Duolingo

Duolingo is a free language-learning and crowdsourced text translation platform. The service is designed so that, as users progress through the lessons, they simultaneously help to translate websites and other documents. , Duolingo offers Latin American Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Irish, Danish, Italian, Turkish, Norwegian, Ukrainian and Esperanto courses for English speakers, as well as American English for Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Russian, and Turkish speakers. It is available on the Web, iOS, and Android platforms.

Duolingo started its private beta on November 30, 2011 and accumulated a waiting list of more than 300,000 users. Duolingo launched for the general public on 19 June 2012 and as of December 2013 has 16 million users. In 2013, Apple chose Duolingo as its iPhone App of the Year, the first time this honor was awarded to an educational application.

Education model

Duolingo offers extensive written lessons and dictation, with less practice speaking. It has a gamified skill tree that users can progress through, and a vocabulary section where learned words can be practiced. Users gain "skill points" as they learn a language, such as when they complete a lesson. Skills are considered "learned" when users complete all the lessons associated with the skill. Up to 13 points are awarded per lesson, with three points deductible for mistakes. Users start with four "lives" on early lessons, and three on later lessons, a "life" being lost with each mistake. A user must retry the lesson if they make a mistake after all lives have been lost. Duolingo also includes a timed practice feature, where users are given 30 seconds and twenty questions and awarded a skill point and seven or ten additional seconds for each correct answer. The whole course teaches more than 2,000 words.

Duolingo uses a heavily data-driven approach to education. At each step along the way, the system measures which questions the users struggle with, and what sorts of mistakes they make. It then aggregates that data and learns from the patterns it sees.

The efficacy of Duolingo's data-driven approach has been reviewed by an external study commissioned by the company. Conducted by professors at City University of New York and the University of South Carolina, the study estimated that 34 hours on Duolingo may yield reading and writing ability of a first-year college semester, which takes in the order of 130+ hours. The research did not measure speaking ability. It found that a majority of students dropped out after less than 2 hours of study. The same study found that Rosetta Stone users took between 55 and 60 hours to learn a similar amount.

Business model

Duolingo does not charge students to learn a language. Instead, it employs a crowd sourced business model, where members of the public are invited to translate content and vote on translations. The content comes from organizations that pay Duolingo to translate it. Documents can be added to Duolingo for translation with an upload account which must be applied for. On 14 October 2013, Duolingo announced it had entered into agreements with CNN and BuzzFeed to translate articles for the companies' international sites.

The Language Incubator

Instead of slowly adding additional languages, CEO Luis von Ahn announced on 29 May 2013 that they would create tools necessary for the community to build new language courses, with the hope to introduce more languages and "empower other experts and people passionate about a specific language to lead the way". The result was The Language Incubator, which was released on 9 October 2013. In addition to helping the community create courses for widely-spoken languages, the Duolingo Incubator also aims to help preserve some of the less popular languages such as Latin, Mayan, and Basque. The first course entirely created by the Duolingo community through the Incubator was learning English from Russian, which launched in beta on December 19, 2013.

History

The project was started in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn (creator of reCAPTCHA) and his graduate student Severin Hacker, and then developed also with Antonio Navas, Vicki Cheung, Marcel Uekermann, Brendan Meeder, Hector Villafuerte, and Jose Fuentes. The project was originally sponsored by Luis von Ahn's MacArthur fellowship and a National Science Foundation grant and is mainly written in the programming language Python. Additional funding was later received in the form of an investment from Union Square Ventures and actor Ashton Kutcher's firm A-Grade Investments.

Duolingo has 27 staff members and operates from an office in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Shadyside near Carnegie Mellon's campus.

On 13 November 2012, Duolingo released their iOS app through the iTunes App Store. The app can be downloaded for free and is compatible with most iPhone, iPod, and iPad devices. On 29 May 2013, Duolingo released their Android app, which was downloaded over a million times in the first three weeks and quickly became the #1 education app in the Google Play store.

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