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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

#201

Post by matheusmoreira »

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 not perfect but I found that it was the easiest way to just get started. Japanese is intimidating but Duolingo got me started. Immersion and other material such as detailed books on the subject are still absolutely necessary but without Duolingo I'd still be planning to learn japanese instead of doing it.

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

#202

Post by sudhirj »

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?

"lost $25M" doesn't necessarily mean they set it on fire. If the wording is changed to "invested all their revenues and a further $25M of raised or borrowed capital", wouldn't that make more sense?

The way these arguments are usually phrased doesn't do the company justice. Amazon "lost" money for decades because they were building giant and ambitious infrastructure, not setting burning in on executive parties.

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

#203

Post by AussieWog93 »

brushfoot wrote: post #198
AussieWog93 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 don't think anyone is seriously under the delusion that Duolingo alone will make you fluent in a language. It is an amazingly powerful tool to bootstrap you from "I cannot understand a single word of this language" to "I can pick up a newspaper and get a vague idea of what they're talkin…

The old FSI language courses are very effective. And free and in the public domain. FSI combines hundreds of pages of print materials with hundreds of verbal audio drills. I used it to supplement a French course in college and my professor asked me how I advanced so quickly. The course materials were doing very little for the rest of the class because they didn't force natural language thinking. FSI grammar drills ma…

I've not heard of FSI before. Thanks for the recommend.

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

#204

Post by FabHK »

rtpg wrote: post #155
dubeye wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it fun to learn language on Duolingo as a kind of game. But unless I have a need to regularly use the learning, I know for sure it won't stick. And I'm afraid that last 0.1% of aquisition is pretty much impossible to obtain deliberately unless you abandon your native language. Even your English, whilst technicaly good, has a couple of flags.

There are plenty of people effectively native in multiple languages. It’s not guaranteed (I have that missing part for one language despite having done all of High School and college in it), but i know people who speak perfectly in two languages (usually English+their parents native tongue) I have found that English is a bit weird in that you need obsessively high absorption of like, culture, to execute well, so it’s…

> I have found that English is a bit weird in that you need obsessively high absorption of like, culture, to execute well

I'd think that English is not unique there.

To speak Chinese at the level of an educated native, I'd say you have learn not only the language, but also the country's history, and have some familiarity with canonical Chinese texts such as the "Four Books and Five Classics" (Confucius, Mencius, etc.), "The Dream of the Red Chamber", etc., to understand idioms such as "四面楚歌" (four sides of Chu song = facing insurmountable difficulty, defeat [1]).

As another example, Hong Kong has its own lingo (a variety of Cantonese) that evolves so rapidly that HK people that have been abroad a few years tell me that they note that the language has evolved and shifted when they come back.

I'm fairly certain that it is easy to spot non-native speakers in many languages, maybe even easier than in English.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/四面楚歌

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

#205

Post by saladuh »

If anyone's planning on learning Japanese with Duolingo: don't. Did that for a few weeks, basically learnt nothing. I soon found out from experienced learners that it was terrible [0]. I then discovered the AJATT/MIA[1] methods of learning Japanese, which prioritize immersion/sentence mining of the target language and learning vocab/kanji and sentence structure through Anki decks (you can use any SRS system but Anki is by far the best with a rich ecosystem of Japanese integrations such as the Yomichan dictionary).

I used the foss app Kakugo (available on Fdroid, not sure about the play store) to learn the hiragana and katakana writing scripts in 3 or 4 days, and have now moved on to reading Tae Kim's Grammar Guide[2] for learning grammar and using Refold JP1K[3][4] style anki decks to learn my first 1000 kanji.

However this method is more of a 'grind', you need to set aside at least 2 hours a day so that you can read Tae's textbook, learn new vocab and do your reviews through Anki. In your free time, once you have a decent amount of grammar understanding and vocab, you need to be immersing in Japanese, so anime, J-dramas, etc. (Jap music isn't very helpful here).

