Duolingo S-1 IPO | Hacker News Reader

Duolingo S-1 IPO

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256 pointsmarc__1206 comments

I really like Duolingo. It's not my favorite way of learning a language§, but they do a good job of pounding vocabulary into your head over and over. I will never forget that jeruk is "orange" in Indonesian.

However, taken from "Risk Factors" on this S-1:

> •users feel that their experience is diminished as a result of the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, format, size and quality of ads that we display;

Duolingo has a big problem with both their ads and how they promote their Plus plan. (I hope to never see an owl flying through space again)

Primarily, the quality of the ads I see are those stupid fish games or the "pull this pin to drop lava on the knight" that you see advertised on Facebook. I'm sure they're making money off of views, especially since you can't proceed in your lesson until you watch the video, but it cheapens the brand name of Duolingo (at least for me).

If they had ads for anything language, travel, or even food related, it would feel more on par with their branding. But so many other dollar grab apps do the same thing [regarding those kinds of video ads] that it feels like I'm just looking at another cheap app.

Secondly, how they promote their Plus plan. You are limited in how long you can access their platform by how many hearts you have. Miss enough questions, your hearts run out. Run out of hearts, you're restricted from proceeding further in your studies. You must buy hearts to stay on their platform. This feels counter intuitive, as you are now kicking users off of your platform and lose the ability to sway them towards other things you have to offer.

I have found that between carrot and stick approaches, it is usually better to use a carrot where you can.

§ - For my style of learning, I've found Pimsleur to be one of the better approaches. Breaking sentences into phrases, phrases into words, and down words into syllables really helps me grasp the langauge more, especially with the context that goes around in the "story".

Duolingos website actually has different features (and less/no ads for the mobile version of the website). On iPhone you can export the website itself to your home screen and it’s essentially an ad free version of the app with better features. I found it to be way more enjoyable this way

Reduces tracking vectors too.

Thanks for the tip! Ads in Duolingo have become so obnoxious I stopped using it (I have better language apps that I pay for so the plus plan doesn’t make sense for me). This is probably the biggest risk for this IPO. You spend almost as much time dismissing ads and popups as you are learning the language. I can’t imagine this is helping them attract new users or converting users to the plus model for that matter. And no I don’t want notifications especially if you ask every 2 minutes.

I saw a ton of ads for the first 2-3 weeks of daily practice and then never saw ads again except for the occasional ad for upgrading to Plus.

I started using Duolingo a month ago. When you are out of hearts you can do "practice" sessions to replenish. Sometimes it gives you the option to watch an ad, but only a single time. My wife bought the Pro plan where you never run out of hearts but I figure if you are out of hearts that probably means it's time to practice instead of doing new material.

The problem with Duolingo is that not everyone sees the same, even under iOS. When Hearts came in, it was immediate on my Wife's account. But I didn't see them for 6+ months. We both regularly update apps too. It is a very strange thing.

I bought a $50/yr subscription to Busuu and never looked back. Long time Duolingo user. It's a good app but a bad product. Busuu on the other hand feels easily worth the money if you're actively learning with it, and you can get quick feedback from native speakers in their community (and give others feedback which is just as rewarding.) I haven't used Duolingo in a while so maybe they've added similar features, but if they haven't they're seriously missing out on the community effect of language exchange.

> "pull this pin to drop lava on the knight" that you see advertised on Facebook

Not at all your point, of course, but someone got fed up with those ads and actually made the game depicted: https://www.theactualgame.com/

Wait... are those adverts not depicting an actual game??

On Twitter you can read the comments on the ads and the most frequent comments are from people complaining that the actual game apparently has nothing to do with those ads. I think I've read it's more like clash of clans.

Wow, TIL - I never click those ads because I assume the games are aggressively monetised nonsense but it didn't occur to me that the game might be completely different from the ad.

Hello Guys, This is Dilip Sripuram. The developer of the TheActualGameRescue you are talking about. Just wanted to address the issues you mentioned. About the Ads, you don't need to watch an Ad. The whole game can be played without watching a single Ad. Each level gives you enough coins to unlock next and by the end of easy levels you will have enough coins to unlock 3 medium levels. The login issue is so that I can save the save file with Google Play services. I will recheck this and limit the number of times it asks to once. I recommend watching this video to better understand the gameplay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksI3YVoMwnM&ab_channel=GeneM...

Thanks. P.S : Posting this to every mention here. First time here on Hacker News.

This is very very often thr case with crappy chinese games in the play store. I get ads for so many games that look cool in the trailer but are apparently something completely different if you read the reviews. There's even one that uses some kind of really weird ripped off Age of Empires textures/models for their game. What they have in common is that theyre all pay-to-win chinese games where loot boxes cost up to $100.

They're probably also (digitally) malware in many cases, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksI3YVoMwnM&ab_channel=GeneM...

Thanks. P.S : Posting this to every mention here. First time here on Hacker News.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksI3YVoMwnM&ab_channel=GeneM...

Thanks. P.S : Posting this to every mention here. First time here on Hacker News.

I had to try this after seeing all those ads. It is pretty similar to what the ads were. The game itself also has an obnoxious number of ads. For example, I had to watch a thirty second ad (or pay 75 "coins") to unlock the second level. In the second level I had pull one of two pins, to either dump lava on myself or gold. I chose gold and won a flawless victory, on to the next ad!

The other annoying thing about the game is that every level it asks you to register some kind of account or sign in with your Google account. If I refused to do that at first, why would I want to be asked every level?

I guess it's kind of fitting that the game is annoying as the ads that inspired it are too. I'd pay 1 dollar for an ad free version of this game, assuming the levels eventually became challenging and the game didn't nag me all the time about creating accounts. I won't watch 30 seconds of ads every 30 seconds though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksI3YVoMwnM&ab_channel=GeneM...

Thanks. P.S : Posting this to every mention here. First time here on Hacker News.

Welcome. But please don't post the same message multiple times like that. It makes the thread hard to read, and you should not feel like you need to address every comment separately if this response already covers all the points.

Sorry jsnell, this won't happen again.

I applaud you for creating the game that people clearly want to play based off of those ads. I think that's a creative idea and you executed it pretty well. I see those ads most frequently on twitter - do you have a twitter bot that just links to your thing whenever those ads get posted? Might get some traffic.

I admit I didn't check to see what the coins were. I just assumed it was some kind of microtransaction. If you don't need to watch ads - why would anyone choose to? Unless, like me, they mistakenly thought you had to (which I would think is just as bad)?

Regarding login, I would suggest just explaining why you need this service, what you get for it, and letting the user choose it or not.

Curious how many users you have and what you make from this game.

I have about 3.3k downloads as of now. Mobile games need over 5 million downloads and many daily active users to make anything. 98% of the mobile developers don't make more than 500$ for their entire project. So, all work is just to stand out. My only way is with good gameplay. I will increase the "Buy" button size and may be add an animation to it suggesting you to click it. Thanks.

That trailer is great, epic music, I have no idea if the game is playable, but I guess that's beside the point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksI3YVoMwnM&ab_channel=GeneM...

Thanks. P.S : Posting this to every mention here. First time here on Hacker News.

Actually this is something that's been bugging me forever - maybe someone knows the answer? What's the incentive to advertise one game but sell another? There's clearly a market for the "pull the pin" kind of game, they don't seem to be particularly hard to make and these ads are by large game publishers. Why not just make the game that people actually want?

