Huh, I had no idea Duolingo was this successful. Anybody with insight into General Atlantic that could speculate on what changes they could bring? I've read their Wiki page but it's pretty barren, although they seem to be enacting some curious initiatives like: "In 2018 General Atlantic invested in UK investment start-up Greensill in an attempt to challenge traditional lending systems"
I moved abroad in 2018 to a non-english speaking country and just about everyone I met had Duolingo on their phone. You'd be surprised at how many would cough up for a Premium membership just to keep their streak from breaking and making the cute green owl cry.
That said, apparently their biggest market is actually people trying to learn English, which... checks out. In our modern times, english is the lingua franca. There's a bottomless pit of people who want or need to learn it.
It's weird, because it's not very good at understanding the need of the users. If you are Chinese and want to learn English, you have to show the contrast between the grammar-points from a Chinese perspective in an meaningful way.
It really feels like: how can I, as an english developer, teach language? Instead of: -How can I, as an elite teacher, create an app to teach language?
Now that I think about it... is there any teachers with SF-developer-salary? Is there any language-teachers that talk about being the 10x teacher?
When you get on the SF portion of the 101 you used to be able to see their hiring billboard with living in Pittsburgh as a plus. I wonder how how much of their being able to fly under the radar is due to their location.
People who speak English as a first language never grasp the true market demand for language learning since all of their language learning is recreational.
> In this case, an existing investor in Duolingo sold a small portion of their existing stake to allow General Atlantic to have a bigger stake in the company.
Hopefully they'll be able to afford some more support staff.
I sent them an email asking for a simple feature request, and they never even acknowledged receiving it. A simple, "We will pass this along to the appropriate team to consider" would be sufficient.
Otherwise great app! (I am a paying user.)
Edit: If I'm doing something wrong, please let me know. Downvotes are fine, but it doesn't let me know how to improve.
Not sure if that's what happened but as a B2C company we also don't acknowledge any feature or idea requests, and have strong ToS language against submitting any unsolicited ideas. Our CS staff generally deletes/archives them without reading them if they can tell by the title.
The problem we had was that a lot of users submit ideas we've already had or were already working on (I mean if we've been working on a project for 5+ years do they really think this idea didn't cross our mind), but then some of them think they are entitled to a little something for it.
One of them tried to demand some kind of reward once they saw the feature had been implemented (even though we were working on it well before they even mentioned it and it wasn't a groundbreaking change or anything), raised hell like she had been cheated posting screenshots of her unanswered e-mail, and even claimed to get a patent attorney to help her. Fortunately that feature was present in a bunch of other apps so it doesn't look like it went anywhere. I suspect if we had said "We have passed this along" then our situation would be much worse.
Basically with Duolingo's userbase size I am sure they have at least some malicious users.
I'm not one of your downvoters, but since you asked for feedback, I will try and inhabit the mind of one: a complaint about duolingo's non-response to your email isn't terribly interesting. (And neither is a comment replying saying that your complaint isn't very interesting, sorry everyone who sees this before it disappears from the front page)
Duolingo recently introduced a dark pattern where ads are shown after completing every exercise. Before, we were given the option to not see them (or see them for some "gems"). Evaluating Duolingo, I find it is not the most effective language learning app anyways, instead teaching pattern matching for some of the lesser popular languages like Chinese
If I may ask, what do you find more effective? I've dabbled with Duolingo before and am not a paid user, but it seemed to kind of work for me. But open to alternatives (modulo, "move to the country where <x> is the native tongue" type stuff.)
I've been using HelloChinese, and find it a little more effective. With a language Chinese, I find reading/writing to be most challenging, so apps that force a little more immersion I have found most beneficial
Memrise is surprisingly good, I've found. It focuses on phrases, and has short videos with native speakers talking that you learn from. Also has repetition. It's a good app.
Memrise for memorization and colloquial phrases - they film native speakers in native locations, prioritizing everyday conversations over academic study.
Drops for pure vocabulary development - spaced repetition for the first 100/500/1,000 words.
I completed Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese on Duolingo (as in level 5/gold completed) and feel like I know the equivalent of at best a 3-month one-hour-a-week type entry level class.
The stuff that works better for me are actually online classes (for example Coursera has 6-part HSK Mandarin classes) since they are well structured, they have lots of video with natives speaking, and they deal with relatively useful topics. Duolingo taught me to say things like "the book was eaten by the yellow horse" before I could even ask someone how old they were.
That said, I feel like they've been going in the right direction by adding things like duolingo stories. If they expand those and add more interactive stuff it could get more interesting.
