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Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

reuters.com

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

#61

Post by WanderPanda »

wyxuan wrote: post #41
Areading314 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've had some success with talking to the Apple Translate app (formulating my own sentences) while learning Arabic using Duolingo. Arabic people could actually understand my simple, mostly nonsense sentences

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

#62

Post by YetAnotherNick »

bawolff wrote: post #52
least wrote: post #46

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…

People learn languages for a variety of purposes. Some people just want to know enough to be able to ask where the bathroom is and read a menu at a resturant.

More people learn languages to feel good and for bragging rights than for any actual use.

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

#63

Post by Hamuko »

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.

>Why is this always the comment whenever any startup or IPO is discussed on this site?

Because a lot of these companies seem to be doing the underpants gnomes business strategy, as in 1) Register a bunch of users 2) ??? 3) Profit

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

#64

Post by jraby3 »

least wrote: post #46

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…

In theory their valuation is based on expected future returns. There are a lot of apps that have no or limited benefits that still drive traffic and revenue (all the brain training apps come to mind).

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

#65

Post by jamal-kumar »

least wrote: post #46

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…

I find it really useful for practice, but it's obviously not the best thing to be using solely if you think that's going to reach you to proficiency.

It's a fun way to kill like 15-20 minutes a day, it's probably the closest thing I waste my time on that's like a video game these days yet 100x more productive. I've got books for learning Russian and German to go through along with using Duolingo as a pretty good option for practicing basically everything else. It's fun to compare how I got Spanish down via immersion without really practicing too hard on anything outside of rosetta stone (Didn't teach me a damn thing, was a very bad tool back in the day)... Just reading a book from the 1950s (Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish -- highly recommended) and sinking myself into that world for a while took so many years. I'm pretty sure I would have done better off with some better programs and proper study instead, but it definitely gave perspective to where tools like Duolingo have their place and where they're the most useful in pretty much giving you gameified drills and tests.

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

#66

Post by jamal-kumar »

bawolff wrote: post #52
least wrote: post #46

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…

People learn languages for a variety of purposes. Some people just want to know enough to be able to ask where the bathroom is and read a menu at a resturant.

This is pretty valid, but sometimes people with limited knowledge will do something seemingly innocuous like ask where the 'toilet' is rather than the more polite reference and totally freak a complete stranger out. I think it's not a bad idea to do your best to try and learn at least a little bit beyond this before dropping into a foreign country, at the least because it makes the whole meeting new friends thing a lot easier.

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

#67

Post by tasogare »

bawolff wrote: post #52
least wrote: post #46

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…

People learn languages for a variety of purposes. Some people just want to know enough to be able to ask where the bathroom is and read a menu at a resturant.

Except you won't be able to do that with Duolingo. I'll go as far as saying that Duolingo is (very) negative for learners: it sells them the idea they are learning a language and progressing when they are in fact not.

A good example of that is a comment I read here on HN from a user defending Duolingo since it allowed him to master hiragana (one script of Japanese) after two years and half. This is normally taking a week, for a slow learner, and the rest is practicing for fluency.

Source: myself; learned and learning multiple languages, at university and by myself. Working in edtech research.

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

#68

Post by gokhan »

devin wrote: post #59
gokhan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Duolingo, you might mix it with other materials for a much better experience. I told our kids' experience learning foreign languages here [1]. My wife used the same technique to learn some French, Duolingo reinforced with audio and visual materials, songs with lyrics, regular learning books, podcasts etc. Duolingo is used daily in our house and we're paying for not seeing ads. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/ite…

This proves the OP's point. Duolingo is trash if you aspire to fluency. It's only useful in fluency as an additive to a robust training program. You don't get fluent by following Duolingo alone.

I disagree. Duolingo is not trash as the op suggests, it's a great fire starter and makes you able to use other materials by handling the intro well. Peppa Pig is a sustainable language learning tool if you did something before to learn the basics and Duolingo handles that part well for free. How is that trash?

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

tasogare wrote: post #67
bawolff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People learn languages for a variety of purposes. Some people just want to know enough to be able to ask where the bathroom is and read a menu at a resturant.

Except you won't be able to do that with Duolingo. I'll go as far as saying that Duolingo is (very) negative for learners: it sells them the idea they are learning a language and progressing when they are in fact not. A good example of that is a comment I read here on HN from a user defending Duolingo since it allowed him to master hiragana (one script of Japanese) after two years and half. This is normally taking a…

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by realityking »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #66
bawolff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People learn languages for a variety of purposes. Some people just want to know enough to be able to ask where the bathroom is and read a menu at a resturant.

This is pretty valid, but sometimes people with limited knowledge will do something seemingly innocuous like ask where the 'toilet' is rather than the more polite reference and totally freak a complete stranger out. I think it's not a bad idea to do your best to try and learn at least a little bit beyond this before dropping into a foreign country, at the least because it makes the whole meeting new friends thing a l…

Cultural context is difficult but it also can’t be learned unless you already have some language skills. It’s not helpful to expect 2nd language speakers never to make mistakes Like the foreign exchange student asking for a rubber instead of an eraser, those mistakes can be great learning points.
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