Larger total market.

The "pull the pin" game requires actual level design effort. You design 2000 puzzles and in 6 months the player's done with them all.

Taking Bejeweled and painting it a different colour can be done once and keep the user occupied indefinitely.

They would send me ads in languages I didn't know, which was hilarious as if any app should know what languages I speak it's Duolingo.

When you have everything right, I love how owl comes and say he will make it harder, so you loose your hearts quicker, and suddenly you cannot study any more that day

Ps. I subscribed

> You are limited in how long you can access their platform by how many hearts you have. Miss enough questions, your hearts run out. Run out of hearts, you're restricted from proceeding further in your studies. You must buy hearts to stay on their platform. This feels counter intuitive, as you are now kicking users off of your platform and lose the ability to sway them towards other things you have to offer.

Pro-tip: Hearts only exist in the app, not on the website.

As soon as they switched to the hearts system, I uninstalled the app and now exclusively use the mobile website. Considering their app is just a web view, the experience is essentially the same (you'll need connectivity at the start and end of a lesson), except no ads and no hearts!

As a plus, the website actually allows you to view the forum discussion on sentences, for example if your answer was wrong but you feel it should be correct, you can see what other people are saying about it. Why they don't offer this in the app is beyond me.

The decision to gate people's learning by restricting their number of attempts stupid. It's counter to the point of learning, but I guess they didn't feel they were getting enough revenue from just ads alone, so they have to kneecap the learning experience to force people into their over-priced monthly subscription.

You can see the discussion in the app, just click on the flag icon.

I think it's more complex, Apple's app store rules make it clear than an iphone app cannot be a clone of their website, and there must be a differentiating factor. Thus, hearts.

You can also get hearts back without paying by doing what was previously known as 'practice', a random lesson of what you've previously learnt, by pressing the heart icon - on android, at least.

I like the hearts system. It makes me think about the answer more, instead of just hoping it's right.

> Why they don't offer this in the app is beyond me.

Lesson instructions are even weirder:

When you take the Japanese class in English, you can read the explanations for each lesson in the app. However, when learning French in German, the instructions _only_ exist on the website. If you use the app exclusively, you'll have to guess all the grammatical special cases through trial and error.

This is the difference between Duolingo created content and community created content. The Duolingo courses have a lot more to them in app form. It seems like it is a lazy implementation in the app to me.

I have a over 1000 day streak and I've seen the app change a lot over those 1000+ days. It is heading towards "why am I bothering with this?" territory to be honest. I also do Memrise, and their marketing is just as obnoxious, but the app is actually a lot better at doing the stuff DuoLingo used to focus on IMO.

> As a plus, the website actually allows you to view the forum discussion on sentences, for example if your answer was wrong but you feel it should be correct

You can do this in the app. There is a button on the bottom right when you finish a lesson that lets you see the forum for the question.

What boggles my mind is that you cannot collapse parts of the conversation irrelevant to your inquiry about the question.

Another alternative (for Android) is to roll back to an earlier version of the app that was actually usable.

I use version 3.106.5 and I don't get any limitations on messages and there's a glitch where you can skip the ad by tapping where the 'X' will be before anything loads. Additionally, you can view the discussion in this version and submit change suggestions.

Some comments: I haven't really seen any ads in DuoLingo apart from their own. I guess my ad-blocking efforts are paying off.

Regarding Pimsleur: I hadn't heard about them, are they only for learning the basics? I'm at A2 french now and aiming for B1. Is Pimsleur suitable for that stage of learning?

Pimsleur is great to improve your pronunciation and learn until B1. From there on I would recommend using Memrise and ClozeMaster. Memrise has a great collection of community based courses that will push up to C1

The thing i miss most in DuoLingo is a solid way to teach the underlying grammar.

There must be an app that is good for learning all french conjugations.

Babel is really good for grammar and explains well in bite sizes, but it's a little pricy. It could also do with some more repetition imo, however I would recommend it.

I like Duolingo, but I wonder why can't they charge something more reasonable. I think they charge like 60 o 70 euros per half year, so 10 euros per month. We are 4, that is 40 euros per month, almost 500 a year. That is a lot of money.

I would gladly pay a family pack of 10 per month for all 4 of us not to have adds.

They have a family plan that works out to $2 or so per month per person if I recall correctly.

Thanks. I haven't seen it. you are right.

> especially since you can't proceed in your lesson until you watch the video

That's not true. On my iPhone, I just quit the app when a video ad starts playing and then reopen it. For me, the ads play after I've finished a lesson, and doing this it still saves my progress. Quit and restart is quicker than watching some dumb video (and even if it isn't, I'd rather spend my time restarting than watching a video ad)

Try their desktop browser version. All the ads can be blocked by uBlock Origin, there are no limits on what you can do whatsoever (I have no idea what are these "hearts" you're talking about), and most importantly - you can switch to the "write your answers on a keyboard" mode.

That last bit makes a hell of a difference. One thing is to click through, another is to actually translate a sentence or to write it down in "type what you hear" exercises, with hints showing up only when you explicitly ask for them. It makes the whole thing harder, but is absolutely worth the effort. You'll pound not just the words into your head, but also the grammar.

I learned two foreign languages in the recent years (as in: can read a newspaper or talk about my last vacation, humble brag!), and Duo was one of the keys to success (Anki & having an actual teacher were another ones). I believe it wouldn't work so well if I was just "clicking through" on mobile.

> •users feel that their experience is diminished as a result of the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, format, size and quality of ads that we display;

They should show short video ads in the language you're learning, so the challenge is to understand the ad. Free learning, better engagement and actually relevant ads.

I'd be up for that I think

Looking forward to the imminent expansion of the Klingon-language advertising sphere.

https://www.duolingo.com/course/tlh/en/Learn-Klingon

Today is a good day to BUY!

Pimsleur really is a fantastic method. I'm surprised it has dropped into relative obscurity.

For those who don't know, the Pimsleur language tapes involved learning a bunch of phrases and repeating them back to the tape. This would build into full conversations using the phrases, along with dropping out particular words like changing "eat" into "drink". There was essentially no written component.

The lessons also had an element of spaced repetition: Phrases from lesson 1 would pop up again in lesson 3, and then again in lesson 7 just to check you hadn't forgotten them.

Paul Pimsleur marveled at the invention of the tape recorder, saying that now students would be able to record and practice samples of real language while on the go. Nowadays everyone has a 'tape recorder' and then some in their pocket, but most methods seem to ignore audio completely, or let it take second place to written language.

Language Transfer [1] is a little bit like that, (all audio, and you are meant to talk back and just listen, speak and think, not write anything down), but it’s more of a conversational style where the teacher is explaining things to a student and you are supposed to pause to answer before the student does. Actually saying it does make a difference!

I haven’t got all the way through a course yet (need to get back but I’ll have to go back to an earlier point because it’s been a few months) but I feel like I made ten times the process as I did trying to do a course Duolingo for the same language.

It does the same kind of thing with the repetition. “Now remember how we’d say [word]” and it really does stick better than just seeing the word and a picture.

And it’s all available free too (but you can support on Patreon if you want).

1: https://www.languagetransfer.org/

Sounds like the Michael Thomas method

I have gone through several courses with passive listening and learned so much. Would highly recommend.

