DULINGO’S IN GENERAL

1. Where is the Duolingo office? 5541 Walnut Street. Pittsburgh, PA.

2. How effective is Duolingo in learning a language?
There are a lot of anecdotal and marketing claims about the effectiveness of different language learning
methods, but there is usually little scientific evidence to back the claims. We wanted to change that,
so we commissioned a study to find out how well people learn a language on Duolingo.
Here’s a link to the final report: http://static.duolingo.com/s3/DuolingoReport_Final.pdf
Some interesting points:
a. On average, it takes 34 hours of Duolingo to learn the equivalent of one semester of college. As a
college professor I'd say that a semester course generally takes a lot more than 34 hours of work
(At Carnegie Mellon the expectation is that a semester course takes 9 hours per week for 14
weeks).
b. The study was done by an external research team that previously evaluated the effectiveness of
other methods such as Rosetta Stone. It is of note that it took 55 hours of study with Rosetta Stone
to reach the equivalent of one semester of college. So Rosetta Stone costs more, but it teaches less.

I'm pretty happy that the data shows Duolingo is effective, but I'd say we can be way more effective,
and we'll continue working on the product until we run out of energy :)

3. What advantages does Duolingo offer over Rosetta Stone?

First, Duolingo is totally free. No ads, no subscriptions, no 5-easy-payments plan. Rosetta Stone costs
hundreds of dollars.
Second, there is scientific evidence that Duolingo can be more effective. An independent study was
done by a research team that previously evaluated the effectiveness of Rosetta Stone. They found that
it takes students on Duolingo 34 hours to learn the equivalent of a one-semester university course,
whereas it takes 55 hours with Rosetta Stone. Here is a link to the study:
http://static.duolingo.com/s3/DuolingoReport_Final.pdf
And of course there are other differences that are harder to quantify: Duolingo has game mechanics, a
5-star mobile app, and since it doesn't come in a CD-ROM, we're able to improve it on a daily basis.
4. When is Duolingo coming out with its Android app? In May 2013!
5. What is the history of Duolingo? How did it get started?
I'm writing this exactly 1 year after Duolingo launched -- almost to the hour :)
The whole thing started as an academic project at Carnegie Mellon between me and my PhD student
Severin Hacker. I had just sold my second company to Google, and we both wanted to work on
something related to education. Education is very general, so we decided to concentrate on one kind
that is in huge demand everywhere (except the US): language education.
It turns out there are over 1.2 billion people learning a new language around the world. Now, the
majority of these people, like 800 million of them, are learning English, and don’t have very much
money. In fact, the reason they are learning a language is to be able to get a better job, or a job at all.
 The majority are not learning French because they want to get ready for a trip to Paris over the summer.
They’re learning a language to get a job at a call center.
Here’s the crazy part about this. There’s a huge number of people that want to learn English, and most
of them can’t pay, but the ways to learn a new language typically require them paying, because
somebody has to make money. It’s either that you learn a language in middle or high school, which
means you're pretty wealthy because you go to a school that offers foreign languages; or you learn it
in college or adult classes, in which case you’re also pretty wealthy because you can pay for those; or
you buy some sort of software like Rosetta Stone or Open English, in which case you have $1,000 to
spare.
So, the largest part of the market was not being addressed because there was no great way to make
money from them. Most people who wanted to learn a language couldn't really afford the best ways
of doing it.
We wanted to have a way to teach people languages for free. But not just free. We wanted to have the
best quality of language education, and offer it for free.
