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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

#101

Post by ben_w »

least wrote: post #88
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.

That's fair, though I think in the case of wanting to be able to be a tourist in a place with a foreign language, you'd be better suited using phrasebooks and a translation app. Duolingo isn't going to really prepare you to have those kinds of conversations and isn't really a reference book, so being able to look up the few phrases you need to get around isn't practical. It's designed to teach you the language in a s…

> قابلی پلاؤ

I’ve spent most of the last year struggling to learn the Arabic alphabet with Duolingo, yet FWIW my guess for what sort of dish Kabuli Pilau might be was fairly close.

I wonder if anyone outside the UK knows, or can guess, what sort of dish a “spotted dick” or a “toad in the hole” is?

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

#102

Post by least »

soperj wrote: post #81
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…

It's free and it certainly isn't worse for you than watching tv.

If you're watching TV in your target language it can actually be very productive for your language learning and definitely better than Duolingo. Granted, you have to get to a point in your language learning for that to be the case. Perhaps Duolingo can get you over that first hurdle, though there are probably better resources for that.

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

#103

Post by locallost »

The gamification part of the app works well, until you make a break. For me it was when I stopped using it because it basically felt like breaking off an addiction, and I didn't want to go back. So it kept me using it for a while, but ultimately it pushed me away from it. My motivation was a trip to a foreign country, and maybe I would've kept at it after it was over, but as it is, I didn't. From my experience then it seems their goal is less language learning, and more engagement in a typical social network kind of way.

I think the app is technically also really good, and in general pleasant to use. And I think it's not a bad way to learn because you can immerse yourself more than by going to a school where a teacher tries to explain things to you. Doing homework is really important, and Duolingo is basically all homework.

How much did I learn in about a month and a half of 30mins per day? Can't say after two years of not using the language at all, but at the time it was enough to get a sense of something if the menu was not in english etc. And when I was in the countryside (in Italy), I was looking for somebody and the mother of the person said just "ape", and I knew that they're taking care of the bees. And recently I walked next to a new Italian restaurant in town, and at the entrance it said "la nostra cucina ________ (forgot what)" and I was like, oh, I know what that means. So it's not much, but it's not nothing.

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

#104

Post by least »

gambiting wrote: post #97
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've learnt both English and German at school, for pretty much equal amounts of time - about 12 years each. And well, I can speak fluent English, but barely any German, despite usually having at least ~2 hours of lessons a week, plenty of homework, oral exercises..... For me, it has everything to do with actually using the languge in practice. English was and is everywhere - it's much easier to practice when all your…

Immersion is absolutely essential to language learning and English has an abundant amount of resources, as you say.

I understand the difficulties you've had with getting immersed with German, given that my target language while in the military had very little content period, let alone things I was particularly interested in. It might be worthwhile to look for German translations of works you've read/watched in your native language or English, though, if you're still interested in learning it.

> I feel duolingo has the same problem - no matter how much you "learn" with the app, it won't ever stick unless you can practice somewhere in the real world.

Yeah, there's too many methods you need to use to facilitate language learning and while Duolingo can potentially fill a lot of these holes, I don't think it can be your holistic one stop shop.

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

#106

Post by thenoblesunfish »

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 got huge value out of Duolingo as a first step. I live in a German speaking country where it’s entirely possible to speak no German. Duolingo and textbooks got me far enough to enroll in a B1 course and find some speaking partners. The alternative would probably have been paying for a year of A-Level courses, and to be honest I may not have found the time. For absolute beginners, Duolingo has a lot of value.

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

#107

Post by lbriner »

jwmoz wrote: post #49

I can't believe there is so much money in this app, it's basically flashcards. There are so many mistakes in it when I was using it for Indonesian. Something like HelloChinese is such a better app.

I think it is worse than flashcards because you usually use flashcards after a tutor who can give you some context around what you are learning. I found two big problems with Duo:

1) You are not given any input as to why or how e.g. German words are conjugated, not just verbs but adjectives as well, you are just expected to learn them. If you don't know what gender is, as an English speaker, then trying to learn der, das and die won't make any sense whereas if they said, "German uses different words for 'the' so make sure you learn the article with the word to remember which it is", it would be more useful.

2) The insistence on being text-based makes learning things like Japanese especially hard. Many people only want to speak and understand a language so forcing them to also learn an alphabet just makes it even harder, especially since in Japan, you won't see everything in Hirigana anyway! If you want to help with pronunciation then you could use a pinyin to do so.

I also thought it was quite funny that the premium version gave you tutoring, in which case, I might as well attend a college class?

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

#108

Post by least »

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #106
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 got huge value out of Duolingo as a first step. I live in a German speaking country where it’s entirely possible to speak no German. Duolingo and textbooks got me far enough to enroll in a B1 course and find some speaking partners. The alternative would probably have been paying for a year of A-Level courses, and to be honest I may not have found the time. For absolute beginners, Duolingo has a lot of value.

I'm glad that it worked out for you! I can't comment on the quality of every individual course, but if it propels you towards your language learning goals, then it's definitely doing its job.

I do think that for many languages there are more effective ways to learn in a given time period than Duolingo, but if Duolingo helps you stay motivated and keeps you practicing in a way that other methods couldn't, that in itself has a ton of value.

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

#109

Post by lbriner »

jfoster wrote: post #50

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?

The most obvious answer would be that many people who can afford basic internet but cannot afford a college class can learn at least the basics of another language.

I guess they only need to upsell a small percentage to the premium version to get a large ROI.

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

#110

Post by gurkendoktor »

vr46 wrote: post #94
dep_b wrote: post #22

Some of it’s statistics were pretty interesting, like the huge amount of Arabic speaking people that wanted to learn Swedish.

Driven by many refugees that sought asylum in Sweden, I believe. https://blog.duolingo.com/our-commitments-to-helping-refugee...

Duolingo's loading screen regularly highlights that:

"Did you know that most people learning Swedish on Duolingo are in Sweden (refugees)?" (quote from memory)

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