> Nowadays everyone has a 'tape recorder' and then some in their pocket, but most methods seem to ignore audio completely, or let it take second place to written language.

Admittedly, there is a cost involved for voice talent. But it is well worth it, in my opinion. I started using Duolingo to learn Hungarian. The course is in beta. It began with pre-recorded clips, which were very helpful to understand the tone. Later, the course switched exclusively to text-to-speech. It is so much harder to understand than a real person's voice, and so much nuance is left out.

Pimsleur is great. A lot of their courses are on Audible too, so with a subscription you can buy them slowly over a number of months. That is what I started to do.

Unfortunately, Pimsleur is rather expensive. A set of CDs at full price is over $200, and most have three levels to buy.

It's cheaper online: $20 per month, and it'll take you about a month to do the equivalent of a set of tapes/CDs at one per day. (I assume it's the same or equivalent lessons.)

I've learned several languages to the "tourist" level via Pimsleur, but mostly borrowed from the library. Duolingo is a good complement to it for building vocabulary.

Hearts is the worst thing about Duolingo. They themselves claim 'it is ok to make mistakes', and then punish you for them, making you do useless (for learning) repetitive tests over and over again.

Luckily, there is still a classroom loophole that allows you to study with unlimited hearts, but I don't know how long it'll last

In the app you can use free practice mode to restore hearts.

Thank you Captain Obvious. It is still useless grinding that takes time and gives nothing to learning.

Oh, and you start being afraid to make mistakes, to not be forced to perform said grinding over and over again.

I have 800+ days in Duolingo. There were no hearts when i started, it appeared when i was in early 700s and I learned how to switch them off with classroom trick. If I had hearts from the start, I'd choose a different app. Hearts are that bad.

The problem is that you’re grinding something you already know (in my experience always something too easy) just for hearts, and the heart system removes the ability to grind something you don’t know until you know it in a lesson. I want to make mistakes until I nail it when I’m learning.

That said, at least the Pro version fixes it.

> Run out of hearts, you're restricted from proceeding further in your studies. You must buy hearts to stay on their platform.

This is not true. It just means you made enough mistakes that you should use their practice mode rather than continuing learning new stuff. The practice mode is entirely free and rewards you with new hearts.

> Secondly, how they promote their Plus plan. You are limited in how long you can access their platform by how many hearts you have. Miss enough questions, your hearts run out. Run out of hearts, you're restricted from proceeding further in your studies. You must buy hearts to stay on their platform. This feels counter intuitive, as you are now kicking users off of your platform and lose the ability to sway them towards other things you have to offer.

This is incorrect. You don’t need to buy hearts - you can do some practices and get more hearts to do more lessons, which is (IMO) a huge part of the learning. When you are weakest you lose hearts so you practice more in order to keep working through lessons.

DuoLingo is alright for very light language practice but it gets frustrating very quickly. Some examples:

1. About 25% of the time it's asking me to type out letter-by-letter the meaning of a sentence in my native language. So I'm learning Czech and it'll give me a sentence like "Ta moucha seděla na něčem zvláštním" and present me with a free-text field where I have to write out the English version. The other way round (making me type out "Ta moucha..." in Czech) I totally understand but this way is really stupid, not least because...

2. The expected translations are often wrong or inflexible. In the case above it wanted me to write out "That fly was sitting on something weird" - but I had written "That fly was sitting on something unusual" which is a perfectly valid interpretation of the sentence, but because they basically did a strcmp() I got it "wrong". Another example I remember was particularly bad because of the content of the sentence - "Tuhle větu jste opravdu nepřeložili příliš dobře", which I translated as "You really did not translate this sentence very well" (I'd expect "didn't" IRL but because I know how dumb DuoLingo can be I went with the simple version). The expected meaning was "You really did not translate this sentence too well" which is pretty clumsy IMO, and it's like they're taunting me but they're the ones who who didn't translate it "too well". I've dozens of these, there's seemingly no way to report them (I can see discussions but there's no way for me to participate)

3. There were enough lessons and material early on to give me the impression it was worth paying for the service, but after a couple of weeks I realised that I was being served the same sentences over and over. Now I understand there's value to spaced repetition, but what I'm experiencing is beyond a joke.

It's a really polished app in some respects, but in some areas where it really matters it's as useful as learning by copy-pasting into Google Translate.

Yeah, I'd say it's about as polished as it can get, but it conceptually is just not going to be useful for any serious learning. It's been my experience over the years that the more enjoyable a language learning technique is to do, the worse it actually works. And duolingo is to their credit very enjoyable.

That's quite an astute observation - I guess getting out of your comfort zone is a necessary part of language learning. I've written on HN before about relatively simple things I have found useful (keeping a diary in $language, or watching films with $language audio) but looking back, if I'm honest the toughest situations were probably the most valuable for building confidence and testing my abilities.

The only thing something like Duolingo could be good at is learning vocabulary. But I found it pretty bad at that. I had much more success with Memrise. However, this was many years ago and last I checked Memrise had regressed significantly, at least for me.

Duolingo is a terrible way of learning languages overall. Almost as bad as Rosetta Stone. But, like Rosetta Stone and other things like gym memberships, it doesn't have to be effective to be profitable.

I have had unlimited hearts without pro for almost as long as I've used Duolingo. I only had limited hearts for the first few months. And I still have no idea how they decide between users but I suspect locations probably has something to do with it.

Duolingo has a special place in my heart because it helped me bootstrap French from almost literally zero knowledge. I remember my first night learning on Duo, having gone through a few lessons and also starting to read « Harry Potter à l'école de Sorciers » painstakingly slowly. In about a year of very much part-time effort, I was able to start going to a local French Meetup which rocketed my comprehension.

Now that I'm about ~B2 and able to get by when I go to la Francophonie, I occasionally toy with the idea of picking up another language. But I don't really consider using Duolingo as a great way to start. It seems it's had to reckon with how to turn a profit in lieu of their race-to-the-bottom of crowdsourced translations, which seems to have inevitably turned to ads.

When my kids were using it for mostly entertainment purposes, it seemed that whatever efficacy it had may have plummeted. Maybe I'm wrong - I really did like it and I love the idea of it. It just doesn't seem to have fulfilled its promise.

(Everything that follows is my personal opinion.)

I'm technically working on a competitor to Duolingo (for Japanese), so I'm definitely biased, but personally I'm a little sad with how much success they're having considering how bad their system is (for Japanese, can't comment on other languages, but I can't imagine it's a lot better?).

There are a lot of considerably better options for learning Japanese (and I'm not even talking about my own app as it's still a huge work-in-progress), and yet for some reason I see posts from people using Duolingo on forums everyday. It's really popular.

I make a point of trying out most of the apps/websites in this space (since it's always a good idea to see what others are doing better than you), and (to me) it's apparent that Duolingo is definitely on the bottom of the barrel when it comes to actually being an effective learning tool. It might be okay-ish for a total, 100% beginner, but it breaks down very very fast.

I guess you don't need to have a good product as long as you have solid marketing, flashy UI and heavily gamify the process? That was somewhat eye opening for me.

Gamifying is an important feature though, as it makes it easier for students to maintain motivation to keep learning.

Yeah, I agree. Even if a tool is effective if you can't motivate the user it's all for naught.

I just wish that concentrating on this aspect wasn't so disproportionately rewarded by the market; after all an educational tool should primarily be judged by how effective it is in actually educating, and the "fun" factor should only be a bonus, where with the current state of affairs it kinda seems like it's the other way around.