My experience with russian or swedish is that the comments give a lot more insight on many excercises and what it is they are trying to teach and the grammar part of things. If you just chug along without taking the time to browse around then very little remains with you. I am not sure this is a compliment to Duolingo though as I am mostly praising the usefulness if their users...
Thanks, I hadn’t thought to try beginner language courses as an alternative to Duolingo and similar apps! (I’ve done an intermediate-level university course on pronunciation which was pretty good.) I agree that Duolingo isn’t very useful — and the last time I tried it, it didn’t really help me understand the grammar either. I don’t like how it encourages superficial out-of-context rote-learning.
It varies a lot based on what language you’re looking at, how much time you want to put in and what level of proficiency you’re at. Your best bet is probably to search for the learn $language subreddit for relevant apps, resources and blogs. (I can give pointers for Japanese.)
Not OP but here’s my personal opinion (and I’m sure many may disagree):
There’s a bunch of parts of learning a language (a few more for Chinese character languages like Japanese) and learning one often doesn’t help you that much with the others, which most people don’t realize:
- recognizing individual kanji characters
- recognizing words formed via combinations of kanji
- reading passages in context
- writing characters
- writing passages
- understanding grammar rules
- forming sounds naturally (people who can speak sound unintelligible because of bad accent, this is not the same skill as speaking - more muscle memory)
- speaking (does not actually require understanding grammar, nor sounding reasonable!)
- listening and understanding verbal language...
- without context
- in a casual context
- in a formal context
- with unspoken, understood context (this and above two require understanding culture)
- domain specific vocabulary (everyday speech is totally different than business, and different from speech with a lot of slang)
- knowing socially appropriate things to say or do based on unspoken context
- and more I probably missed
Learning all of the above is a project that people with decades of study can’t necessarily do all well [1] - so first pick what you want to be able to achieve and focus on that, and also acknowledge that learning a language is going to be a daily practice for the next several years of your life. If you don’t want that, then time spent learning a language will probably be a waste IMO (unless you’re just doing it for a general sense of Japanese language and culture - Duolingo is probably good for that), and I’d advise you to spend your time doing something else.
For me I wanted to be able to speak in casual conversations and everything else is secondary. That said reading passages is useful for understanding how specific grammar and vocabulary is used in context, so that was my second priority. Working in Japanese companies is legendarily terrible so I never had an interest in professional or very formal Japanese (just enough to understand formalities spoken to me when I go to stores or talk with reps at companies).
I’m currently at an intermediate level after ~1.5 years of regular study - good enough for most common social contexts, not good enough for business Japanese or niche topics. Someone deeper than me will certainly have different opinions as well.
- The first ~6 months, I liked the Pimsleur series but your mileage may vary. It’s old school mp3s (used to be cassettes) that teach you not by explaining rules but by giving you scenarios and having you use grammar rules and learn by inferring patterns, responding under time pressure (an mp3 can’t wait for you - this is important!). You will not have a formal understanding of the language but it can get you to saying things pretty quickly, and gets you over your fear of sounding dumb in a foreign language quickly since you’re speaking from the beginning. You learn some basic vocabulary and (sometimes overly formal) grammar, which will make more sense when you do formal study concurrently or afterward. It’s all audio so I just listened and spoke responses aloud to it during my commutes (by train, not caring that I look like a crazy person) and otherwise didn’t change my day to day life.
- WaniKani is great for learning to read individual Kanji and build vocabulary via spaced repetition (not the same as reading passages), worth the cost (every year they do a $100 off sale for lifetime fyi), though they play fast and loose with the meaning and composition of radicals so be aware of that - also its a fixed order, so if you take classes at the same time it will be out of sync with that. The open-source Tsurukame iOS app for it is phenomenal and I use it all the time on trains.
- Skritter is good for learning to write Kanji via spaced repetition (that’s a totally different skill than reading!), but to be honest you don’t need to really lear...
This covered a lot of what I was planning to cover.
+1 on figuring out your goals. A while ago I read an article about this as well as other parts of learning a language but I can’t find it anymore.
I also want to mention that there are heaps of apps, websites and resources available for learning Japanese. (Of course, they aren’t a substitute for actually speaking/reading/whatever it is that you aim to do.) Tofugu has a regular series covering these apps: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-learning-resources-...
There are actually a number of alternatives to WaniKani: kanji garden, kanshudo, kanji koohii and Anki + Remembering the Kanji deck + 5k most common words deck. I think the main benefit of WaniKani over these others is the API — e.g. adjacent apps like Satori Reader can hide furigana based on what you’ve already learnt. I think both the WaniKani and kanji koohii forums are good places to find more help.
subs2srs for Anki and delvin language are similar to FluentU.
