My biggest issue with apps like Duolingo is that they pretend learning a language is like a game. Effortless and easy.
In reality you need to have quite some motivation to learn every day for a few hours. You need to learn words and grammar by writing them down. Lots of times. You need to talk with people at least a few times per week. You need to repeat a lot. It's very hard work. And even then it takes most regular people about 2 to 4 years to get yourself to a level like my English (not fluent, but enough)
Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO
111–120 of 352 posts
Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO
#112I 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…
The immersion is definitely the most valuable. Very few language apps can help you learn idioms or slang, even if they are in common usage.
Even if you were learning English, you are more likely to learn "that is very good" rather than "that is amazing" or "sweet!".
I think we also underestimate how much immersion forces us into thinking in the other language when we are surrounded by it, even passively. If you use English all the time and learn German for 2 hours per day, it's not even close to what it would be like living in Germany, even if you were speaking English there.
Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO
#113I 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…
Every foreign language that I've learned (4 in total) I felt it's necessary to get basic vocabulary and grammar and then just try communicating it in. Obviously living with people surrounded by the language helps, I don't even know if 'remote' is possible. For that purpose duolingo is pretty good.
Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've done duolingo for 300+ days and can tell you that Japanese and Arabic are uniquely bad/hard to teach
No, Japanese phonology and therefore pronunciation (what the grand parent post is complaining about) is one of the easiest out there. There are very few consonants, only 5 vowels, not tone and accent is irrelevant. I don't understand how pronunciation could be remotely a problem with Japanese. There are also some other easy things like grammar (very few rules, that are quite consistent and composable) and some basic…
> There are very few consonants, only 5 vowels, not tone and accent is irrelevant.
Except that l/r is pronounced differently than most English speakers, the vowels aren't always pronounced yet take up time ("Nan desu ka" is almost always pronounced like "Nan dess ka", for example), and syllable accent is tone rather than volume for emphasis.
Other than that, it's completely easy.
Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO
#115Reminder that Duolingo’s IPO is very accessible to the public via Robinhood. I am very surprised to see the high valuation for them but it may also be because an uneducated public is trying to get in on something they feel is attractive only because they recognize the name. They may be in for a shock if the stock plummets soon after, especially since there are disincentives for flipping the stock if you bought into t…
> but it may also be because an uneducated public is trying to get in on something they feel is attractive only because they recognize the name.
That sounds like a form of FOMO and they always think of only one way of trading this stock and that is buying it and holding it. Especially at these prices on the day of IPO.
There are larger investors and VCs that have participated in funding rounds that have more than 10x'ed their fundraising round before the IPO. Somebody has got to sell and take profit at some point.
I won't be surprised to see a small push higher then followed by some selling from the larger investors to contribute to the selling pressure of this stock.
It's the larger early investors and VCs that have the advantage of manipulating this stock on day 1 of IPO day, not a group of retail traders and they will end up holding the bag at a high price.
Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO
#116I 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 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.
> Language learning is hard and a multifaceted thing that no single application is going to adequately prepare you for.
Why do you sound disillusioned with Duolingo? It's just an app. I think the hacker news community undervalues it for no reason
Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO
#117I 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…
> 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).
In my opinion it's the other way around.
Reading is easiest in any alphabetic language. Both intrinsically and to teach.
Reading has no time limit so you can make your way through text at whatever pace you want.
Reading instruction is strongly amenable to automation. You can just sit and do exercises on an SRS until the cows come home and you will eventually learn to read. Not on duolingo through.
Speaking is the next easiest, you can't go at any speed but you can at least go slowly. Plus you only have to deal with one accent when speaking, your own.
Most languages have more consistent spelling than English, so if you know how to read an IPA phonology chart (and if you are embarking on the multi-year journey of learning a language then spending a time to learn IPA is a no-brainer) then you can probably figure out how to speak in a way that is understood.
Listening is the hardest because you don't control either the content, the pace, nor the accent. If someone is throwing words out like a gattling gun or in a non-standard dialect then tough luck. The learning curve for listening is a cliff in most circumstances.
Neither speaking nor listening are amenable to automation. TTS is no substitute for native speakers, and automatic speech recognition is a joke. So the only way to pick up these skills is with real native speakers which is expensive and slow.
Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO
#118Quick 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
This is the most retarded silicon valley vc tech bubble comment I have ever. There are 11million companies in the US, many will fail making money let alone being 'strong' companies that drop $10 mil a year.
If the numbers are so great and they have so much money at hand why are the people who run the business selling some of their share? Possibly due to high market valuations of all kinds and a very attractive price to dump a well established business that you have milked the most out of to date?
Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO
#119Honestly 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.
Same here. This valuation makes no sense to me. I’ve spent a LOT of time optimizing ways in which I learn languages, and duolingo doesn’t do much.
Here’s what I can recommend:
- follow as many instagram account as possible to teach you the language. There’s so many “teaching chinese” instagram account for example. Every day when I check instagram I learn a few chinese words.
- check browser plugins to display subs in different languages simultaneously on netflix
- use memrise or anki or other app or real world flash cards. There’s a reason people always go back to the flashcards.
It’s all about input. You need to learn a lot of vocab, fast. Don’t even focus on grammar at first, and even less on output. Output will come naturally after a while.
Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Every company at this stage loses money The company is ten years old. I would have to imagine almost zero companies lose money ten years in because they literally do not exist anymore.
There’s a ton of companies which exists solely to burn other peoples cash. I think VC funding makes IPOs a bit more confusing. It makes sense to IPO, if you need to money to boost your business. Duolingo needs money to update their app, so they can use the IPO to fund it. The problem is that if you’re VC funded it now looks like the VCs have lost faith in the company. They paid for the bill for ten years and now they…
> That makes an IPO look like an exit strategy.
Every IPO is an exit strategy or a refusal to run a balanced budget. If you have cash flow you can invest for free and compound the growth internally. If you have responsible financial management you can tap the bond markets for basically free.
VC's want a 10 bagger - they have had it and more - is Duolingo going to be valued at $65B in a couple of years? I doubt it.