But the point there kinda is that gamification is not a "fun" factor, it's what makes them more effective in actually educating. If you have the best learning strategy, but you don't actually stick to it, it won't help.

Indeed, it makes them more effective in actually educating, but the effect is multiplicative, and not additive. The tool that is gamified needs to be effective in the first place, so ideally you'd need both.

Except I play some video games that really motivate me to keep playing. Both video games and Duolingo accomplished this by eliminating the learning portion from their software to boost retention.

What are some recommendations for learning apps/websites?

Which language? :) Edit: I enjoy Audiolingual drills: https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/ These courses vary, some very good. Chinese and French in particular. For Russian, 'Modern Russian' (Clayton). 'French in Action' video series is excellent. Assimil books are helpful. Software.. eh. [I make language software :D]

I’ve tried Duolingo, Babbel, Rosetta Stone, Lingq and some others I can’t even remember the name of. First of all, you won’t learn a language using only an app. And you will need a lot of intrinsic motivation and grit which an app can’t help you with. That being said, the best app I ever used and still use is Lingq, because it guides you towards using the language in real life situations with a lot of context, and you can use their audio clips to learn in the car or during Sport etc.. The other apps only ever have you translate words and context free sentences, which is a futile approach.

Generally app/website courses suck because of conflicting business models. You need to seriously read and understand grammar to learn language and employ spaced repetition memorization. The apps usually do the later not the first one because holding attention span is hard, writing good courses is harder and it's easier to monetize dictionary building than reading material.

Common plan is to pick up a well written book for your language and do flash cards + media/live tutor suppliment.

Currently I'm learning Thai: I have a modern book course (Becker's series) + voice Anki flash cards + some media on youtube or netflix movies (I've tried pimsleurs but it made me fall asleep)

Check out Refold[1]. IMO it is the best place to learn how to acquire a second language. It's not an app or a course or anything. Its approach is almost all self-directed, but it lays out everything you need to do and provides a Discord community to help you.

[1]: https://refold.la/

As someone who has learned and is learning multiple languages this rings true to me. Duolingo is very good for getting started and acquiring the basic vocabulary. but it plateaus rapidly. After that you don’t get much from it and you should use something that uses mini stories with a larger context and preferably audio read by natives (Small aside: Duolingo has awesome mini story podcasts for Spanish and French which they should incorporate into their app). The best tool I found for the mini story approach is Lingq, which is not so good at getting you started though. You’re also right about the gamification. This is something Duolingo absolutely nails. A friend’s mother is addicted to doing her English lessons and has a 2 year streak. But she also barely speaks English yet, which is unsurprising to me given the fact she only ever uses Duolingo.

Hadn’t heard of LingQ til now, this seems really good.

The founder (Steve Kauffmann) is a polyglot with a youtube channel where he talks about effective strategies for learning languages, sometimes even in other languages. I can’t recommend it enough.

It does seem good, til you compare price ($8-40/mo) with its limited use cases.

What do you mean by limited use case?

When I used the free trial, the main activity was centered around pasting text from other sources/sites, then marking the words you recognize. To me that's not worth $8/mo, much less $40 at the Premium Plus level. I realize there are a few other features to LingQ but the cost-benefit of the lowest tier didn't make sense to me.

I have free dictionary apps that remember every word that is looked up. I'd rather input those lists into a spaced repetition app and receive essentially the same benefit without paying.

They have tons of audio/text content with translations, but it's really hard to find. I think the UI is the worst part of Lingq.

> I have free dictionary apps that remember every word that is looked up.

Care to provide any reference for these?

> After that you don’t get much from it and you should use something that uses mini stories with a larger context and preferably audio read by natives

Duolingo has mini-stories, at least for Spanish, and has had them for a while.

They're usually around something happening to a bunch of characters. In most of the recent stories, there is a larger group of characters who all know each other and have interconnected "adventures".

The lessons then become not just translating random, out of context sentences, but listening to the story and answering contextual questions. They do seem fairly basic, but I think the basic idea is already there, it should only be improved.

I mean, at some point, success is the definition of success. Perhaps you're misinterpreting what the average consumer wants in a language learning app.

Initially that might have been true, but now that I thought about it for a little while I don't think I am.

I just personally find it sad that for your average consumer the educational aspects in an educational app are significantly less important than non-educational ones, and that the perceived value of a product vastly overshadows its actual value, that's all.

What app, if I may ask?

This one: https://jpdb.io

But be warned - it is still very rough around the edges, and still very much a work-in-progress. (I'm only working on it in my spare time as a side-project.) It's definitely not ready for prime time yet, and won't be for quite some time still.

That said, I do already have users. One of my users is using it to help him consume native Japanese content really early. He's learning Japanese since September of last year, and he started using my app a few months ago (probably a month or two ago; not sure, I'd have to check) and he's already reading some of the easier Japanese visual novels and web novels, and watching anime with only Japanese subtitles.

This - I personally believe - is the best way to learn a language: by immersion. So I always wanted to make an app that will short-circuit the process and will allow you to start consuming content a lot earlier that you'd ever be able to do using only traditional methods.

Very cool work! Paradoxically, I've been slacking off on practicing Japanese diligently ever since I moved to Tokyo. I've been meaning to get back into a good routine so I'll give jpdb a shot.

I'm curious how you did this: "We have 16785 prebuilt decks with vocabulary from 1124 different anime waiting for you." Did you write a script that calls subs2srs?

Well, essentially yes, it is based on text analysis, but it's a lot more complex than "a script that calls subs2srs". (:

(My whole codebase is over 100k lines of code, all written by me.)

I have a unified morphological analysis engine that I use for every type of media that I have in my database, and I use it to generate stats and vocabulary lists.

I didn't mean to imply that what you're doing is simple; I was just curious.

I'll be honest, I have no idea what a unified morphological analysis engine is. Something to look into tonight

I didn't take it that way, so don't worry. (:

Sorry, I might have gotten carried away with all of the fancy words. (: The "morphological" part comes from linguistics (see the "Morphology (linguistics)" article on wikipedia), by "unified" I meant that I apply it to every kind of texts, and an "engine" is just another word for "software" (think "game engine" - a reusable piece of software that can be used for many things in a single domain).

I'm currently learning Japanese and I tried playing with this for a bit. I have to say that this looks really nice, and almost exactly what I was looking for. The flashcards are interestingly presented, and the selection of sources is great (Though it doesn't have Minna no nihongo 2 which I'm currently going through).

Great work, and thanks for working on this and making it available!

I am currently learning Japanese on Duolingo, I am wondering how long it has been since you tried their Japanese course? I noticed it changed significantly between now and when it first released. It certainly doesn't feel like a course like traditional education provides, more like a flashcard vocabulary and grammar builder. I have had to Google plenty of things while using it because nothing is ever actually explained and Japanese has plenty of arbitrary rules, but I don't feel that's all that bad.

I am also curious if you need beta testers for your app, I would be open to giving it a go.

Yeah, I did look at it recently too, and I still think it's not very good.

I mean, for a total beginner it is okay-ish for some basic vocabulary, but at that stage of learning a textbook approach is a lot more effective in my opinion. You're better off just grabbing a copy of Genki, going through that with a teacher, and once you have the fundamentals down and can efficiently study on your own start doing vocabulary flashcards in a better app and consume easy native content.

