification paid. If every year 1% of the user base pays $50 to $100 for certification, that is worth $50M to $100M in revenue. I know there was a time I would pay $100 to get an English certification (before coming to the US for school). I also "help" teach French in college and privately. If they required a certification, I would not have minded paying $200 at that time to get a certificate.
I agree with your sentiment. There's no denying that they are a valuable tool for language learners, but they do not have the monetization figured out yet.
Originally they were going to provide translation services, which hasn't worked out. Now they're trying to provide certifications for people who pay a fee. Will that work? Maybe it will. What feels odd is that the valuation is so high for a company that hasn't yet figured out a reliable way to make money from what it does.
If all else fails, they could install paywalls, but a substantial portion of their users might abandon them at that point.
>> Instead, the company is now using its Test Center certification program as a revenue source (the tests cost $20) and says that it has other plans to monetize.
He can monetize this in a similar way. Crowd sourced translation service where the more advanced language learners translate books or something. It will be higher quality than google translate for sure.
The article explicitly states that Duolingo moved away from this model though:
"As a company spokesperson told me, the company actually tabled its ambitions around translations about a year and a half ago and hasn’t scaled the businesses or accepted new clients"
Good guess, but the article explains how paid translation wasn't working so well for them. It seems unclear how they are going to make enough money to justify this valuation.
Not at all, because the free language tool is just half of what they do. The part that actually makes the money is crowdsourced translations, which are done by more advanced students as practice.
Actually from the posted article, it sounds like they've been phasing out the translation-as-a-service part of their business for over a year now. Their reasoning is that "eventually businesses tend to pay more attention to the parts of the company that are profitable," and they want to be an education company, not a translation company.
Evidently they're planning to make money from paid certification tests and they have "other plans to monetize".
To me this looks a bit like a "charity" investment. I've heard rumours Duolingo was running thin on capital while frantically searching for a business model.
However, despite not being profitable yet, Duolingo is doing a tremendous amount of good. I know quite a bit about language learning and learning in general, and I have never seen a better tool for learning the languages they offer. The combination of words, sentences, smart repetition and text-to-speech is pretty much unique, and the courses I've seen are quite well designed.
Caveat: No, Duolingo alone is not enough to get fluent in a language, but if you used it as your only (or major) tool, you'll get very close.
Yeah I have to wonder how great Duolingo would have been if I had it as a kid as a learning tool for French (I'm Canadian). I generally got good French marks, but I think Duolingo would have boosted my actual ability.
I think Duolingo is great for exactly that kind of situation, where multiple languages exist in one country, and that is actually the norm, rather than the exception.
For example there is also a course in the incubator teaching Catalonian for Spanish speakers, Catalonian being a language spoken in a part of southern Spain.
Only complaint is they appear to have no priority in supporting languages of the East, where the majority of the world lives. I guess their main demo, at least at one point, was Western students, who aren't typically taught those languages in school.
In the least, teaching Mandarin should be a higher priority than half the languages they support.
I've been learning Mandarin, and after searching for something like Duolingo found Chinese Skill [一]. It's not as good as Duolingo, but does include a way to teach characters. It would be great if it could have a drawing interface like Pleco [二] which can reliably recognise most characters I draw, with my terrible handwriting.
They do teach English to speakers of Chinese, Mandarin and Hindi.
Skritter will fix your Mandarin handwriting and tones if you use it regularly. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nwinter who did it is now doing a game to teach coding invested in by ycombinator.
Yes, the majority of the world lives in the east. That means they should target (eg) Mandarin -> English instead of English -> Mandarin. Which is precisely what they're doing.
True, but the issue is the keyboard. Notice they don't have really any Cyrillic languages either. Trying to get people used to using many ALT and key combos is a tough starting point for a lot of gamified learners. Japanese has been on the block since Duolingo began, but again, the keyboard is the main hurdle.
Might be wrong with this and it might not fit Duolingo's app but it would not be too bad to at least have spoken Japanese with romaji.
I think most people will admit that learning to write Japanese well is something not many foreigners will ever do, while speaking isn't that terribly difficult. I spent a little bit learning Japanese and I found that learning speaking + romaji only at first was not only easier, but helped when looking at symbols later (since I already knew how the words were said).
Anyone with dual language skills can contribute. http://incubator.duolingo.com/ I assume the problem is finding Mandarin / English speakers who are willing to spend the time on the course.
I am also very disappointed by this. I am mainly interested in learning Mandarin and Japanese. But Duolingo is so good that I decided to start learning Spanish with it till they support Mandarin or Japanese. Now it's one year later, still no Mandarin or Japanese and I ran out of motivation for Spanish a long time ago.
IIRC, they've said that they're targeting people learning english more than english speakers learning other languages. They have english courses in lots of languages.
Duolingo is the best learning platform I've ever used. Even better than Khan Academy (and Khan Academy is really really good). Happy to see them doing so well!
Duolingo is pretty nice, but often the voices are odd and I'm not so sure the pronunciation detection is accurate. Hard to complain for a free product, of course.
Lingvist is fairly new and French-only for now, yet I feel like I'm making more progress with that than I did with Duolingo. Not sure why that's the case.
I'm pairing both with French vocabulary decks on Brainscape, which is an Anki-like SRS app. Lingvist claims it will switch to a paid model soon, and Brainscape decks are in-app purchases. Lingvist is both mobile and web, though I always prefer the web interfaces when I have access to them. Wish it also had a speaking component.
I've started using Verbling for having conversations but so far they seem pretty unstructured and not worth the money. This will, of course, depend on who you choose. There don't seem to be a lot of French to English options there.
