Duolingo

Duolingo ( ) is an American educational technology company which produces learning apps and provides language certification.

On its main app, users can practice vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and listening skills using spaced repetition. Duolingo offers over 100 total courses across over 40 distinct languages; including a small variety of constructed languages. The company uses a freemium model with over 500 million registered users. Duolingo offers a premium service which eliminates advertising and offers more features.

Duolingo also offers the Duolingo English Test certification program and a literacy app for children called Duolingo ABC, and the company released an elementary level math app called Duolingo Math currently exclusive to iOS.

History

The idea for Duolingo was initiated at the end of 2009 in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn and his post-graduate student Severin Hacker. Von Ahn had sold his second company, reCAPTCHA, to Google and, with Hacker, wanted to work on something related to education. A driving motivation was Von Ahn's upbringing in Guatemala, where he saw how expensive it was for people in his community to learn English. Swiss-born Hacker (co-founder and current CTO of Duolingo) believed that "free education will really change the world" and wanted to supply people an outlet to do so.

The project was originally sponsored by Luis von Ahn's MacArthur fellowship and a National Science Foundation grant. The founders considered creating Duolingo as a nonprofit organization but Von Ahn judged this model as unsustainable. An early revenue stream was as a crowdsourced translation service. This was replaced as a source of revenue by a Duolingo English Test certification program, advertising and subscription.

In October 2011, Duolingo announced that it had raised $3.3 million from a Series A round of funding, led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from author Tim Ferriss and actor Ashton Kutcher's investing firm A-Grade Investments. Duolingo launched a private beta on November 27, 2011, and accumulated a waiting list of more than 300,000 people. The platform launched to the general public on June 19, 2012, at which point the waiting list had grown to around 500,000.

In September 2012, Duolingo announced that it had raised a further $15 million from a Series B funding round led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Union Square Ventures. In November 2012, Duolingo released an iPhone app, followed an Android app in May 2013, at which time Duolingo had a user base of around 3 million. By July 2013, the service had grown to 5 million users and was rated the #1 free education app in the Google Play store.

In February 2014, Duolingo announced that it had raised $20 million from a Series C funding round led by Kleiner Caufield & Byers, with prior investors also participating. At this time, Duolingo had 34 employees and reported having about 25 million registered users and 12.5 million active users, though it later reported a figure closer to 60 million users.

In June 2015, Duolingo announced that it had raised $45 million from a Series D funding round led by Google Capital, bringing its total funding to $83.3 million. The round valued the company at around $470 million, with 100 million registered users globally. In April 2016, it was reported that Duolingo had more than 18 million monthly users.

In July 2017, Duolingo announced that it had raised $25 million in a Series E funding round led by Drive Capital, bringing its total funding to $108.3 million. The round valued Duolingo at $700 million, and the company reported passing 200 million registered users, with 25 million active users. It was reported that Duolingo had 95 employees. Funds from the Series E round would be directed toward creating initiatives such as a related educational flashcard app, TinyCards, and testbeds for initiatives related to reading and listening comprehension. On 1 August 2018, Duolingo surpassed 300 million registered users.

In December 2019, it was announced that Duolingo raised $30 million in a Series F funding round from Alphabet's investment company CapitalG. The round valued Duolingo at $1.5 billion. Duolingo reported 30 million active users at this time. Headcount at the company had increased to 200, and new offices had been opened in Seattle, New York and Beijing. Duolingo planned to use the funds to develop new products and further expand its team in sectors like engineering, business development, design, curriculum and content creators, community outreach, and marketing.

In October 2013, Duolingo launched a crowdsourced language incubator. In March 2021, Duolingo announced that it will be ending its volunteer contributor program and donating money to its volunteer contributors who helped to make Duolingo. The company said that from now on, language courses will be maintained and developed by professional linguists aligning with CEFR standards. On 28 June 2021, Duolingo filed for an initial public offering on NASDAQ under the ticker DUOL. From August 2021 to June 2022, the Duolingo language learning app was removed from some app stores in China.

In the early 2020s, Duolingo was noted for their viral videos on the social media platform TikTok.

