Duolingo ( DEW-oh-LING-goh) is a freemium language-learning platform that includes a language-learning website and app, as well as a digital language proficiency assessment exam. Their goal is to give everyone access to a private tutor experience through technology. As of November 2016, the language-learning website and app offer 68 different language courses across 28 languages, with 8 additional courses in beta and 15 additional courses in development. The app has about 200 million registered users across the world.
Video Duolingo
History
The project was started at the end of 2009 in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn (creator of reCAPTCHA) and his graduate student Severin Hacker, and then developed along with Antonio Navas, Vicki Cheung, Marcel Uekermann, Brendan Meeder, Hector Villafuerte, and Jose Fuentes.
Inspiration for Duolingo came from two places. Luis Von Ahn wanted to create another program that served two purposes in one, what he calls a "twofer". Duolingo originally did this by teaching its users a foreign language while having them translate simple phrases in documents, though the translation feature has since been removed.
Von Ahn was born in Guatemala and saw how expensive it was for people in his community to learn English. Severin Hacker (born in Zug, Switzerland), co-founder of Duolingo, and Von Ahn believe that "free education will really change the world" and wanted to supply the people an outlet to do so.
The project was originally sponsored by Luis von Ahn's MacArthur fellowship and a National Science Foundation grant. Additional funding was later received in the form of investments from Union Square Ventures and actor Ashton Kutcher's firm, A-Grade Investments.
Duolingo started its private beta on November 30, 2011, and accumulated a waiting list of more than 300,000 users. On June 19, 2012, Duolingo launched for the general public. Due to popular interest, Duolingo has received many investments including a $20 million Series C round of investment led by Kleiner Caufield & Byers and a $45 million Series D round of investment led by Google Capital. Duolingo has 95 staff members, of whom many were Google employees, and operates from an office in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of East Liberty.
On November 13, 2012, Duolingo released their iOS app through the iTunes App Store. The application is a free download and is compatible with most iPhone, iPod and iPad devices. On May 29, 2013, Duolingo released their Android app, which was downloaded about a million times in the first three weeks and quickly became the #1 education app in the Google Play store. As of 2017, the company had a total funding of USD $108.3 million. Duolingo received a fifth-round $25 million in July 2017 from Drive Capital, with the funds directed toward creating initiatives such as TinyCards and Duolingo Labs.
Maps Duolingo
Business model
Duolingo has a freemium business model and it uses advertising in both its Android and iPhone apps. Duolingo courses include periodic advertisements which users can remove by paying a subscription fee. To earn money, Duolingo originally employed a crowd sourced business model, where the content came from organizations (such as CNN and BuzzFeed) that pay Duolingo to translate it. These companies would send their news stories (written in English) to Duolingo, and the application's users would help translate the story in order to practice their English skills. Multiple users would translate the same sentences, and then software would compare the results to decide on the most accurate translation. After many sentences are put through this process, they are combined to create a translation of an entire document. The company would then pay Duolingo for this translation. This business model was later discontinued, after it was decided the industry was too competitive (price-wise) with other services like Gengo and rapidly advancing neural machine translation technology, too time-consuming, and too distant from the company's core goals.
In July 2014, Duolingo started a language certification service, Test Center, as a new business model. As of September 2017, 50% of Duolingo's revenue came from ads and 48% came from in-app purchases, with the remaining 2% derived from the Duolingo English Test.
As of 2017, Duolingo runs ads on both its mobile and desktop applications. Users have the option to subscribe to Duolingo Plus, allowing them to download lessons for offline use and to skip ads. Duolingo Plus follows other attempts at making money from users, such as Duolingo's charging $4.99 to repair a broken streak. As of April 11, 2018, one month of Duolingo Plus costs $9.99, 6 months cost $7.99 per month, and 12 months cost $6.99 per month or about $84 per year.
Duolingo is partially funded by investors interested in language technology, such as Union Square Venture Partners ($3.3 million in 2011), New Enterprise Associates ($15 million), Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers ($20 million), Google Capital ($45 million), A-Grade Investments, Ashton Kutcher, and Tim Ferris.
Language courses
Courses for English speakers
As of April 11, 2018, 31 courses are available to the public in English, three of which are constructed languages and two of which are fictional languages. Ordered by number of learners, they are:
Five courses for English speakers are currently in development (ordered by progression percentage towards completion):
Languages in beta are available on the website but not in the app. Duolingo currently offer 2 fantasy languages, Klingon, and High Valarian.
Catalan and Guarani are available as a second language for Spanish speakers. Duolingo offers language courses for speakers of languages other than English, but all available languages offer at least English as a course.
Courses available in other languages
As of March 6, 2018, the following languages are available to speakers of languages other than English:
Duolingo Incubator
The Duolingo Incubator is where volunteers contribute to improve Duolingo's language courses. To become a Course Contributor, you must fill out an application, and in order to do so, you must meet the following criteria:
- Bilingual. You have to be fluent in both languages to contribute accurate learning content. You don't have to be a native speaker, but you should write at the level of one.
- Committed. It takes hours each week to make real progress on a course.
- Passionate about languages and helping the world. This is what will keep you going.
As of April 11, 2018, there are 95 languages for various speakers available in the three "incubation phases" in the Duolingo Incubator.
Products
Duolingo provides written lessons and dictation, with speaking practice for more advanced users. It has a gamified skill tree that users can progress through and a vocabulary section where learned words can be practiced. Duolingo launched Duolingo Test Center on July 22, 2014, now known simply as the Duolingo English Test (DET). It is an online language certification test that can be taken from home. Duolingo has been used in schools. For example, in Costa Rica and Guatemala, Duolingo has been used in public schools as a pilot project run by the government. After select users were invited to a closed beta test, Duolingo released the app for iOS devices on July 19, 2016, for desktop on March 2, 2017 and for Android on August 30, 2017.
