Duolingo Blog

i don't know why people are taking Duolinguo and relatives as the definitive course to learn a language... they even cite at their FAQ about the need of going outside the app if you want 'fluency' some people are quite fine learning a limited number of phrases to lurk in a country. a great part of communication among humans also happens with the body/eyes. no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages [0] https://blog.duolingo.com/can-duolingo-make-me-fluent/ edit: Duolinguo also is nice (and make a funny non-invasive joke) if you are using something like uBlock!

Hi Jztan, glad you're exploring this space! I'm the co-founder of MobileBoost, and I'd love to introduce our product, GPT Driver (https://www.mobileboost.io/). We started two years ago with an AI-native approach, which is particularly useful for handling dynamic flows, hard-to-locate UI elements, and testing across multiple platforms and languages. Our main objective is to reduce test maintenance effort. Duolingo recently shared their experience adopting our tooling: https://blog.duolingo.com/reduced-regression-testing/ We offer: a Web Studio – A no-setup-required platform with all tooling preconfigured. SDKs – Directly integrate with existing test suites (Appium, XCUI, Espresso). Happy to answer any questions!

They will target certain demographics in ways that their lawyers can argue are legal such as giving more interviews to Grace Hopper attendees or schools with favorable demographics [1]. This is a great way to poach minorities from different companies without moving bringing any minorities to tech in any significant capacity. This is probably why men are increasingly going to Grace Hopper [2]. [1] https://blog.duolingo.com/how-duolingo-achieved-a-5050-gender-ratio-fo… [2] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/05/1203845886/women-tech-conference-men-gr…

There is a Duolingo for Music, worth a look! https://blog.duolingo.com/music-course/

800+ day streak here and top 2% user according to last years statistics. I have taught myself Spanish using just Duolingo to a pretty decent level where I can now follow along with a decent amount of TV. I have been using the new path for the last few months and can categorically state that it is much more effective for learning. Duolingo are aligning themselves with proper educational frameworks, baking in scientifically proven spaced repetition and paving the way for more diverse modes of communication such as email conversations and stories with interconnected plot lines. More information can be found in these blog posts: https://blog.duolingo.com/new-duolingo-home-screen-design/ https://blog.duolingo.com/how-are-duolingo-courses-evolving/ https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-advanced-stories/

I've been reading similar anecdotes lately trying to gauge whether I could reach B1 in a Romance language in a few months of study. What I've found is a lot of pessimism about how well Duolingo teaches you a language, with many arguing it's a waste of time altogether. I'm surprised that could be the case though. They have data from millions of language learners processing through their lessons, and looking at their making-of blog (https://making.duolingo.com), the product seems data-driven. They do A/B testing to see the efficacy of new features they roll out. Aside from that, they combine reading, writing, speaking, and listening exercises, and have made some innovative features like chat bots. One language tree includes a few thousand words. If anything, I would expect Duolingo to be vastly more effective than other methods.

> English is far from the best candidate. It's also the only candidate. English is the most commonly learned foreign language by far[1], and I don't foresee any major economic movement to change that. English has a momentum no other language have ever had. There is no language that has a larger body of knowledge online than English. Virtually all cross-border hobbyist communities, expert platforms, etc (eg Stack Overflow) are in English. People all over the world use English to communicate, even when nobody in the group has English as their native language. I was a member of a European student network called BEST, which had 0 member universities in English-speaking places and still the entire thing was in (bad) English. The entire EU is running on English informally, and I bet formally too a few decades from now (and not because we like the Irish so much). My startup has some customers in the UAE, in India and in Pakistan - their sites main (and sometimes only) language is English. The list goes on and on. Chinese would've had a chance if they weren't so isolationist. Call me when the first Chinese language TV show gets popular outside China and Taiwan. I bet English language TV shows will be popular in China long before then (if they aren't already - I honestly don't know). Like it or not, English has won. [1] There's a bunch of sources, I liked this Duolingo post: http://making.duolingo.com/which-countries-study-which-languages-and-w…

Language encodes what people need it to encode to be useful. I heard of an example of colors--there are some languages that don't even have a word for blue. https://blog.duolingo.com/color-words-around-the-world/

According to Duo themselves its already included in duolingo max -- https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/

Seems like Duolingo apparently uses both? Or perhaps one of these is out of date. >As Duolingo’s products grow and evolve to reach even more learners around the world, Lottie animations help us keep users engaged, delighted, and always learning.[0] >We thought the answer might lie in an alternative to a game engine —something that can help us take a limited number of assets and turn those into a virtually unlimited number of combinations. This is how we learned about Rive![1] [0] https://lottiefiles.com/case-studies/duolingo [1] https://blog.duolingo.com/world-character-visemes/

This blog post suggests they are also trying to represent the learner. The way you look doesn't dictate the languages you can learn. https://blog.duolingo.com/lgbtq-representation-in-duolingo-stories-and…

Duolingo courses are no longer created by volunteers. They stopped the volunteer program in 2021 [1], right around the time they increased monetization efforts. They offered part-time jobs and a $4 million reward fund to previous volunteers when closing the program, which I thought was pretty kind. [1] https://blog.duolingo.com/ending-honoring-our-volunteer-contributor-pr…