If you want to improve your pronunciation look up Dōgen on YouTube or try the Waseda speaking with fluency course.
IMO most app-based services like Duolingo will help you to learn basic grammar rules and random vocabulary but learning a language requires speaking it under time pressure to living humans about changing topics with shifting social context, so no matter how good Duolingo gets it will only get you so far.
In other words, I’ve never met someone who actually attributed their success in learning a language to Duolingo or any app like it. I do hear a lot of beginners who can’t consistently form grammatically correct sentences lavishing it with praise, however.
Old school services like Pimsleur’s tapes, or for more advanced users services like FluentU can help get your listening skills up, and language specific publications like the Chairmans Bao for Chinese can work on your literacy, but ultimately there’s not much substitute for speaking with a teacher or friends (my experience with HelloTalk for connecting you with conversation partners has been mixed - better than nothing but its not like the prolonged exposure & relationship building of a real friend, nor the targeted learning and crisp explanations from a teacher).
But yeah if you’re just getting started I personally enjoyed learning through Pimsleur - no fancy app, just mp3s, and it gets you speaking with time pressure from day one - if speaking is your main goal, this was the fastest way for me to get started, and you learn from exclusively listening to people pronouncing correctly (unlike taking a class, where you’re exposed to everyone but the teacher butchering the language), so I find I sound much better than any of my classmates in class nowadays.
What's weird about this round is that they gave away a board seat to a new outside investor, who has ownership of under < 1% of the company.
Is this common? I thought board seats were prized, and only given in deals where the investor is capitalizing the company and owning something like 20% post-money.
I have never understood the value of an observer seat as you get exposure and concomitant liability without the ability to actually vote on something. Plus observers are not included in the usual D&O package.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 81.5 ms ] threadI moved abroad in 2018 to a non-english speaking country and just about everyone I met had Duolingo on their phone. You'd be surprised at how many would cough up for a Premium membership just to keep their streak from breaking and making the cute green owl cry.
That said, apparently their biggest market is actually people trying to learn English, which... checks out. In our modern times, english is the lingua franca. There's a bottomless pit of people who want or need to learn it.
It really feels like: how can I, as an english developer, teach language? Instead of: -How can I, as an elite teacher, create an app to teach language?
Now that I think about it... is there any teachers with SF-developer-salary? Is there any language-teachers that talk about being the 10x teacher?
Duolingo has done some cool stuff with AI: http://sharedtask.duolingo.com/ they just don't seem to use it?
Looks like it was an earlier investor.
I sent them an email asking for a simple feature request, and they never even acknowledged receiving it. A simple, "We will pass this along to the appropriate team to consider" would be sufficient.
Otherwise great app! (I am a paying user.)
Edit: If I'm doing something wrong, please let me know. Downvotes are fine, but it doesn't let me know how to improve.
The problem we had was that a lot of users submit ideas we've already had or were already working on (I mean if we've been working on a project for 5+ years do they really think this idea didn't cross our mind), but then some of them think they are entitled to a little something for it.
One of them tried to demand some kind of reward once they saw the feature had been implemented (even though we were working on it well before they even mentioned it and it wasn't a groundbreaking change or anything), raised hell like she had been cheated posting screenshots of her unanswered e-mail, and even claimed to get a patent attorney to help her. Fortunately that feature was present in a bunch of other apps so it doesn't look like it went anywhere. I suspect if we had said "We have passed this along" then our situation would be much worse.
Basically with Duolingo's userbase size I am sure they have at least some malicious users.
I'm not one of your downvoters, but since you asked for feedback, I will try and inhabit the mind of one: a complaint about duolingo's non-response to your email isn't terribly interesting. (And neither is a comment replying saying that your complaint isn't very interesting, sorry everyone who sees this before it disappears from the front page)
Drops for pure vocabulary development - spaced repetition for the first 100/500/1,000 words.
The stuff that works better for me are actually online classes (for example Coursera has 6-part HSK Mandarin classes) since they are well structured, they have lots of video with natives speaking, and they deal with relatively useful topics. Duolingo taught me to say things like "the book was eaten by the yellow horse" before I could even ask someone how old they were.
That said, I feel like they've been going in the right direction by adding things like duolingo stories. If they expand those and add more interactive stuff it could get more interesting.
