Apple named Duolingo - a piece of language-learning software - its 2013 iPhone app of the year.
As of December 2013, Duolingo offers Latin American Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Italian courses for English speakers, as well as American English for Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Turkish, and Hungarian speakers. It is available on the Web, iOS, and Android platforms.
"The majority of people in the world want to learn English because it may get them a job, and learning usually requires money. Duolingo does not cost a cent; it's free to download; and will remain this way for the long term," says Duolingo co-founder Luis von Ahn.
The key to Duolingo's success lies in gamification and repetition. The app transforms the study into an amusing diversion, replete with points, letterheads and video game "lives". At the end of each successfully completed round, the user is rewarded with a trumpet fanfare and sense of accomplishment.
At the end of some lessons, the app asks users if they would like to practice by translating a real-world document, like a Buzzfeed article, for example. By meddling together enough stabs at this task from high-level Duolingo users, the app can render accurate translations.
So far, Duolingo has contracts with Buzzfeed and CNN to translate stories from English into languages such as Spanish, French and Portuguese. This service is earning it a hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but Von Ahn predicts he will be adding a raft of new clients soon.
"The language market is huge, worth $30 billion a year, a project like this requires a number of participants and Duolingo has them. Being named app of the year in 2013 took us from 16 million to 20 million users in a week," he says.
"The app draws more than 100 000 new users a day. This not only keeps the translation service humming, it helps the app learn how to teach languages better.
Von Ahn says he cannot find satisfying data to demonstrate the most effective method of teaching language, so he A/B tests various methods in the app to see what works best.
"If we want to know whether to teach adjectives or plurals first, we do an A/B test set, measure which does better, and then start using the winning method for all users. Through that we've modified our teaching methods quite a bit."
Duolingo also associates photos with nouns to aid users' memory; reaching the endpoint of the app means the user will have roughly achieved B2 level ("upper intermediate user") in the common European framework of reference for languages.
"Users will understand what they hear very well, be able to read books and watch movies in the language that they've learnt," he concludes.
Share