Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 352 posts

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#41

Post by wyxuan »

Areading314 wrote: post #25
vncecartersknee wrote: post #4

Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.

I can't agree more. I made some progress on Japanese only to find that when I spoke it was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker. I think speech/pronunciation correction is still an unsolved problem.

I've done duolingo for 300+ days and can tell you that Japanese and Arabic are uniquely bad/hard to teach

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#42

Post by jansan »

BooneJS wrote: post #5
vncecartersknee wrote: post #4

Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.

I moved on to Babbel.

Babbel is great and they also have shorter subscription plans. I only needed a quick fresh up of my French skills and did not see why I should subscribe to a full twelve months plan, which was the shortest that I could find on Duolingo.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#43

Post by zwayhowder »

vncecartersknee wrote: post #4

Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.

Their business model isn't to teach you languages, it is to make money off the millions of people who want to learn a new language.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#44

Post by daxaxelrod »

mdorazio wrote: post #35
daxaxelrod wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal experience leads me to disagree. I've been using Duolingo to learn Chinese for about 400 days now. I recently took another step and started taking private zoom lessons and my tutor said a few of her students have come from the same path. Duo has given me a good understanding of sentence structure and raw vocabulary. Even though my pronunciation needs work, Duo has given me so much for watching a few ads a…

I learned Chinese in college and then lived in China for a year and a half. Personally, I think sentence structure and basic (spoken) vocabulary are the easiest parts of Chinese since there's no real conjugation and particles do all the heavy lifting instead of messing with word forms [1]. The hard parts are memorizing a decent number of hanzi and properly pronouncing with tones. I tried duo to learn some Japanese an…

I agree, building the mental map of written characters->translation was certainly difficult early on.

Duo is not going to be as good as institutional schooling or immersion but I don't think it has to be to be considered a net positive for all of us. It has lowered the barrier enough to allow people to get started for what is essentially free. I remember 10 years ago I saw rosetta stone cds being sold in barnes and noble for $179+ for just a single level. Sacrificing the time of just 170 SWEs for something like this just seems like a no brainer to me, valuation aside.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#45

Post by hardwaregeek »

vncecartersknee wrote: post #4

Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.

The problem is that language learning is inherently about putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations. You have to decipher confusing sentences, handle unfamiliar words and wrestle your brain into thinking in a different language.

You can't really make a fun game that does this. Therefore Duolingo makes a game that focuses on translating the foreign language to your native one. That's great for starting out, but eventually you gotta start composing sentences and ideas in the foreign language.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#46

Post by least »

I was a cryptologic linguist for the army and went through a 16 month course of 6-7 hours of classroom instruction per day M-F, native speaking instructors, tons of immersion, and a couple hours of homework each night and left still feeling like I hardly knew the language that I was supposed to be interpreting. Unless your major in college is a specific language, you probably won't achieve any sort of fluency in your target language from taking a course in it, either.

Language learning is hard and a multifaceted thing that no single application is going to adequately prepare you for. Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening, and both are much harder than reading (for the vast majority of languages). Rote memorization is necessary. Immersion is necessary. Comprehensible input is necessary.

Language learning apps like Duolingo sell the idea of learning a language which is an extremely attractive idea to a lot of people. They also make it a fun activity and incentivize engagement with humor and gamification. The problem is that you can't possibly become fluent in a language with an app like it and there isn't any single app that will.

I suppose in the end Duolingo's valuation is more a reflection of people's desire to learn a language rather than people actually learning a language, though.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#47

Post by Jare »

monkeybutton wrote: post #34
vncecartersknee wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cool I'd love to hear more about it, I've actually been thinking about ways that a language app could work better. Seems like all the current research is that "immersion" in the target language is critical, an app that just played me conversations, had me read text, etc and 'creatively' formulate responses, not just simply fill in the missing word, obviously in increasing difficulty would be ideal.

Immersion provides the strongest motivation to learn and to try. When you want something or have a problem that needs to be solved and the other party doesn't speak English, you're going to be very motivated. The 'dopamine hit' from getting it right and communicating successfully in another language is also way better than from an app/game. The results are just so much more real and tangible.

Immersion also creates connections between the language and other stimuli (visual, emotional, etc). Connections are powerful for creating reliable memories.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#48

Post by urda »

paxys wrote: post #21
poorjohnmacafee wrote: post #3

Quick look at financials, they lost $25M in trailing 12 months, lost $14M in the previous year, lost $10M in the year before. How is Duolingo supposed to become profitable? How is a $6.5B valuation justified?

Why is this always the comment whenever any startup or IPO is discussed on this site? Every company at this stage loses money. It would be stupid to chase profits over user or revenue growth. They have 40 million monthly active users. Registrations grew 67% YoY. Their revenue doubled in a single quarter. Expenses are mostly stock comp. They have nearly $200M cash on hand. The numbers are all solid.

> Every company at this stage loses money.

... why are companies still getting a pass with this 10 years in? No, this isn't an acceptable excuse here.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#50

Post by jfoster »

What is the big opportunity in Duolingo? Are there lots of people learning languages who haven't heard of it already? Is it so essential & useful to language learning that they have a lot of room for ARPU growth? Do they have some way of inspiring a lot more people to begin learning another language?
Post reply on HN