If anyone has suggestions for alternatives, I'd love to hear them. I'd like to rapidly improve my French before a trip at the end of August.
I guess they might operate at a loss for a few years. While its a difficult goal, but it is possible. They have the biggest market possible. Language is elementary for humans. I think if they can target schools and universities with a commercial model, it could really generate the kind of revenues your talking about.
Start out with Michel Thomas' Japanese course. It's just speaking/listening, no reading/writing. I learned more from that in two hours than I did in a month of self-study using other programs. You can probably find it for free on Youtube. The venerable Mr. Thomas is no longer with us, unfortunately.
What amazes me most about all this is just how badly Rosetta Stone missed the boat. I used one of their (rather expensive) lessons years ago, but the lack of a mobile version meant I could only use it at home and not on the go, when I actually had time to spare. It seemed like such a no-brainier to me at the time. In a time where people were paying £300 for their retail software, they could easily have sold loads on the App Store.
Now I use Duolingo multiple times per week on my phone and I wouldn't even think about paying for Rosetta Stone anymore.
Not mentioned in the article is IMHO the most important thing they are currently working on: Language testing/validation/badging. In the context of the "end of college" era, this work in microcredentialing may be the most valuable thing they are doing. Not teaching language, but validating as a trusted 3rd party what an individual knows.
I'm patiently waiting for their Polish course to progress beyond 17% completion...
Their volunteer translation system may seem unreliable, but it's probably the only way smaller languages will ever get attention. At this point, I'm probably better off picking up some Polish books, learning a bit on my own, and contributing to their project.
For iOS, just add the keyboard and it will become available (this is the same way that most people use emojis).
On Mac, you can add the keyboard as well. There is a phonetic keyboard for Russian that I've found to be much easier than the standard layout. I map keyboard switching to ctl+opt+cmd+space, which works pretty well for me. What I really like about Mac is that you can use dictation to read Russian words that you don't need to understand. You will need to download a Russian-specific voice for this, otherwise it will simply read the names of the letters.
Unfortunately you just have to suck it up and learn the layout. If you have a mechanical keyboard you can buy replacement keycaps with both Latin/Cyrillic characters. Otherwise, you can get a set of stickers to put on your keys.
Or just learn to touchtype off the bat.
Depending on your OS, you can also use a phonetic keyboard layout instead of the standard Russian one, but I really strongly recommend learning the standard Russian layout.
Those characters are still based on the Roman alphabet, though. Non-Roman alphabets such as Cyrillic are trickier. For example, I can copy-and-paste Cyrillic, as in русский, but I don't know offhand how to produce those characters on my keyboard, much less on my iPad or mobile device.
When I travelled round Georgia and Armenia for a couple of weeks I enabled the Russian, Georgian and Armenian keyboard layouts for my phone (it's just a setting, and then a key labelled EN-RU-GE-AR appeared).
With significant effort I could type some Georgian or Armenian into Google Translate -- they are awful, awful scripts. Russian was easier, but not as widespread as I'd expected. I could also let other people type things, and they all know about switching between layouts, since they do it all the time to type email addresses etc.
You can add Russian as an input language and use a keyboard shortcut to switch between Russian and English (usually alt+shift or super+space), and then it's just a matter of learning the keyboard layout.
If you're learning Russian, you have to learn a new alphabet anyway, a new layout isn't that much more trouble.
We[1] take a different approach to language learning by focusing on usable, real language from the get go. It's more of a phrasebook that uses games and activities to get the vocab you need into your memory than a grammar learning engine.
"A planned or constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary have been consciously devised for human or human-like communication, instead of having developed naturally. It is also referred to as an artificial or invented language."
Well, they are coming out with Klingon sometime in the next year. Granted, it's a small language, but it seems they are amenable to conlangs. Maybe, they will also have an ability to add your own conlang, so that you and friends can communicate and expand the lang.
Have been a fan of Duolingo for a long time. I see it as an important enabler of people who're aspiring hypergots or polygots. I can't wait for Esperanto to become available within the app.
That's really good to hear. And it's a shame that such a company "only" raises $45M where Wunderlist gets 100-200 (i like Wunderlist but i think there is so much more value and potential in Duolingo!). I tried several Android apps for learning new languages and duolingo was by far the best, imo.
Now, can i have German->Japanese in Duolingo, please? :)
If they could add some Asian languages, at least Korean which uses an alphabet and would probably not require as much special dev as something like Chinese (mandarin) would, that would be super sweet!
Prior to having seen Duolingo, I started a service that is similar to Duolingo, but only for Mandarin Chinese. It's only free for the first 60 words (then $5.99/mo), and I don't think the proposition is quite right yet. It's at http://fastchinese.com if you'd like to check it out.
We made a language exchange social app that's the complete opposite of the Duolingo approach. You learn and exchange more than 120 languages with native speakers from close to 200 countries.
I learned on Silicon Valley that you don't want any revenue anyways, because people will just expect insane revenue growth once you have any revenue. I didn't know if I was supposed to laugh or if someone just had spoken some truth everyone in the valley is too correct to actually say.
All these social media sites that make their money off advertising or selling user data can all go bankrupt as far as I'm concerned. Their users are coming to their websites for the short-term dopamine rush brought by the novelty of social media interaction: these websites are not different in any meaningful way from drug dealers, and they're costing millions of people happiness and productivity. They sell themselves as communications platforms but in reality, they compromise on privacy and as a result some of the most important forms of communication are hampered by their influence. As developers I think we have an ethical imperative to work for organizations like Duolingo who are pushing humanity forward and not social media companies who are holding humanity back.