Sure, I'm always looking for beta testers. (: Although my app is very much public and open to everyone. Just don't expect miracles since it's currently only a work-in-progress side project that I'm working in my spare time and slowly improving: https://jpdb.io

Hey! I went through your comment history, and you seem pretty similar to one of my friends haha. If you're down for a fun experiment, email me at my username @gmail.com.

That depends on what exactly the experiment entails. But since you're the one suggesting feel free to email me with the details. (: My address is @exia.io; you can use any username since I have a catch-all for the whole domain.

Don’t you think the whole market of language learning apps should be looked at with suspicion? I talked to my brother-in-law the other day, and he said he hired a tutor in the Philippines to teach his kids English. Unsurprisingly, it was super cheap. Low paid labor might be hard to get for Japanese, but it seems like for most languages people want to learn lessons over Skype will be far greater value than even a well designed app.

I think it depends on what exact level you're currently at in your language learning.

If you're a total beginner then I personally think that having a teacher who can actually explain things is invaluable. If you don't have the basic rules of the language internalized and you don't have the fundamentals down you're going to have a harder time doing it on your own than someone who can just ask a teacher and immediately get an answer.

I think the sweet-spot for language learning apps (at least for Japanese) is learning vocabulary and kanji. Those are two things where having a teacher doesn't really help all that much, and where an app can really help.

But, again, a total beginner (which is the market that Duolingo targets since that's where the money is) doesn't need to grind vocabulary nor kanji; they need the fundamentals, which they won't really get from it.

I've been practicing Russian on Duolingo almost every day since February 2020, and before that I had a few 30 to 100 days streaks over a few years (can't remember 100% for sure). Making you force yourself into learning a new language is what makes Duolingo stand out among all the other tools I've tried.

I think that the tool that is the most efficient in teaching you a new language is the tool that makes you force yourself into learning, at least a little, every day. I'm quite sure that consciously practicing 10 minutes every Monday-Saturday for a year [1] is more efficient compared to practicing two hours every day for one week every three months [2], even though it adds up to approximately the same amount of time spent yearly on learning the target language.

[1]: (10 minutes * (365 days - 52 Sundays)) / 60 minutes per hour ≈ 52 hours and 10 minutes [2]: 2 hours * 7 days * 4 quarters = 56 hours per year

I see strong similarities between language learning and gyms. The vast majority of people who sign up to gyms do not use them to become athletes. Many of them don't even go. Some of the largest gym chains are objectively rubbish gyms. They don't have the best equipment and often forbid effective exercises because they are perceived as intimidating for casual members. Their business model is in attracting new paying members. They have no interest at all in making their users fit. Ironically the presence of fit, strong and healthy people at the gym discourages unfit people from joining.

These language learning cons are all the same. They reel you in with the promise of language learning being easy. This is essentially a lie. Language learning isn't exactly "hard", but it takes dedication and persistence over a long period of time. They don't tell you that. The few who "make it" from Duolingo do so via other means in the end.

I agree that the support for east Asian languages is horrendous, but Duolingo is optimised for romance languages, as it should be. The average person just wants to learn a little French as a hobby, and that's okay. I personally love the app and have used it as a stepping stone twice to get to content on YouTube or Twitch where you need an A2-ish level to start participating.

Too many programmer types lose the forest for the trees. They think purely in terms of their definition of "better", not their customer. Flashy UI, marketing, and gamification are what most people want.

A few points that caught my eye:

1. They have ~5% conversion from free to paid which seems like the top end of freemium apps (Range seems to be 2-5%) [0]

2. The business model section is interesting if you want to learn about SaaS / freemium models

3. Their web price is actually more than the iOS/Android price (83.88 v/s 80) which is surprising given that iOS has a 30% tax

[0]https://blog.hubspot.com/service/freemium

Possessing the business acumen of plankton, this Acquired.fm podcast episode helped me understand the origins of freemium, what's going on.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent

On one hand, I like the general idea of Duolingo. But for Asian languages it's worse than useless. You're never taught grammatical rules, it's like you might learn a couple of random words.

Far better specialized apps exist for both Korean and Chinese ( Hello Chinese is my favorite).

And oftentimes what it "teaches" is outright wrong. I've seen a good number of posts of people having fun with Duolingo in their native language and picking apart the mistakes.

You don’t need to. Read up on the grammar if you encounter an odd construct or as a refresher, but remembering grammar rules is useless (And I say this as someone who can cite most of the grammar rules for English and German). It’s better to expose yourself to a lot of language and etch the patterns in your brain. In fact, I think not explaining grammar sparks curiosity, which is much better for remembering the rules you really need to know.

That is the approach Duolingo takes intentionally, I think some people assume it's just lack of content but their philosophy is "show don't tell"

Duolingo just doesn't have enough content for this, at least when I used it (2017). I did the whole tree, and could remember the correct answers to sentences I couldn't understand.

German only clicked for me when I got a tutor who sat me down and started explaining the grammar.

I think the issue is that Duolingo just isn’t good for learning a language at all, just for learning vocabulary. For example, we learned the English conditionals in school. Never once in my life have I actively thought about how and which conditional to use (except for the exam of course, but that just shows how dumb testing languages is).

They remade the more popular trees recently to make them CEFR compliant and added grammar lessons to some, I'm doing Spanish and it's very good, tons of immersion stuff, audio lessons, stories, podcasts.

This might work for German or another European language, but Asian languages work radically different.

Korean and Japanese for example completely change the word order around.

I'm learning Japanese. Of course you have to learn the grammar at some point, but you're not going to analyze a sentence were "hodo" and the negative form are used for a comparison. The best way for this pattern to stick is to know the meaning of the sentence you listen to in advance and then getting used to hearing it. No amount of grammar learning will help you understand the construct in a fluent conversation.

Seconding Hello Chinese as a fantastic app. But I just want to share the apparently unusual-around-here experience that Duolingo was one of my best tools for learning and retaining Chinese vocab. I suspect it’s because the whole experience is fine-tuned to be vivid across so many sensory dimensions; when I remember a word I learned in Duolingo I can often also remember the exact place I was standing when I learned it. That does not happen for me with Anki or Hello Chinese. It could depend on brain type or something but I don’t think their success is purely a fraud.

Which one do you recommend for Korean?

Check out eggbun and lingodeer. They're both pretty good, one might work for you.

TTMIK is my fav resource for Korean. Not an app though, just audio courses / books.

..meanwhile, in Serbia.. we're woking on a continuation of 'Language Learning with Netflix' project. It's under development and buggy, check the 'Video Clips' tab for all-you-can-eat language exposure (TurtleTube is a better name).

https://www.languagereactor.com/

Next push: more content, languages, personalised buffet based on your known vocab and interests.

Don't open too many videos, you'll knock over our translation server :). Need to move that over to a box with GPUs tomorrow.

Need help making a mobile version of this btw.

I worked all the way through Duolingo's Mandarin curriculum a couple of years back (after having basic knowledge from studying on another paid site). I can say that it was definitely fun, and it was easy to study every day. The downside was that I was still at a pretty basic level when I finished their curriculum. Logged on just now, and they haven't added any new content since I finished.

For people who just want to learn a few words of a foreign language and have fun while I'm doing it, Duolingo is great. And I'm sure that the market is huge.

