Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 352 posts

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

#281

Post by Fernicia »

high_byte wrote: post #226
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…

the problem isn't that it's hard to do. the problem is that their business model relies on their app not achieving it's portrayed purpose - learning. success means losing your customers. that's why I don't use it anymore and I'm baffled by how good they are at being bad. or rather - staying on the exact thin border between "not good enough" and "not bad enough".

Such a silly way to think about it. You could frame every service as having this conflict. Does Google want to obfuscate results so I'll spend longer looking for results?

Duolingo is extremely popular because people get use out of it and like it. You've taken a tiny perverse incentive and jumped to the conclusion that it trumps all the other more important incentives.

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

#282

Post by Jabbles »

Imagine the number and quality of textbooks you could commission from world experts in any and all languages for $300M, a single year at 20:1 price-to-earnings.

Is the app obviously better? More engaging, to some, perhaps. More profitable? I guess that remains to be seen.

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

#283

Post by lostcolony »

bagacrap wrote: post #210
meepmorp wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

The wording you quote, "Of the Germanic family, English is exceptional", implies English is a Germanic language. One that borrows heavily from Latin, but still, a Germanic language.

Also from wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English "English is a Germanic language, with a grammar and a core vocabulary inherited from Proto-Germanic. However, a significant portion of the English vocabulary comes from Romance and Latinate sources."

English borrows from both quite heavily (for historical reasons listed there), to where I don't know that classifying it makes a lot of sense, but having dabbled with both, just from a language learning perspective, I'd say German definitely feels closer. Some simple counterexamples -

"What is that?" - "Was ist das?" vs "Que es eso". Same grammatic structure, but obviously very similiar words between German and English. Not so much Spanish. The Latin is "quid est".

"I see him" - "Ich sehe ihn" vs "Lo veo". English and German are very similar in both grammar and word; Spanish is very different from both, putting the direct object before the verb as it does, and not requiring the subject (yo). The Latin is "i videre eum".

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

#284

Post by [deleted] »

bagacrap wrote: post #210
meepmorp wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

[deleted]

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

#285

Post by anyfactor »

Jabbles wrote: post #282

Imagine the number and quality of textbooks you could commission from world experts in any and all languages for $300M, a single year at 20:1 price-to-earnings. Is the app obviously better? More engaging, to some, perhaps. More profitable? I guess that remains to be seen.

They have a name recognition and that's about it. I really wonder what kind of people actually buy IPOs. Except PLTR I can't name one stock that went public in the last 2 years that didn't dip below their IPO.

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

#286

Post by splonk »

jfengel wrote: post #213
saiya-jin wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Duolingo isn't really intended to get you to B1. And even if it were, it would take more than six months to get there. A commonly cited statistic is that it takes 360 hours in a classroom to reach B1. Duolingo claims to proceed faster than classroom hours, but there's enough fuzz in that number to suppose that it's closer to 1:1. You just can't realistically do 360 hours of Duolingo in six months. Duolingo could at b…

They started adding B1 level content a couple years ago, although I agree with the overall point that it's probably not going to get you there on its own.

https://blog.duolingo.com/how-are-duolingo-courses-evolving/

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

#287

Post by FalconSensei »

dorchadas wrote: post #253
wildfire wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

≥ you never practice reading for comprehension This has existed for at least two years: https://www.duolingo.com/stories Yes, it does not cover every language but the intent is to address that ( perceived ) complaint. I disagree that an actual coursebook is more helpful. I used Duo for 6 months prior to moving to a Germany. It gave me an incredible confidence boost to be able to at least understand what was going on…

> This has existed for at least two years: https://www.duolingo.com/stories I'm aware of stories, but given that it's only available in a small minority of languages, I'd say it's fair to say DL doesn't offer it when the majority of their languages don't (and likely won't ever) have stories.

they used to have you read wiki articles like, 6 years ago? I feel that over the years, Duolingo started focusing way more on the game aspect than learning.

The spaced repetition is also mostly gone, only somewhat available on desktop.

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

#288

Post by asoneth »

JCharante wrote: post #233
yosito wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone who has used Duolingo and spaced repetition apps for ~10m/day for the last four or five years, is there something specific you recommend transitioning to?

I've started with some Netflix and podcasts, but they're a little more awkward in 10m chunks.

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

#289

Post by kaiwen1 »

For me Duolingo is woefully ineffective. A far better method is Pimsleur plus Anki. Ankify the Pimsleur audio, make your own Anki cards with most of your vocabulary in cloze phrases. Ankify the audio on as many of those cloze phrases as you can using native speakers. Work at it daily. Use a textbook to learn the grammar. This is a system that works. It’s the fastest way I know of to begin understanding languages intuitively. No need for mental translation. No difference in how your mind responds to “What do you want to eat?” and “你要吃什么?”

Of course, Duolingo’s valuation isn’t connected to success in learning language. It’s connected to success in convincing people that they can and should learn a language.

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

#290

Post by mcluck »

JCharante wrote: post #231
thenoblesunfish wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem with just textbooks is you don't get to hear or speak the language at all. There's also very little structure so you're expecting a novice to know how to effectively test themselves.
Post reply on HN