But making the best language learning system (or the best of anything) requires a lot of money. You
have to hire the best people to develop it, improve it, and keep it alive. This is why students typically
have to pay: somebody has to finance the operation. So the question became: how do we fund the best
language learning system while keeping it 100% free to the students.
And this where an idea similar to reCAPTCHA came to us: Is there a way in which we can generate
something valuable out of the mental energy spent by students learning a language? And it turns out
there is, and that’s what Duolingo does. Instead of paying tuition or a subscription fee, our students
actively translate a range of documents for organizations as they practice what they have learned.
Things like news articles, websites, Wikipedia, and blog posts. They hone their language skills with
real world applications, which gives their effort a purpose and offers an opportunity they previously
couldn’t afford.
It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement for both parties. Our students receive a high-quality, completely
free, language education, and organizations are given translation services powered by the students.
One year out, we have 4 million people across the globe learning a language for free and growing by
the day.
6. Is Duolingo looking at other ways to help its users practice languages? How can it immerse its users
to help them learn languages?
Yes, we are going to add other types of exercises soon! Expect a lot more conversation this year.
7. What is the business model of Duolingo? We created Duolingo to give everyone free access to
language education and to remove barriers from the lives of people trying to better themselves. But
we're not a non-profit, and believe in making Duolingo self-sustainable so it doesn't have to rely on
donations.
There are two parts to our revenue model. First, we make money by selling translations to
companies like CNN and Buzzfeed. So, for example, they write their news in English, and send
 it to us. We then give it to our students, who in order to practice their English skills, help
translate this news to their native language. Then we give the student translations back to e.g.
CNN and they pay us for having translated them.
The second and most important part is our new app, the Duolingo Test Center. We’re now giving
everyone the chance to prove that they have language skills without having to pay the $250
normally charged by the existing proficiency tests such as the TOEFL or the IELTS. Our tests
will cost $20 (it’s free now, in Beta), and will help our educational app stay afloat. Here's a video
explaining this:
8. Can you learn French and Spanish at the same time on Duolingo? Yes :) You can learn every language
we support at once, all for free!
9. Are MOOCs the future of education in 20 years or an intermediate thing?
I’m not a huge fan of MOOCs as they exist today. Live lectures typically suck, and watching them
online makes them even worse. Even if we were to solve all the practical problems of watching these
videos by giving everyone access to high-speed internet to enable proper streaming, by ensuring the
sound is recorded well, or even going farther to make the content of lectures themselves more lively
with film crews, screenwriters and actors, I think the approach is fundamentally wrong.
Classroom lectures are an offline solution to a problem that doesn’t need to exist online. Before the
industrial revolution, most education happened through the apprenticeship model. If you wanted to
learn how to become a butcher, you’d become the apprentice of a butcher and learn everything you
could from them. As the need arose to educate more and more people and to standardize what
everybody knew, we figured that we could get economies of scale by putting 20, 50, or even 200
people in a room to listen to a lecture. Yes, these 30 people may come in with different amounts of
background knowledge, and some may be smarter than others, but treating them all the same was a
major innovation because it allowed the global educational system to scale and produce today’s
workforce. With technology, however, we have other ways to provide scalable access to education.