I imagine the market for people wanting to learn English is even higher.

Much higher. When I last checked, it was much easier for an English speaker to find a Mandarin penpal than the other way around.

There are plenty of good Mandarin decks on Anki, especially ones with sentences/idioms.

(You just have to be careful with the Pinyin at times as it may be automatically generated and some characters have more than one sound/tone.)

Agree strongly with this. The Spoonfed Chinese deck is so good that it's worth actually paying for. I think it's only $3 or so now.

I'm also working through their Mandarin and I'm stunned they only offer simplified. It would be so easy to implement traditional characters.

It's fun and free, which is nice, but it's really nowhere near as good as other paid platforms.

Offering Traditional Chinese would require a lot of review work to catch character mapping errors and phrases that are not idiomatic in Taiwan. Given the low quality of Duolingo's existing Chinese sentences, I wouldn't hold my breath. (I've played around with the Mandarin class last year and immediately ran into some mistakes; not sure how much bad luck was involved.)

I was extremely surprised at how poor quality Duolingo's Mandarin class was.. I don't speak fluently but I speak well enough for daily life and even I could find some errors (and confirmed with my partner who is a native speaker)

In all languages I speak decently, I've been surprised by how poor quality the lessons were.

Would you mind offering some examples? I'm a beginning learner and my assumptions are based on the character mappings I see in Pleco, and having toggled HelloChinese between simplified/traditional. I would love to study areas where character meanings change.

Just going through the Mandarin onboarding in Duolingo again, and one of the common errors is that 得 is pronounced de2 in sentences where it should be dei3.

There are also common words like 星期 where the characters are the same in SC/TC, but the tone would be different in a hypothetic Duolingo TC class (xing1qi1 vs xing1qi2), and I don't recall ever hearing "下星期" in Taiwan, it was usually 下禮拜. Erhua such as "小一點兒" is also not something that feels natural in TC.

But I think you are specifically asking about characters where the mapping from SC to TC is not 1:1. This StackOverflow answer has a few examples and a link to an exhaustive list on Wikipedia: https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/38707

I sometimes read TC clickbait articles, and when they use 后 where it should be 後 that's usually a sign of a crappy machine conversion from SC. 發髮 and 干乾幹 are two more really common character groups that map to a single SC character.

The rabbit hole goes even deeper because the same Unicode character can have typographic differences by region. Just today I learned that Apple's PingFang SC and PingFang TC fonts use a different "roof" on the character 龜, even though it is the same traditional character in both cases. More examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Chinese_character (but that wouldn't be an issue for a TC Duolingo class)

Thank you, this is really helpful and gives me some good starting points. I had no idea the mapping wasn't 1:1!

Nearly 1800 day streak, often in the diamond league, mainly using it for German, Esperanto, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, and Arabic.

The art style and animations which they’re so proud of are absolutely the worst part for me, made worse by the fact I can only disable the animations on iOS by going into system settings, Accessibility, and choosing “Reduce Motion”, which affects the entire device and still doesn’t fully eliminate them.

(That said, I know I’m not normal and it may well be a good thing for their business even though I hate that part of it).

This, along with several bugs that never got fixed and the fact that offline mode stopped being useful during the pandemic, is why I am no longer a subscriber.

The language courses I’ve been doing are variable quality: When I finished their German course I tried a GCSE[0] paper from the previous year practice catalogue of the exam board, and found I would’ve gotten a B[1]. However, I would probably not pass a CEFR grade A1 exam[2] because even though it taught me a broad enough vocabulary for B1, it didn’t teach me to conjugate my verbs fluently.

It feels like it’s doing a better job at teaching me Spanish, but I’ll only know if/when I finish that course. The Greek course feels much like the German course («τρώω» vs. «τρώει»? My conjugation sucks).

The Arabic course… I’ve been trying for about nine months and I still don’t know the Arabic alphabet (really doesn’t help that Duo is using numerals 2 and 3 as stand-ins for letters that don’t have Latin alphabet correspondences, even if there is a Wikipedia page for it [3]).

[0] UK high school finishing exam

[1] The scale went from A* to G at the time, since then it has been ‘reformed’ to be numerical

[2] A1 is noob level. The grades are A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2. B1 is what you need for citizenship, C2 is essentially “I can defend my PhD thesis without hesitation”.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet

Such a fun website, but as you point out, it's optimized in many ways for complete beginners and children, who looove those animations. In that vein, I was sad when they removed the translation feature (which was their original plan for monetization) - that was fascinating and was how I reached maximum level very quickly in Italian.

I tried so hard to get into Duolingo but I just felt like I was making progress so slowly. I much prefer italki. It's a lot more expensive than Duolingo, but worth it IMO to actually talk to a native speaker regularly.

Cool to see italki mentioned here.

italki.com was the first startup job I got out of college over 8 years ago in Shanghai, and where I met my current cofounder.

I used to use it to get people's Skype addresses and do p2p learning. It seems they've cracked down on that a lot.

I use Duolingo to learn Spanish. It's very simple but the streak system has kept me making slow progress. I've only gotten to "Checkpoint 3" (of 7) but it seems to be working well - I don't speak fluent but I can usually read signs etc. in Spanish and actually understand them.

The main issue I can see them facing is: it's very simple, so easy to clone. And Duo has its flaws, so I wouldn't be surprised if of those clones are a lot better. I like Duo, I use it now, but I could switch to another service in 1 second.

In the Risk Factors section

> The online language learning industry is highly competitive, with low switching costs and a consistent stream of new products and entrants, and innovation by our competitors may disrupt our business.

I don't personally like Duolingo. Formal education has been better for me, with languages. Both Duolingo, Memrise and Rosetta Stone neglect to tell you why any language rule exists or what contexts its used in and just procedurally generate gendered ways to ask for an Apple for 50 levels of lessons, pretending like rote memorization and classical conditioning is useful. I would say that it is not, context is very important.

Enough people believe this is useful, like you, you want to read signs. This won't help you notice that the entire color spectrum can be wildly different in different languages and cultures, or that you sound like you used Google Translate and everyone will look at you weird because they speak in a trendy way.

As for a company, its just ARR. Enough people will pay for it and use a subscription, that's good enough.

I should've mentioned that I actually took Spanish classes a few years before Duolingo. Those classes taught me the grammar and why the rules exist, but I didn't memorize many words (or I forgot) and I had serious trouble understanding actual Spanish speakers.

Duolingo "teaches" alternate tenses weirdly and IMO too late. But it does well for memorizing words, and it has people speaking with actual Spanish accents and forces you to understand them. So it's particularly helpful for me.

Ah okay, yes that’s good you coupled it with a class

I think people should understand that it’s a supplement, and not a solution when you’re on the plane to that country already

I wish I had done a couple of months of Japanese on Duolingo before traveling there. Simply knowing katakana and hiragana is a huge leap forward from zero knowledge. There were many words I would have known already just from exposure if only I could have read them.

Train line names for example, and all the dozens of english words written in Katakana. You also can't learn from exposure if you can't read the alphabet so I missed out on that too.

> and I had serious trouble understanding actual Spanish speakers

This is why I much prefer Fluent Forever. They play clips of words or phrases that sound similar to non-native speakers but are easily differentiated by native speakers. If you do it enough (and have immediate feedback about whether you heard it correctly) you can eventually learn to hear the distinction. For me it was be the difference between being able to read/write in another language and being able to listen and converse in it.