In August 2022, Duolingo overhauled its user interface and user experience, changing the structure of the courses from a tree-like design where users could choose from a range of lessons after completing previous ones, to a linear progression. This was widely criticized by users across a variety of social media outlets, including Reddit and Twitter. CEO Luis von Ahn said that they had no plans of undoing the changes, commenting that their decision was made in order to simplify Duolingo for new users, and that maintaining both the old and new versions would be difficult.

In October 2022, Duolingo acquired Detroit-based animation studio Gunner.

Services

Duolingo app

Duolingo language courses are built upon the concept of a "tree". Trees are composed of skills, which focus on a specific aspect of the target language. Trees are usually split into sections, or units, containing a chunk of related skills. Skills can be vocabulary and grammatically based, but other skills relating to color, idioms, relationships, and countries are also featured in courses. Skills are composed of six levels: levels 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and Legendary. Users progress through levels on skills by practicing the lessons a certain number of times, usually 2 to 6, depending on the skill. Users also have the option to "test out" into the next level on a skill. Users also have the option to test out of entire units within a course. When users complete a lesson or test out, they are rewarded experience points. Users are also tested on prior knowledge in future lessons as lessons will call back to previously learned words and expect the user to be able to apply them in new sentences.

Lessons can include matching, translating, speaking, multiple choice. In 2019, the company launched Duolingo Stories. This feature consists of a small story for a particular situation to help improve learners reading and listening skills. Stories are available on selected, most popular courses. For some languages Duolingo offers podcasts for people in intermediate level consisting on stories told usually by native speakers from different parts of the world where the target language is spoken, but with simplified grammar, vocabulary, and with a slower intonation, as well with occasional assistance with providing context or explanations of unusual words in the source language by a narrator.

Duolingo also provides a competitive space. In Leagues, people can compete against their friends or see how they stack up against the rest of the world in randomly selected groupings of up to 30 users. Rankings in leagues are determined by the amount of XP earned in a week. Badges in Duolingo represent achievements that are earned from completing specific objectives or challenges.

Duolingo provides features designed to allow teachers to track students' progress in language acquisition.

In 2022, Duolingo began rolling out a redesigned user interface, featuring a single learning path. This change upset some users.

Languages offered

Duolingo provides language courses in many languages, including constructed languages such as High Valyrian (''A Song of Ice and Fire'') and Klingon (''Star Trek'').

Duolingo offers courses in the following languages:

* Arabic
* Catalan
* Chinese (Cantonese)
* Chinese (Mandarin)
* Czech
* Danish
* Dutch
* English
* Esperanto
* Finnish
* French
* German
* Greek
* Guaraní
* Haitian Creole
* Hawaiian
* Hebrew
* High Valyrian
* Hindi
* Hungarian
* Indonesian
* Irish
* Italian
* Japanese
* Klingon
* Korean
* Latin
* Navajo
* Norwegian
* Polish
* Portuguese
* Romanian
* Russian
* Scottish Gaelic
* Spanish
* Swahili
* Swedish
* Turkish
* Ukrainian
* Vietnamese
* Welsh

* Yiddish
* Zulu

Duolingo ABC

Duolingo ABC is a mobile app for young children for learning letters, their sounds, phonics, and other foundational early reading concepts that was released in 2020.

Duolingo Math

Duolingo Math is a mobile app for learning mathematics in a form similar to the original app. It is currently only available on iOS devices.

Duolingo English Test

Duolingo English Test (DET) is a standardized test of English language proficiency for non-native English language speakers.

Business model

Most language-learning features in Duolingo are free of charge, but it has periodic advertising in both its mobile and web browser applications, which users can remove by paying a subscription fee or invite links. This feature is known as "Super Duolingo" and includes benefits such as unlimited hearts (retries), level skipping, no ads, and progress quizzes.