IIRC their demographics are heavily skewed towards younger people. In US/Japan etc. the largest age-group of learners is 13-22 - Found the source: https://blog.duolingo.com/dear-duolingo-how-does-language-learning-dif…

Just in case some people don’t get the joke: https://blog.duolingo.com/french-accent-marks-pronunciation/

Small companies can try lots of interesting things, and they may or may not work out for them. Gravity Payments famously has their $70k minimum salary[0]. Duolingo insisted on gender parity in CS hires[1]. But if Amazon or Microsoft tried the same thing, it might not work. I’m more interested in what geopay is going to look like industry-wide than what one small company is doing, but they might make an interesting data point. [0]: https://gravitypayments.com/thegravityof70k/ [1]: https://blog.duolingo.com/how-duolingo-achieved-a-5050-gender-ratio-fo…

Irrelevant nitpick: "gender" in linguistics means "category". Objects in grammatically gendered languages are rarely/never categorized as "manly" or "effeminate"; they're, for example, categorized as "animate" or "inanimate". [1] [1] https://blog.duolingo.com/what-is-grammatical-gender/

In case anybody is interested, there's a very good explanation of some language-related political subtleties in https://blog.duolingo.com/ukraine-language/

Driven by many refugees that sought asylum in Sweden, I believe. https://blog.duolingo.com/our-commitments-to-helping-refugees/

They started adding B1 level content a couple years ago, although I agree with the overall point that it's probably not going to get you there on its own. https://blog.duolingo.com/how-are-duolingo-courses-evolving/

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-contributor-pr…

On a side note, my brother works at Duolingo and wrote an article detailing a very similar migration (from Python to Scala) here: http://making.duolingo.com/rewriting-duolingos-engine-in-scala and lists very similar reasons for the switch.

People are already using Swift in production. In fact, they suffered through the slow compiles, etc of the older Xcodes. http://making.duolingo.com/real-world-swift I wouldn't write any new code in Objective C. Swift is just a better language to work with. 12 months from now, you'll be much happier that you wrote 25k lines of Swift in 2015 instead of Objective C.

Duolingo | Full-time | Multiple roles | $177K-$240K for NY roles | NY and London | Hybrid Our mission is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally accessible. Our culture is eng-driven, friendly, and very data-driven thanks to our large userbase. Check out our blog to see what engineering at Duolingo can look like: https://blog.duolingo.com/hub/engineering/ Tech stack: (frontends) Swift/Kotlin/TypeScript, (backend) Python/Kotlin/Postgres/Dynamo, (infra) AWS/k8s/Terraform. We're always hiring for engineers. A few roles below: Senior Engineering Manager, Chess (NY) https://careers.duolingo.com/jobs/8385137002 Senior Android Engineer (NY) https://careers.duolingo.com/jobs/8217266002 Senior iOS Software Engineer (NY) https://careers.duolingo.com/jobs/8318257002 Engineering Director (London) https://careers.duolingo.com/jobs/8444624002 Senior Gameplay Programmer (London) https://careers.duolingo.com/jobs/8424809002 Base salary: $177-240K for the NY-based roles, unsure about the London-based roles. Perks: free lunch, 2-week winter break + 20 days of flexible time off.

They = Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic --- ## 1. “They all kept the triconsonantal root system — where word meaning is based on three core consonants (like K-T-B = “write” → Hebrew katav, Arabic kataba, Aramaic ktav).” *Source evidence:* * The article “Triliteral Roots / Consonantal Roots” states that many Semitic languages (including Arabic, Hebrew) have roots typically made of three consonants (triliteral) and that words are formed by inserting vowels, etc. ([Transparent Blogs][1]) * A source says: “Both Hebrew and Arabic rely on a triliteral root system, meaning words are formed from three core consonants. Example of the root K-T-B…” ([Biblical Hebrew][2]) * Another general description: “The roots of verbs and most nouns in the Semitic languages are characterized as a sequence of consonants ... such abstract consonantal roots are used…” ([Wikipedia][3]) So this claim is well supported. *Arabic translation of the claim:* > احتفظت جميعها بنظام الجذر الثلاثي الحروف — حيث يعتمد معنى الكلمة على ثلاثة حروف صامتة أساسية (مثل ك-ت-ب = “كتب/يكتب” → العبرية כתב (katav)، العربية كتب (kataba)، الآرامية כתَب (ktav)). *Hebrew translation of the claim:* > כולן שמרו על שיטת השורש התלת-עברי — שבה משמעות המילה מבוססת על שלושה עיצורים ל־(למשל כ־ת־ב = “כתב” → עברית כתב ( katav ), ערבית كتب ( kataba ), ארמית כתב ( ktav )). *Citations (for this claim):* * Semitic linguistics: “The roots of verbs and most nouns in the Semitic languages are characterized as a sequence of consonants …”…

OpenAI's GPT4 https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/

They already have https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/

Its only available on ios at the moment https://incubator.duolingo.com/courses/ja/en/status hideki Japanese beta course available on iOS! 15 hours ago We are thrilled to announce that our Japanese course is now available on iOS. It's coming to Android in a few weeks, and web will be next! Find more details at https://www.duolingo.com/comment/22676285 http://making.duolingo.com/how-we-invented-a-new-way-to-teach-one-of-t… https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/6bxr2v/i_am_luis_von_ahn_coinve… https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2017/05/18/japanese-finally-…