We know personalized one-to-one tutors produce significantly better outcomes than classroom
lectures. One of the most famous results in educational psychology is “Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem,”
which shows that the average student tutored one-to-one performs two standard deviations better than
students who learn via conventional classroom methods – that is, they perform better than 98% of the
students in the control class! And this makes sense: teachers typically aim the lecture at some sort of
“median student,” which means that those above the median are not learning very efficiently, and those
below are often confused.
Instead of making crappy recordings of something known to be suboptimal, we should be scaling and
automating the best known teaching method: one-to-one tutors. This is what we’re trying to do with
Duolingo by attributing the following 3 characteristics to our teaching method:
 - Active, not passive. Instead of falling asleep while listening to a monotone lecture, Duolingo users
learn by doing. Daydreaming is impossible in a context where you’re required to interact to move
forward.
- Personalized. Because users learn by answering exercises every step of the way, we get a signal
about how well they’re learning. For example, we can tell if somebody always messes up verb
conjugations in the past tense, if they can read but not understand the spoken language, or even if
every time they see the word for “chicken” they take an extra 500 milliseconds to answer. We use
all of this information (from more than 6 billion exercises per month) to generate unique lessons
for each user.
- Fun. Duolingo was designed to feel like a game from the very start. Students have to pass levels
in order to unlock new skills, they can earn virtual currency to “buy” virtual goods, etc. MOOCs
typically have horrible retention rates, whereas Duolingo doesn’t, and it’s largely because people
like playing games.
Even though Duolingo only teaches one subject (foreign languages), it has more active users than all
the major MOOC platforms combined – and they teach hundreds of subjects!
10. What are Luis Von Ahn's future plans for Duolingo? In the short term, we’re working on a really cool
way to teach conversation in other languages. I can’t mention too many details, but we’re very excited
about it.
We’re also working on bringing Duolingo to schools. We’ve met a number of inspiring teachers
looking to make a difference in their students’ lives and have seen the effect that Duolingo can have
as a classroom tool. We created Duolingo for Schools last year and already 100,000 classrooms are
using it – without any paid marketing, just word of mouth. The feedback we’ve gotten is inspiring,
and we’re developing progressively more tools to help teachers reach their goals.
In the longer term, we want everybody to have access to all types of education of the highest quality.
We started with languages, but we won’t stop there.
The educational system throughout the world is pretty broken. For example, in my country, Guatemala,
only 24% of the people who graduate from high school have the required reading and writing level,
and only 7% have the required math level. On top of that only about 60% of the people actually
graduate high school. And even in countries like the US, after learning math five days a week for
almost twelve years, the most advanced thing most high school graduates can do is to add fractions.
We think we can help by developing intelligent apps that teach the most important subjects: reading
and writing, math, physics, etc. What’s particularly exciting is that for the first time in history, we can
observe how millions of people learn and improve based on this data – this was impossible until very
recently. So while there are conflicting theories about how to teach something better – what to
introduce first, how to broach a particular topic, etc. – we can actually test these theories at a large
scale and help people learn more information in less time. And just as importantly, for the first time
we can offer access to education in a medium that can reach billions of people at relatively little cost
(smartphones).
11. Why did Duolingo move from translation to certification for monetizing?
Initially, our business model was based on crowdsourcing. Companies such as Buzzfeed and CNN
uploaded news stories that users then had the option of translating as a way to strengthen the skills
they learned on Duolingo. We would then return the translated documents to e.g. CNN, and they’d
pay us for having translated their content (here’s my TED talk (
http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration?language=en ) on this
idea).