There’s a bunch of parts of learning a language (a few more for Chinese character languages like Japanese) and learning one often doesn’t help you that much with the others, which most people don’t realize:
- recognizing individual kanji characters
- recognizing words formed via combinations of kanji
- reading passages in context
- writing characters
- writing passages
- understanding grammar rules
- forming sounds naturally (people who can speak sound unintelligible because of bad accent, this is not the same skill as speaking - more muscle memory)
- speaking (does not actually require understanding grammar, nor sounding reasonable!)
- listening and understanding verbal language...
- domain specific vocabulary (everyday speech is totally different than business, and different from speech with a lot of slang)- knowing socially appropriate things to say or do based on unspoken context
- and more I probably missed
Learning all of the above is a project that people with decades of study can’t necessarily do all well [1] - so first pick what you want to be able to achieve and focus on that, and also acknowledge that learning a language is going to be a daily practice for the next several years of your life. If you don’t want that, then time spent learning a language will probably be a waste IMO (unless you’re just doing it for a general sense of Japanese language and culture - Duolingo is probably good for that), and I’d advise you to spend your time doing something else.
For me I wanted to be able to speak in casual conversations and everything else is secondary. That said reading passages is useful for understanding how specific grammar and vocabulary is used in context, so that was my second priority. Working in Japanese companies is legendarily terrible so I never had an interest in professional or very formal Japanese (just enough to understand formalities spoken to me when I go to stores or talk with reps at companies).
I’m currently at an intermediate level after ~1.5 years of regular study - good enough for most common social contexts, not good enough for business Japanese or niche topics. Someone deeper than me will certainly have different opinions as well.
- The first ~6 months, I liked the Pimsleur series but your mileage may vary. It’s old school mp3s (used to be cassettes) that teach you not by explaining rules but by giving you scenarios and having you use grammar rules and learn by inferring patterns, responding under time pressure (an mp3 can’t wait for you - this is important!). You will not have a formal understanding of the language but it can get you to saying things pretty quickly, and gets you over your fear of sounding dumb in a foreign language quickly since you’re speaking from the beginning. You learn some basic vocabulary and (sometimes overly formal) grammar, which will make more sense when you do formal study concurrently or afterward. It’s all audio so I just listened and spoke responses aloud to it during my commutes (by train, not caring that I look like a crazy person) and otherwise didn’t change my day to day life.
- WaniKani is great for learning to read individual Kanji and build vocabulary via spaced repetition (not the same as reading passages), worth the cost (every year they do a $100 off sale for lifetime fyi), though they play fast and loose with the meaning and composition of radicals so be aware of that - also its a fixed order, so if you take classes at the same time it will be out of sync with that. The open-source Tsurukame iOS app for it is phenomenal and I use it all the time on trains.
- Skritter is good for learning to write Kanji via spaced repetition (that’s a totally different skill than reading!), but to be honest you don’t need to really lear...
I also want to mention that there are heaps of apps, websites and resources available for learning Japanese. (Of course, they aren’t a substitute for actually speaking/reading/whatever it is that you aim to do.) Tofugu has a regular series covering these apps: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-learning-resources-...
There are actually a number of alternatives to WaniKani: kanji garden, kanshudo, kanji koohii and Anki + Remembering the Kanji deck + 5k most common words deck. I think the main benefit of WaniKani over these others is the API — e.g. adjacent apps like Satori Reader can hide furigana based on what you’ve already learnt. I think both the WaniKani and kanji koohii forums are good places to find more help.
subs2srs for Anki and delvin language are similar to FluentU.
If you want to improve your pronunciation look up Dōgen on YouTube or try the Waseda speaking with fluency course.
In other words, I’ve never met someone who actually attributed their success in learning a language to Duolingo or any app like it. I do hear a lot of beginners who can’t consistently form grammatically correct sentences lavishing it with praise, however.
Old school services like Pimsleur’s tapes, or for more advanced users services like FluentU can help get your listening skills up, and language specific publications like the Chairmans Bao for Chinese can work on your literacy, but ultimately there’s not much substitute for speaking with a teacher or friends (my experience with HelloTalk for connecting you with conversation partners has been mixed - better than nothing but its not like the prolonged exposure & relationship building of a real friend, nor the targeted learning and crisp explanations from a teacher).
But yeah if you’re just getting started I personally enjoyed learning through Pimsleur - no fancy app, just mp3s, and it gets you speaking with time pressure from day one - if speaking is your main goal, this was the fastest way for me to get started, and you learn from exclusively listening to people pronouncing correctly (unlike taking a class, where you’re exposed to everyone but the teacher butchering the language), so I find I sound much better than any of my classmates in class nowadays.
Is this common? I thought board seats were prized, and only given in deals where the investor is capitalizing the company and owning something like 20% post-money.