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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

#231

Post by JCharante »

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.

The alternative could be a $40 textbook and an open source flashcard / srs program.

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

#232

Post by dorchadas »

volta83 wrote: post #199
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…

When learning a new language, one uses a lot of tools. Duolingo is just another tool at your disposal. Nobody is claiming that any single tool - much less Duolingo - will make you proficient in a language. If Dolingo is claiming this, that would be false advertisement / scamming.

> Nobody is claiming that any single tool - much less Duolingo - will make you proficient in a language.

Lots seem to have that belief, though. As I said in another comment, it's something you can see quite often in various language learning forums in Reddit (/r/duolingo) and Facebook, as well as on the DL forums themselves.

> If Dolingo is claiming this, that would be false advertisement / scamming.

They might not explicitly claim it, but they certainly imply it in my opinion.

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

#233

Post by JCharante »

yosito wrote: post #165
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…

You're not going to become a triathlete thanks to training wheels either, but if you don't know how to ride a bike, the training wheels give you a good start. I've learned two languages using Duo Lingo as a supporting tool early in the process. I don't think I would have been able to have conversations so early without it. And for me, having conversations (even poorly) in my target language is the single most importa…

but you see people still using Duolingo after 6 months or 1 year. If you saw someone still using training wheels after 1 year, you would tell them to stop because it's handicapping them. Duolingo is the same, it's a terrible investment of time after 1 month.

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

#234

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#235

Post by missedthecue »

selectodude wrote: post #26
paxys wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

The IRS tells small business owners that it's a hobby if they aren't profitable by year three.

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

#236

Post by dorchadas »

thesausageking wrote: post #230
ngokevin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying a language learning startup and surveyed a lot of people. The response is universal that everyone's tried Duolingo, and it didn't work for them in actually learning, despite monster streaks. I think it's masterful as a dopamine machine and employing habit building tactics. Perhaps it's a good icebreaker for people in language learning, as long as people are resourceful enough to look beyond Duolingo.

Duolingo has worked great for me. I had learned Spanish a decade ago and completely forgotten it. In a few months of consistent practice, I learned enough to get around. And after 6-9 months, I could have basic conversations. I was never good at learning languages and Duolingo has been the best system for me. I like the paced repetition it does. Also, that it has you practice reading, writing, saying, and listening.

> I had learned Spanish a decade ago and completely forgotten it.

I would argue this is why it worked well for you. You already knew the language and just needed to revise, which is something I would argue DL does do good at, especially the web version.

> Also, that it has you practice reading, writing, saying, and listening.

The thing is, in most courses (the home-developed ones with stories might be exceptions), you don't practice those skills. You learn to translate stuff from the target language to English; that's not reading. You don't learn to read texts and interpret them in the language. The writing is awful as well, since it's just reverse translation, not actually responding to a prompt or natural conversation.

The speaking leaves a lot to be desired, unless it's massively improved since I last tried it. I once said "blah" on the Spanish course and it was accepted as correct; I've also had it accept background noise before too. And the same with listening -- it's a TTS, you don't actually practice listening to native speakers and understanding what's being said with comprehension questions, etc.

It doesn't really teach the four skills as they would be applied in the real world at all. Not to mention that default on the app has you click words in the proper order instead of actually recalling them. That's another huge negative.

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

#237

Post by dorchadas »

kouteiheika wrote: post #83
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.

> Seems like all the current research is that "immersion" in the target language is critical This, a hundred times this. Immersion is not only effective in getting you used to the language, but also really helps you solidify what you've learned, and is extremely motivating. Virtually all of the people that I know in the Japanese learning community who learned the language really fast heavily immersed in a lot of cont…

If you could do step one that wasn't based entirely on anime I'd love it. That's always been my biggest hurdle with the Japanese learning community -- almost all recommendations seem to be anime, and I'm just not that interested.

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

#238

Post by JCharante »

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 like HelloChinese (spent $100 on it and then forgot to unsub which cost another $100) but stopped using it after realizing that because they only go to HSK 4, I might as well stick to Anki so I can go HSK 6 & beyond. (I don't want to use 2 apps for my srs reviews everyday).

Also if you want to use SRS for any words you learn outside the app, you'll need to use another app anyways.

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

#239

Post by shapefrog »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #219
shapefrog wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No shock at all this is how the game works! You slap out a float, ideally small enough so that the supply and demand inbalance pushes the price up. So 3.7mil shares were issued at $102, and opened at $140, so that is a 'cost' to the company of $140 million + underwriting fees etc (probably another $30mil + the 700k shares they have options on at issue price). Additionally insiders dumped out 1.4mil shares at the issu…

What I meant is that regardless of the financial situation of the company or whether shareholders still believe in it, don't you think insiders would be selling at IPO because it is probably the first major liquidity event ever? Even if you completely believe in the future of the company, locking in returns and getting some liquidity (Even if the stock didn't pop heaps) would be nice for people who have been illiquid…

And this is why the IPO market is broken. VC's are riding startups through multiple rounds of funding for way longer than before then dumping the late stage mature companies onto the public markets.

Those that locked in their returns, recieved the proceeds of thier 1.4million shares of $142.8 million into their accounts just before the bell rang for the market open. The bell rang everyone cheered and the shares they just sold are worth $196 million. Regular joe with a robin hood account makes the money and the CEO/VC loses money ... who knows more about the company though?

> Even if you completely believe in the future of the company, locking in returns and getting some liquidity

Worth it if you get $10 a share instead of $100? All about value. Why not dump some out in the previous 8 funding rounds? The reason is not many VCs would be in there cashing out the guys from the previous rounds, or would only do so at a heavy discount or to gain control over the company.

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

#240

Post by dorchadas »

daxaxelrod wrote: post #9
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.

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…

If it took you 400 days to pass the HSK level 1, I would argue that you're absolutely doing something wrong or extremely inefficient.
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