Some examples that I can remember:

Dutch- broek (pants) vs. boek (book)

French- bague (ring) vs. bogue (bug)

I suspect that many Duolingo users are not choosing between Duolingo and a formal language course. I suspect they're choosing between Duolingo and some other smartphone activity.

I enjoyed my formal language education but four years of high school Spanish was about as useless as any other high school class. The ~10m a day I spend on Duolingo is as much of a "waste" of time in terms of language aquisition, but it's almost as enjoyable as my language classes were, feels slightly less wasteful than whatever other smartphone game I'd be playing, and lets me maintain the fantasy that one day I'll actually get around to (committing the time necessary to) learn a foreign language.

Yes, sure, I was just commenting on its utility

Foreign language classes by choice or immediate necessity is different than high school

Duolingo is great for me as a complementary tool of formal education.

I haven't looked at Duolingo for a while, I tried it for Polish about 4 years ago and it seemed ok.

I've used a lot of tools over the years for Korean, Japanese & Mandarin, all are ok, but I usually go back to Anki for pure flash cards.

The only exception was Memrise for Japanese that I used for several years because everyone in my original class signed up at the same time and we were all "friends" on it so the competitive nature in us kicked in. IIRC Duo has a similar feature, but the challenge is getting that initial social pressure going. Once my cohort dropped off Memrise, so did I.

I've personally found duolingo to be a poor way to learn a language. It gets none of the nuances right and is mostly just for entry level vocab.

My favorite method is this guys using anki:

http://brianjx.altervista.org/GermanC2exam.html

His stories on German and Italian are fascinating reads because he was in his later years in life when he learned it! It's just a general nod to remember, you're never too old to learn!

I found it too playful. I, by far, prefer Clozemaster

https://www.clozemaster.com/

I gave it a go and it's realy primitive. Just random sentence flashcards with no structure, learning material, spelling romantization and other features you'd expect. It does have audio but it's machine voice that goes extremely fast whixh you can only slow down when you answer the question.

I'm constantly surprised by these new SASS projects popping up that are being outdone by open source Anki flashcards from 2010.

I like that it is "primitive"

It aims to answer the question, "What should I do after Duolingo?" It is based on https://tatoeba.org/en/

"I'm constantly surprised by these new SASS projects popping up that are being outdone by open source Anki flashcards from 2010."

Trust me, Anki can do very little for Chinese compared to clozemaster and the DuShu app. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trescher.d...

This seems to suffer from the same problem that many of these learning apps have: it forces you to start as an absolute beginner, even if you aren't one. If you are on an intermediate or advanced level, this website could still be useful, but you first have to go through thousands of very easy sentences.

It could very well gauge my level by upping the difficulty until I start making too many errors, and then taking it from there. But nope, by default it'll start with the 1000 most common words, which has zero learning effect, and is mostly annoying and boring.

Duolingo Plus is great value, but I feel like they need more advanced content to help build you up to watching TV series, etc. in your target language.

Also the divergence between the mobile and web content is strange, the mobile app misses out a lot of the discussion forums and the grammatical tip pages. Also the web content is harder as you're forced to remember the words yourself rather than just arrange them in the right order.

It's a great app, I just think they need a way to incorporate more grammar lessons / tips and cheatsheets, and more advanced media (videos with target language subtitles, etc.)

Took me years to realize grammar rules were available in the web platform (I didn't even know they had a web version!). Really a missed opportunity.

Interesting timing. Duolingo is a bit like Zoom in the sense that they got insane growth last year due to everyone being stuck at home.

That should make the financial numbers look exceptionally good for IPO.

But now everyone is itching to travel and so maybe they'll continue the insane growth as people learn languages of the places they want to travel to.

A few things about the timing in addition to lockdown induced growth :)

1. They raised their Series A in 2011 and raised a few rounds between 2012-2015 [0]. VCs usually have a time horizon of 5-7 years so this might be another reason.

2. Interest rates continue to be low (not that this is news) so stock markets might be more receptive.

All in all , a great result if it lists at ~4 or 5 billion$ given that their latest valuation seems to be about $2.2 billion [1]

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/duolingo/company_fin...

[1]https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/18/language-learning-app-duol...

I remember looking into applying to them but back in the day they claimed they only hired Phds.

Which is interesting because their app or its teaching style never turned out all that exceptional

Yes it's far too repetitive for more ambitious learners.

Also, all the delays/animations are really bothersome. If you set it up well, learning has its own rewards, so you needn't focus so much on gamification.

Reading material is laughably bad and as far as I remember is not even available in the mobile app (or at least was for the longest time). So people are just randomly guessing grammar rules and forums are constantly spammed with the same explanations.

I have used duolingo for like 6-12 months of learning Spanish and it helped me so much. I was in Mexico and could understand a bit what they were talking about on radio and just making connections with people because you could speak a bit of their language was great! And I think that's where duolingo shines.

They do not want you to learn a language completely/perfectly but it's kind of a bootcamp for languages. And their way of learning is helping so many people. The streaks are probably the drug most people need to continue or grinding a topic. It really helps a lot of people because in general since the main population sucks at consistency. On top of that, their branding is also top notch with duo, and their user experience overall is just the best. Happy to see them IPOing soon.

I quite like Duolingo at the start. They did an excellent technical presentation at one of the AWS events I attended, and I think they were doing some really innovative stuff. If I recall correctly, their original model was to have more advanced learners crowdsourcing translation services, similar to how CAPTCHA made money. I guess the problem with that model is not many people become advanced learners. Something has to support all of the free install, use for a week or two crowd, and I guess that's where the hearts system came in. Either way, they never supported the language I had to learn (Icelandic, few do) so I found another app/site that did.

I had been a heavy Duolingo user and collected a great record until I had a crazy 2 days busy with some company work. Once I finished I recognized all my records were gone. I never use the app again =))

From prospectus -" For many, Duolingo has become synonymous with language learning: for example, on Google, people search the term “Duolingo” nine times more often than “learn Spanish.”

I would imagine the sum of "Learn <any language>" would exceed searches for Duolingo - do they really think it has become genetic like Kleenex?

It seems inaccurate as well.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=duolingo,l...

duolingo - 49, learn Spanish - 16

That's slightly over 3x, nowhere near 9x.

If you change from US-only to worldwide, you roughly get their figure.

I'd be curious how much of their revenue is ex-US. It's an interesting stat, but if we've expanded the cohort massively to include a bunch of exclusively free users, then it's less so.

Which itself is misleading because people searching in non-English languages will search "duolingo" while they will not search "learn Spanish" but instead their language's equivalent

Comparing worldwide isn't really a fair comparison if Google doesn't internationalize the trends

"Learn spanish" is "impara lo spagnolo" in italian "Duolingo" is "Duolingo" in every language

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=duolingo,learn%20...

this guy i18ns

The isn't deceptive because "Learn <any language>" vs Duolingo. It is deceptive because they offer many languages, so it's really "Learn <any and all languages Duolingo supports>" vs Duolingo.

considering how much rosetta stone held the same position and quickly fell out of favor, I wonder how much of a selling point it is.

What happened to them?

Seems like a well-timed IPO to sell a slightly misleading company narrative. They're labeling themselves as a growth company yet I'm very skeptical that those 2020 numbers can be maintained.