As of April 2018, Duolingo no longer uses a spaced repetition system.
Duolingo English Test
Duolingo provides its own version of an English test designed to test users' proficiency in the English language. They boast "scientifically-proven language certification" that is "extremely secure with remote proctoring, and the scores are extremely precise." The test can be taken at home in about half an hour and costs $49 USD. As of April 11, 2018, 267 educational programs "are authorized to receive Duolingo English Test scores and interviews, and may therefore make use of the Duolingo English Test in their admissions evaluations."
The Duolingo English Test is designed to assess real-world language ability, by measuring reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. Each test taker's proficiency is reported as a holistic score on a scale from 0-100. The scores align to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), an international standard of language proficiency. The Duolingo English Test provides users with a score comparison scale and table so a test-takers can compare their scores to that of another language proficiency test. The test scores may be interpreted as follows:
- 0 - 10 Beginner Abilities: Can only understand very basic words or phrases in the language. Example: Can read public road signs, ask for basic directions, and fill out a simple form.
- 11 - 30 Elementary Abilities: Can deal with simple, straightforward information and express themselves in familiar contexts. Example: Can have a short, coherent dialogue on topics of interest, but not extended conversations.
- 31 - 50 Intermediate Abilities: Can understand the main points of concrete speech or writing on routine matters such as work and school. Can handle most situations that would come up while traveling where the language is spoken. Can describe experiences, ambitions, opinions, and plans, although with some awkwardness or hesitation. Example: Can open a bank account, if the procedure is fairly straightforward.
- 51 - 70 Advanced Abilities: Can fulfill most communication goals, even on unfamiliar topics. Can understand the main ideas of both concrete and abstract writing, and interact with native speakers fairly painlessly. Example: Can show visitors around and lead a detailed guided tour of a place.
- 71 - 90 Proficient Abilities: Can understand a variety of demanding texts and conversations, also grasping implicit or figurative meaning that is hidden. Can use language flexibly and effectively for most social, academic, and professional purposes. Example: Can get and hold onto his or her turn to speak at a party, or respond to interrogating questions with little or no hesitation.
- 91 - 100 Expert Abilities: Can understand virtually anything heard or read, even intellectually demanding material such as an academic lecture or a book on philosophy. Can use the language fluently and spontaneously in a way that can even be more advanced than an average native speaker. Example: Can scan long texts for relevant information, and differentiate finer shades of meaning in complex social and professional situations.
A study conducted by Feifei Ye in May of 2014 concluded that participants' scores on the Duolingo English Test correlated substantially with their TOEFL total scores, and moderately with TOEFL section scores, with higher correlations for the TOEFL Speaking and Writing sections. This provides criterion-related evidence of validity of the Duolingo test scores. Participants' scores on the first Duolingo English Test correlated highly with their scores on a second test two weeks later, indicating that Duolingo test scores are reliable with a good test-retest reliability coefficient. Another study, published by Lynn Ishikawa, Kelley Hall, and Burr Settles on June 29, 2016, concluded that scores from the Duolingo English Test were significantly correlated with on-campus faculty assessments of English ability for incoming international students and that DET scores significantly predict faculty's decisions to place certain students into academic English support classes.
Duolingo Labs
Duolingo Labs is where users can find and try out various experiments the Duolingo team is working on. As of April 11, 2018, Duolingo Labs includes the following three Projects:
- Duolingo Stories, which use dialogue to help intermediate and advanced learners improve their reading, listening, and comprehension skills. So far, Stories are available in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese.
- Duolingo Events, which allow users to connect with other Duolingo learners in real life and practice communication skills through meeting members of the Duolingo community. As of April 17, 2018, there are 84 language groups in North America, 22 language groups in Central / South America, 82 language groups in Europe, 18 language groups in the Middle East / Africa, and 20 language groups in Asia Pacific with the opportunity to apply to host a language group in an area that does not currently have one.
- Duolingo Podcast, which delivers real-life stories in easy-to-understand Spanish with English narration. As of April 11, 2018, there are 8 podcast episodes, the most recent of which having been added January 31, 2018.
Tinycards
Tinycards is Duolingo's foray into a flashcard app. Pushing past the limits of solely language learning, Tinycards are flashcards that aim to help users memorize anything. Language learning decks are preloaded with vocabulary from Duolingo language courses (specifically French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish), but users can use and submit their own decks. Tinycards works in a similar fashion to Duolingo: a user is shown a flashcard with the new word on one side and definition on the other, and is later asked to recall the information, either with a multiple choice question or by writing the word or its English translation.
Infrastructure
Duolingo uses many services in the Amazon Web Services suite of products, 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 server backend is written in the programming language Python. A component called the Session Generator was rewritten in Scala by 2017. The frontend is written in Backbone.js and Mustache. Duolingo provides a single-page web application for desktop computer users and also smart phone applications on Android (both Google Play Store and Amazon Appstore), iOS App Store) and Windows Phone platforms. 20% of traffic comes from desktop users and 80% from mobile app users.
Recognition and 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. Also, 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.
See also
- Computer-assisted language learning
- Language education
- Language pedagogy
- List of flashcard software
- List of language self-study programs
References
External links
- Official website
- An extract from a Q&A with the founder of Duolingo about their plans for 2017
Source of article : Wikipedia
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