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Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M

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51–60 of 189 posts

Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M

#51
Only complaint is they appear to have no priority in supporting languages of the East, where the majority of the world lives. I guess their main demo, at least at one point, was Western students, who aren't typically taught those languages in school.

In the least, teaching Mandarin should be a higher priority than half the languages they support.

Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M

#52

Great to see them doing so well. Personally, I'd like to see language learning apps explore the parts of language learning that Duolingo isn't good at. Also a high-quality, open source version of Duo would be awesome for super minority, low infrastructure, and/or conlang languages.

Well, they are coming out with Klingon sometime in the next year. Granted, it's a small language, but it seems they are amenable to conlangs. Maybe, they will also have an ability to add your own conlang, so that you and friends can communicate and expand the lang.

Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M

#53
post #46
post #42

In order to pull in $50m revenue per year, Duolingo are going to need to sell 2,500,000 certifications. Is that doable?

$50 million seems like an arbitrary amount of revenue to expect DuoLingo to pull in. How do you come up with that number?

I think it came from dividing the $470M valuation with 10 and rounding up.

Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M

#54

Only complaint is they appear to have no priority in supporting languages of the East, where the majority of the world lives. I guess their main demo, at least at one point, was Western students, who aren't typically taught those languages in school. In the least, teaching Mandarin should be a higher priority than half the languages they support.

True, but the issue is the keyboard. Notice they don't have really any Cyrillic languages either. Trying to get people used to using many ALT and key combos is a tough starting point for a lot of gamified learners. Japanese has been on the block since Duolingo began, but again, the keyboard is the main hurdle.

Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M

#55
post #43
post #3

Anybody else feel a little nervous when a free language tool is valued in the hundreds of millions?

Duolingo is started by Luis von Ahn who invented reCAPTCHA. He pioneered the field of human computation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx082gDwGcM . He can monetize this in a similar way. Crowd sourced translation service where the more advanced language learners translate books or something. It will be higher quality than google translate for sure.

The article explicitly states that Duolingo moved away from this model though:

"As a company spokesperson told me, the company actually tabled its ambitions around translations about a year and a half ago and hasn’t scaled the businesses or accepted new clients"

Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M

#57

Only complaint is they appear to have no priority in supporting languages of the East, where the majority of the world lives. I guess their main demo, at least at one point, was Western students, who aren't typically taught those languages in school. In the least, teaching Mandarin should be a higher priority than half the languages they support.

I've been learning Mandarin, and after searching for something like Duolingo found Chinese Skill [一]. It's not as good as Duolingo, but does include a way to teach characters. It would be great if it could have a drawing interface like Pleco [二] which can reliably recognise most characters I draw, with my terrible handwriting.

They do teach English to speakers of Chinese, Mandarin and Hindi.

[一] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chineseski...

[二] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pleco.chin...

Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M

#58

Only complaint is they appear to have no priority in supporting languages of the East, where the majority of the world lives. I guess their main demo, at least at one point, was Western students, who aren't typically taught those languages in school. In the least, teaching Mandarin should be a higher priority than half the languages they support.

IIRC, they've said that they're targeting people learning english more than english speakers learning other languages. They have english courses in lots of languages.

Re: Duolingo Raises $45M, Now Valued at $470M

#60
post #56

Still waiting for their Russian course!

Any word on getting over the hurdle of using another alphabet on english keyboards?

That should be easy on mobile devices. At least one of ä, á, à, â, æ, å is necessary for most of the supported languages.
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