[0] Review of Duolingo Japanese course from a 2+ year user of Anki/immersion based learning: https://youtu.be/jf-SbSfiXn4 [1] The AJATT method has been around for a long time, it means All Japanese All The Time. It basically promoted SRS and immersion based learning. MIA is basically the same thing, mass immersion, started mainly by MattVsJapan. However I use the guides and tools created by AJATT-Tools, whos contributors focus on tools for Linux, such as MPV scripts for sentence mining (creating Anki cards with unknown vocabulary semi automatically while watching subtitled content, with audio and visual cues). Their guide builds on top of MIA and AJATT style methods: https://github.com/ajatt-tools [2] The defacto grammar guide for Japanese that isn't afraid to teach you Kanji from the start: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar [3] Explanation of the JP1K style Anki deck: https://youtu.be/53qKsYxVhoM [4] Deck system is created by https://refold.la, however I use AJATT-Tools's version of the deck because it includes example sentences (and Kanji have different meanings in context).

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

#206

Post by onemiketwelve »

jpgvm wrote: post #146
captn3m0 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/PLTR/Probability-Of-B... says Current Palantir Technologies Probability Of Bankruptcy = 24%

That analysis seems to be full of shit. When plugging in companies with much better financials than PLTR I end up with higher % of bankruptcy.

Then short it for free money

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

#207

Post by esrh »

saladuh wrote: post #205

If anyone's planning on learning Japanese with Duolingo: don't. Did that for a few weeks, basically learnt nothing. I soon found out from experienced learners that it was terrible [0]. I then discovered the AJATT/MIA[1] methods of learning Japanese, which prioritize immersion/sentence mining of the target language and learning vocab/kanji and sentence structure through Anki decks (you can use any SRS system but Anki…

I did this for just about a year, and i can confirm this works if you put in the time. I'm at around 3000 recognizable kanji and can watch/read pretty much anything that's not particularly hard.

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

davidzweig wrote: post #184
least wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

We're expanding LLN into this: https://www.languagereactor.com/ "Language Reactor ... helps you to discover, understand, and learn from native materials." It's still rough. TurtleTV is kind of useful already. (P.S. looking for a good mobile dev in Europe).

[deleted]

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

#209

Post by AussieWog93 »

saiya-jin wrote: post #197
AussieWog93 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 don't think anyone is seriously under the delusion that Duolingo alone will make you fluent in a language. It is an amazingly powerful tool to bootstrap you from "I cannot understand a single word of this language" to "I can pick up a newspaper and get a vague idea of what they're talkin…

There are definitely more effective methods, just mostly not free and more time demanding. I have a mission to get B1 French, tried Duolingo with some basic level for cca 6 months in past year. You get into the bubble that you think you are progressing but reality is, its a very narrow and not-so-useful progress if whole language knowledge is your goal - mostly passive skills and certain type of language usage that g…

>tried Duolingo with some basic level for cca 6 months in past year

To be honest with you, I think you spent too much time on Duolingo. It's definitely not a suitable tool for learning new things after the first 8-12 weeks (assuming you put in around 30-60 minutes a day).

To be fair, though, in that short initial period you can pretty easily learn close to 1000 common words, as well as basic sentence structure in your target langauge.

This is immensely useful if you want to start communicating with others online or reading texts in your target language; you're looking up the few words you don't know rather than staring at a wall of gibberish.

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

#210

Post by bagacrap »

meepmorp wrote: post #173
gen220 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The grammatical structure of modern English is closer to Romance languages than Germanic languages. You can convert many English sentences into a sensible (if not idiomatic) Spanish sentence by translating one word at a time. German has not so forgiving been :)

> The grammatical structure of modern English is closer to Romance languages than Germanic languages. I'm pretty sure that's not true.

from Wikipedia: "Of the Germanic family, English is exceptional in having predominantly SVO order instead of V2, although there are vestiges of the V2 phenomenon."

Romance languages like French and Spanish use SVO so I think it's correct to say English is like them.

An example given by wiki of German sentence structure translated directly to English:

"Before school played the children in the park soccer."

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