It was very clever, but since then, we’ve decided not to scale the translations business further. The
main reason is that our aim is to be an education, not a translations company, and we realized that if
we kept going in the direction we were going in, we’d eventually morph into a translations company
because that’s where the funds were coming from.

Therefore, we decided to develop a profitable product that was far more in line with our mission:
English language certification. During the first couple of years of Duolingo, thousands of users wrote
to us saying they were thankful for the opportunity to learn English for free, but that to prove that they
speak English they had to take a standardized test like the TOEFL or IELTS. These tests are required
to be accepted to universities, or to get jobs at international corporations in non-English-speaking
countries. The tests are unfortunately extremely expensive (about $200-$250, or the equivalent of a
month's salary in many developing countries) and require commuting to inconvenient locations (for
testing centers), as well as waiting for weeks or months for results.

We launched the Duolingo Test Center in response to this, a way for anyone to certify language
proficiency from anywhere, and for only $20. The test only takes 20 minutes and is available on the
web, Android, and iOS. To prevent cheating, since we don’t require people to go to a testing center,
the Duolingo test is remotely proctored – we record the test taking experience by accessing the device's
camera, microphone and screen during the test.

The Duolingo English Test is increasingly accepted by prestigious universities and companies around
the world, including some departments of Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, the Max Planck Institute in
Germany, and Uber (for drivers in other countries to prove they can speak English).
12. What made Luis Von Ahn start Duolingo?
The whole thing started as an academic project at Carnegie Mellon between me and my PhD student
Severin Hacker. I had just sold my second company to Google, and we both wanted to work on
something related to education. Education is very general, so we decided to concentrate on one kind
that is in huge demand everywhere (except the US): language education.
 It turns out there are over 1.2 billion people learning a new language around the world. Now, the
majority of these people, like 800 million of them, are learning English, and don’t have very much
money. In fact, the reason they are learning a language is to be able to get a better job, or a job at all.
The majority are not learning French because they want to get ready for a trip to Paris over the summer.
They’re learning a language to get a job at a call center.
Here’s the crazy part about this. There’s a huge number of people that want to learn English, and most
of them can’t pay, but the ways to learn a new language typically require them paying, because
somebody has to make money. It’s either that you learn a language in middle or high school, which
means you're pretty wealthy because you go to a school that offers foreign languages; or you learn it
in college or adult classes, in which case you’re also pretty wealthy because you can pay for those; or
you buy some sort of software like Rosetta Stone or Open English, in which case you have $1,000 to
spare.
So, the largest part of the market was not being addressed because there was no great way to make
money from them. Most people who wanted to learn a language couldn't really afford the best ways
of doing it. We wanted to have a way to teach people languages for free. But not just free.
We wanted to have the best quality of language education, and offer it for free.
13. What are Duolingo's potential competitors according to Luis Von Ahn?
There are a number of language learning apps, but none that I am particularly worried about. Last time
we checked, we had about 10x more active users than our biggest competitor. But it’s not just because
we’re much bigger in terms of users that I’m not worried about them. Most of our competitors (Rosetta
Stone, etc.) have turned into marketing companies by now. Their business model is to charge users a
lot of money for their software, and because they charge so much, they also have to spend a lot on
marketing and advertising to acquire users. At that point, if you have a dollar to spend, it’s much better
to spend it on marketing than on making a better product. So, most of these companies spend 80% of
their budget on marketing and are usually not improving their product very much.

My main worry is a competitor we haven’t yet heard about, that somehow figures out how to truly
teach better than us. This is why we have a team whose sole purpose is to come up with the app that
will disrupt Duolingo in terms of language learning.
14. What was Duolingo's initial marketing strategy?
Before we launched, we had a pretty cool splash page where people could sign up to be invited to the
private beta. The splash page had a very clear message: unlike other language-learning software that
costs hundreds of dollars, Duolingo would be 100% free and therefore accessible to everybody.

At around that time I gave a TED talk about the Duolingo idea, which was viewed by over a million
people. This got more than 300,000 people to sign up for our private beta.
 After our public launch in 2012, our main marketing approaches have been word of mouth and PR.
By now, we’ve been written up in virtually every major newspaper in the world.

I’m proud to say we’ve never spent any money on advertising.

