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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

#181

Post by ben_w »

Symbiote wrote: post #169
ben_w wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I presumably made the same guess (spiced rice grains mixed with meat/veg), but British people have the cultural context to know what pilau means. They even a section in Tesco (not just a search, an actual section ). From Denmark, I can suggest brændende kærlighed (burning love, which for Danes is mashed potatoes and bacon), dyrlægens natmad (vet's night snack, rye bread with pâté, beef and meat jelly etc), æbleskiver…

> æbleskiver (apple slices, round pancakes with zero apple)

That reminds me that the regional name for deep fried rectangular potato prisms in Berlin is “Pommes”, which is the French for apple, because everything else was dropped from the bowed French “pommes de terre friets”.

It’s a Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel situation ;)

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

#182

Post by davidzweig »

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…

We are moving 'Language Learning with Netflix' in this direction. There's some stuff to see already: https://www.languagereactor.com/ (my email is in my profile, I'd be happy to hear from you :)

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

#183

Post by AussieWog93 »

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 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 talking about", though.

I cannot think of a single more effective method than Duolingo to get over this first hurdle.

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

#184

Post by davidzweig »

least wrote: post #104
gambiting wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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).

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

#185

Post by least »

pedroaraujo wrote: post #171
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…

A 16 month course of 6 to 7 hours per day with a lot of exercise and you didn't learn the language at all? I don't think Duolingo is a good solution but in your case you had all the opportunity to become fully fluent with that kind of regime, it starts to be your fault.

Obviously I knew my language well enough to perform a job which required some amount of proficiency in it. I'd imagine that some people might describe my level of proficiency as fluent. If you were to compare it against university, it'd be around the level of a four year degree, but undoubtedly worse than someone with a master's degree in the language.

I think this is more a case of your definition of being "fully fluent" is vastly different from mine.

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

#186

Post by kirel33 »

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…

Duolingo is a great example of gamification done well, I'd argue that's the whole selling point of it!

I'll also say it was useful for me to learn basic German for a trip to Germany, 6 months of Duolingo + a few extra (beginner) books do wonders

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

#187

Post by lm28469 »

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…

> They also make it a fun activity and incentivize engagement with humor and gamification.

That's the part I hated the most and the main reason I stopped using it. I wasted more time in front of "achievement" animations and shiny rewards than on actually learning the language

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

#188

Post by dstick »

jtsiskin wrote: post #28
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?

growth rate. low customer acquisition cost. the expenses weren't from marketing, which is good. My biggest concern would be how much of the growth was from people having free time at home due to covid. And if deep learning will make language learning less relevant in the future. You may be less likely to learn a new language if audio can be translated in real time almost perfectly

Babelfish! Sign me up

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

#189

Post by least »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #138
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…

> Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening Listening is much harder for me. I find it easy to mimic/parrot sounds, but not distinguish them when listening.

Speaking in this case isn't simply speaking words out loud intelligibly, but the entire process of thinking and communicating ideas in a foreign language. There is almost always a gap in your knowledge with regards to what you can understand being said and what you can actually say which is why I say it is harder, even if you can say everything that you can say fluently.

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

#190

Post by least »

csa wrote: post #153
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you talk about the resources you used to learn in the classroom? I learned German using the Foreign Service Institute handbook and I thought it was great introduction to the language. I'd love to know what's in use nowadays.

I’m pretty sure this person was learning Pashto or Dari. The materials were mostly (all?) developed in-house. If they were learning Dari, they would have been better off just using externally-produced Farsi textbooks since they have a more robust history of development. The specific recommended materials for an introduction to a language depend on what your goals are for learning the language.

Yeah, the Dari course was notoriously bad quality and rife with controversy with some of the highest failure rates in the entire Presidio at the time. Not sure if anything's changed at this point?
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