On the other hand, I did have a Duo Plus subscription for about a year (in 2020). It was my primary tool for learning Brazilian Portuguese, and when people are impressed with how much I understand, Duo has come up a few times. In other words they are achieving word-of-mouth growth. I do also think it's mostly an effective learning system (especially the Stories) but I did have 3 or 4 years of traditional Spanish education in school. If I didn't have that foundation I probably would not have got as far as I did. Also, Duo gets boring as hell after a year.

I had fun with Duolingo, but I can’t say it helped me learn anything. To me something is missing and the learning structure seems somewhat shallow. I’d not recommend it to someone that is serious about learning a new language.

What might be missing for you is other input: do you read Wikipedia, watch the news, listen to the radio or anything like that in addition to Duolingo?

Yep, same experience here.

Tried learning Spanish with it - ok, you get to learn a little vocabulary, but tough luck if you're trying to convey something other than what your cat is trying to do to your pants...

Any predictions as to what kind of changes to the app this could lead to?

Pressure to maintain revenue growth will lead them further down the path they've already been on for a while (long-time non-paid Duolingo user here): longer, more frequent, and more annoying ads, and more frequent upgrade calls-to-action. I swear there are some days when I'll do ten lessons and see the exact same upgrade ad after every single one.

It seems like a trap they dug for themselves: optimize the drilling process for engagement instead of speed of learning, maximize eyeballs, advertise -- and that sours me on the paid upgrade, because the drilling is such a grind. I'd happily pay if the instruction felt efficient.

You haven’t purchased Duolingo stock today. You know what happens next.

I studied German in college, and was just terrible at it: And because it was a class, the further behind I got, the worse my experience was. Standing in front of a class and sounding just.. obviously bad really hit me hard.

I'm about a year and a half into daily Duolingo German: I'm not going to say I "get it", but I'm doing better at grokking the grammar and I'm further than I ever was in class. I'm a few months from being entirely done with their course.

I'll be doing italki afterwards.

Always nice to see a Latino founder having an exit on here.

For those looking to learn a language, 4chan (of all places) has a pretty good guide to the programs out there.

https://4chanint.fandom.com/wiki/The_Official_/int/_How_to_L...

Duolingo is just like a fun game to try to learn a language but at the end it doesn't help much, tinycards did help me more to learn vocabulary. Trying to learn Finnish and the first words you learn is velho (wizard) who the hell uses wizard ? it's not even a common word. And then it gets boring and repetitive.

I wouldn’t buy. I spent a lot of time learning german, chinese, romanian, spanish on duolingo and I just don’t think it’s a great system to learn.

They definitely have the branding and the community that creates content though. If they pivot to better content, and invest in researching what are better ways to learn.

There's an open source duolingo alternative Librelingo: https://github.com/kantord/LibreLingo

Duolingo's material is basically crowd-sourced, why not contribute it to a _free_ community project instead?

This actually isn’t true anymore. They stopped the contributor program and started doing it in-house, or at least paying the contributors: https://blog.duolingo.com/ending-honoring-our-volunteer-cont...

Slightly off topic: any thoughts on learning multiple languages (related languages or not) at once with Duolingo versus focusing? Wondering if the multi-language approach would help see common structures and reinforce each independently or if it just amounts to a distraction.

So I did Spanish on Duolingo for awhile a few years ago, as in the whole way down the tree. In the end I wasn't really satisfied, for several reasons:

1. Honestly I'm not sure I remember any of it. I found the retention to be pretty terrible. Maybe that's just me;

2. Answers were often obvious with no knowledge of the material. For example, if something is a question and only one of the answers is a question then that's your answer.

This is a pretty common problem with tests I find. Test-taking is a skill you can learn, which is useful... for passing tests. Back in college I can remember getting 80%+ in French multiple choice tests knowing nothing about French.

Here have been some of my go tos over the years:

- With multiple choices where answers are randomly distributed you'll find each answer letter occurs just about as often. So if you have 100 questions with 4 options each but only have 16/90 As, there's a good chance a lot of the remaining answers are A. Yes, test preparers can assign them uneven weights to defeat this. My experience was almost no one did;

- One question can give you the answer to a completely unrelated question. So in a language test you may need to conjugate a verb and be unsure about it but another question will have that verb conjugated in a sentence;

- So many times I've seen tests where two or more questions are based on the same underlying piece of knowledge that could be one of two things. You answer one question one way and the other one the other so you will get 1 of them right. It's usually better than gambling, which may mean 0. But you may also need to get lucky in which case it might be better to shoot for 2 risking 0 instead.

Honestly I think it's tests like these that taught me a lot about managing probability.

- Lastly, and this one may seem obvious but it's not for some reason: answer every question no matter how dumb your answer may seem. If it's a freeform answer you may get partial marks for something. It costs you nothing to try.

I've occasionally seen multiple choice tests that penalize you for a wrong answer, which requires altering the strategy. I think I've seen this twice, ever, however.

But I digress...

3. Likewise where you had to pick words to fill out a sentence, your choices were so limited the answer tended to be obvious.

4. Around that time Duolingo started the pressure to monetize by adding the hearts system, which basically penalized you for getting anything wrong such that you couldn't continue if you made enough errors. This then created the mental barrier of not wanting to get something wrong and googling it to make sure. Just the act of worrying about it was distraction enough;

5. I found the lesson structure to be haphazard, like the topics had pretty random selections of words.

I feel like it would've been better if they'd focused on the most common words and phrases used conversationally.

i know duo isn’t perfect. but i appreciate it because it’s the only language learning thing that’s gotten me to consistently do it everyday for over a year.

anything else i couldn’t maintain the habit. obviously not going to fluent off but as a novice i do appreciate it.

Question for industry experts. Looking at the financial statement of Duolingo, they seem to have invested more in R&D than building the product (cost of revenue). Is that normal? Or I am interpreting it wrong?

My wife used Duolingo to get most of the way to A1 levels (she then did some free Deutsche Welle stuff in preparation for the exam, but that was it). And for that, it’s good: Getting the basics of a language.

Good for them. I wish it was available when I was taking classes in college.

I wish they went deeper in the grammar and explanatory material - the boring things that make a language work. :-}

I like to see educational apps that are also fun to use (and profitable)!

I’m glad Duolingo made it this far. They’re probably doing more good than many of the FAANGs.

Duolingo doesn't work at all for me, I learn to solve their mini-games without actually learning the language, even after spending a lot of time on it. For some reasons my brain get the information, as proven by the fact that I pass the exercises, but I'm not able to use it in a non-gamified context. Seems to be an issue with the method itself.

Anki + an actual textbook + grammar reference is not fancy and requires a lot of time and commitment but I haven't found anything else that works.

How do we buy into Duoloingo stocks?

They filed for IPO. If this goes through, the stock will likely be listed on some stock exchange, and a stock broker will facilitate your purchase of them.

Thank you.

tl;dr on their financials and growth?

162M revenue in 2020 (vs 71M in 2019) 15M loss in 2020 (vs 14M in 2019)

Quarantine / stay at home orders == time to learn a new language

Oh yeah, covid projects

I bet a lot of people wont unsubscribe and they will offset it with their normal growth

I'm surprised they didn't do this in 20Q4 or 21Q1. it's going to be heard to sustain these growth numbers (revenue wise) as the economy opens up. They can pound non G-7 for user number growth, but that won't help with revenues (much).

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