This means they can keep an eye on the most popular languages (currently English, followed by Spanish and French) and observe interesting snippets such as the fact that "for some reason, Italian women learn English much better than Italian men."įor von Ahn and his team, the newest development is the Duolingo Test Center, an in-app language test that came about as a direct response to customer feedback. This constant datamining and huge user base means the company has an interesting overview of language trends and demographics. We are slowly figuring out the best way to teach a language, and we're doing it scientifically." We figure out in a couple of days which is more effective and then switch everyone to that. For example, if we want to know whether we should teach plurals before adjectives, for the next 50,000 users, we'll teach half of them plurals before adjectives, half the other way around and then we measure which of these groups learns better. "We've done a lot of work to improve how we teach and because of our users we are in a unique position to work out how best to teach a language. "There's an independent study that shows that if you use Duolingo for 34 hours you learn the same as you would in one university semester of language learning." "I think the reason it's been doing so well is it's very enjoyable – there are a lot of aspects that make it a bit like playing a game – but also effective," he explains. Von Ahn believes its success is down to a combination of clever, intuitive design aspects and constantly evolving teaching methods. So what makes Duolingo different from the hundreds of other digital language learning platforms out there? The fact that it's free is obviously a big draw, but there must be more to it than that.
Put another way, in America there are more people using Duolingo than learning a language through the US public school system. The app now has 40 million registered users, making it one of the most popular ways to learn languages in the world. Luis von Ahn launched Duolingo in 2012 along with co-founder Severin Hacker.
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