Duolingo had a revenue of $1 million in 2016, $13 million in 2017, $36 million in 2018, and $250.77 million in 2021. In May 2022, it was reported that 6.8% of Duolingo's monthly active users pay for the ad-free version of the app. Duolingo derived most of its revenue from subscription, advertising, and its Duolingo English Test. In April 2020, Duolingo passed one million paid subscribers. In March 2022, it had 2.9 million paid subscribers.

Infrastructure

Duolingo utilizes the Amazon Web Services (AWS) product suite, including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, nearly 200 virtual instances in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). The website's backend is written in the programming language Python. A component called the Session Generator was rewritten in Scala by 2017. The front end was written in Backbone.js and Mustache but is now primarily in React and Redux. Duolingo uses Amazon Polly for voice synthesis.

Duolingo provides a single-page web application for desktop computer users and also smartphone applications on Android and iOS App Store platforms. 20% of traffic comes from desktop users and 80% from mobile app users.

Reception

Effectiveness

A 2017 study found no significant difference between elementary students learning Spanish through the "gamification" of Duolingo and those learning in classroom environments, with both groups demonstrating a similar increase in achievements and self-efficacy. A 2022 study on adults using Duolingo as their only language learning tool, published in the journal Foreign Language Annals, found that the participants that completed a course had similar proficiency to university students after four semesters of study. The authors therefore suggested that Duolingo could be an effective tool for foreign language learning. Another 2022 study of Malaysian students learning French published by the National University of Malaysia Press found that it facilitated acquisition of vocabulary, with the authors suggesting that it was well suited for beginners in this regard.

Linguist Steven Sacco at San Diego State University attempted to test Duolingo's claim that "34 hours of Duolingo are equivalent to a full university semester of language education" by completing a course in Swedish, and taking a standardized elementary exam, ultimately receiving a failing grade. Sacco suggested that Duolingo is helpful for learning vocabulary only in addition to immersion environments like a classroom.

Awards

In 2013, Apple chose Duolingo as its iPhone App of the Year, the first time this honor had been awarded to an educational application. In 2013, Duolingo ranked on Fast Company's "The World's Most Innovative Companies: Education Honorees" list "for crowdsourcing web translation by turning it into a free language-learning program". Duolingo won Best Education Startup at the 2014 Crunchies, and was the most downloaded app in the Education category in Google Play in 2013 and 2014.

In 2015, Duolingo was announced the 2015 award winner in Play & Learning category by Design to Improve Life. Duolingo won ''Inc.'' magazine's Best Workplaces 2018, ''Entrepreneur'' magazine's Top Company Culture List 2018, and appeared in CNBC's 2018 and 2019 "Disruptor 50" lists and ''TIME'' magazine's 50 Genius Companies. In 2019, Duolingo was named one of Forbes's "Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2019". In July 2020, Duolingo was named by ''PCMag'' as "The Best Free Language Learning App".

In popular culture

Due to the app's sometimes aggressive sense of humor and attempts to ensure learners use it on a daily basis, Duolingo's mascot, a green cartoon owl named Duo, has been a subject of an Internet meme in which the mascot is "evil" and will stalk and threaten users if they do not keep using the app. Acknowledging the meme, Duolingo released a video on 1 April 2019; the video depicts a new feature called "Duolingo Push". In the video, users of "Duolingo Push" will receive reminders to use the app in person by Duo himself, who stares at users and follows them around until they use the app (in the video, Duo is depicted by a person in a large mascot costume). On 1 April 2022, Duolingo released another video in the form of a spoof legal advertisement where the lawyers sue the company for damages due to family members going missing, once again alluding to the meme.

In November 2019, ''Saturday Night Live'' parodied Duolingo in a sketch in which adults learn to communicate with children using a fictitious course on the app entitled "Duolingo for Talking to Children".

See also

* Computer-assisted language learning
* Gamification
* Language education
* Language pedagogy
* List of language self-study programs

Notes

References

External links

*

{{Spaced repetition

Social networking language-learning websites
Proprietary language learning software
Education companies established in 2011
Internet properties established in 2011
American educational websites
2011 establishments in Pennsylvania
Companies based in Pittsburgh
IOS software
Android (operating system) software
2021 initial public offerings
Companies listed on the Nasdaq