15. Has being from Guatemala affected any of Luis Von Ahn's career or business decisions or mentalities?
Being from Guatemala is one of the reasons I started Duolingo! Guatemala is a very poor country,
where most people don’t have access to high-quality education, and where learning English can
actually double somebody’s earning potential.
Today, I’m proud that Duolingo is used by the public school system in Guatemala.
(Duolingo is also used by Bill Gates, which means that the richest man in the world uses the same
same educational platform as poor children in a poor country. That is, more money cannot buy you a
better education. This is what makes me the proudest.)
16. Duolingo (German), despite being so good, lacks the nous required to teach someone grammar. How
does Luis Von Ahn plan to overcome this flaw?
Duolingo was built to offer an immersive experience rather than a grammar-memorization tool.
Unfortunately, most people dislike grammar, and we’ve noticed that the only grammar terms we can
reliably assume our users understand are “noun” and “plural.” That said, for German in particular we
do think more grammar explanations would help (it’s very hard to understand German grammatical
cases without explanations). This is on our list of things to improve!
17. Are there any new features in the works for Duolingo?
Yes, we have two pretty exciting releases coming up in the near future. One of them is related to
teaching conversation a lot better than we do now. We’re hoping to release it in the next 2-3 months.
The other one is a secret :)
18. Does Luis Von Ahn have any plans for optimizing Duolingo's vocabulary learning using spaced
repetition?
We already use spaced repetition. Duolingo has a pretty sophisticated model of what each user knows
and how well they know it. And this is not just for vocabulary, but also for concepts such as
pluralization and verb conjugation. So, for example, we know when is the next time you need to
practice a specific word or a sentence in the past tense in order to not forget the concept. Every exercise
you answer helps us update this model.
19. Will machine translation make learning a foreign language unnecessary? I don’t think so. We still
learn many things that could be easily done by computers, such as basic arithmetic.
20. What are the challenges of developing a Japanese course (for English speakers) on Duolingo? The
biggest challenge for us is teaching the writing system. Duolingo currently does not have a good way
of teaching new character sets, but we’ll be working on that soon.
21. Does gamification work in practice for companies or is it just an interesting academic theory?
Gamification works very well for Duolingo. People love playing games and there are particular
characteristics that make it so enjoyable. These are manipulated by casinos, for example, which give
 people the illusion that they have a high chance of winning in order to keep them playing (for
example, the probability of seeing a 2 out of 3 match in slot machines is much higher than it should
be). Making Duolingo feel like a game has helped us keep people motivated to learn a language and
to develop an interest in it in ways that would otherwise have been impossible.
22. What are some of Luis Von Ahn's productivity hacks? I work out for exactly 16 minutes every day,
but I do so at maximum speed (I run 2.5 miles). This keeps me healthy while not wasting a lot of my
time. Otherwise I don’t have very good hacks – I just try to focus and work hard.
23. Does Duolingo use Item Response Theory to evaluate users proficiency? Yes, we use it, especially in
the Duolingo Test Center!
24. What are the biggest challenges faced so far in the journey of Duolingo?
The challenges have changed as we grow. Apps in general, and especially education technology, have
a lot of trouble with retention – everyone’s fighting for people’s time and it’s very easy to create
something, spend effort and resources bringing people there, and watching everyone drop off / leave
within minutes. That has always been a big focus for us and while we do have good retention and
have been able to grow to 110 million users, it’s something we talk about every day!

Another challenge was being able to offer more than just a handful of languages with such a small
team. The answer was creating the Duolingo Language Incubator, a platform that allows volunteers
to collaborate to create language courses online.

We also knew teachers were reluctant to adopt many technologies into the classroom because the
vast majority are not very effective, students get distracted, and some teachers fear being replaced.
Introducing Duolingo for Schools was a challenge for this reason, but the reception and feedback
have been better than we ever expected and now we’re really enjoying helping teachers engage their
students effectively.
25. Why aren't there more rare languages on Duolingo? We have limited resources in terms of people
and time so we are forced to prioritize – and there are many languages out there! Unfortunately, not
that many people want to learn rare languages, as important as they may be. We do teach Esperanto,
Catalán, Irish, and soon Welsh and Yiddish.
26. What is your vision for an ideal language learning experience? A one-to-one human tutor that
understands you, your learning patterns and needs, and that you can access anywhere and at any
time.
27. Is it possible that Duolingo adds video clips of real native speakers for speaking exercises? Does
Duolingo intend to diversify the exercises? Yes, this is a strong possibility. We discuss different ideas
and features regularly at Duolingo and have a long list of things to test. This is one of them :)
28. Is it possible to get the progress bar back in Duolingo? It may come back at some point. We do A/B
tests and usually choose whatever helps keep people motivated to learn more, or whatever helps
people acquire more knowledge in less time. Sometimes results are counterintuitive but our
decisions are rarely based on opinion.
29. What does Luis Von Ahn have in mind after Duolingo? Potentially in parallel? One day, when Duolingo
has taken over all of education worldwide, my plan is to start brainwashing children into working for
me for free. After that I should be set.
30. What would Luis Von Ahn recommend smaller language sites who find it difficult to compete with
his free offer? Work on something else. Resistance is futile. :)
31. How did Luis Von Ahn get to product market fit with Duolingo? Did he run experiments? What were
his early market discoveries?
Before we launched, we tested Duolingo with random people outside of our office. The first test we
did was awful, but we kept going. We made changes based on every stranger that had trouble, and
by the time we had done about 25 tests, it was pretty good. After we launched, we have A/B tested
hundreds of features in order to increase user engagement. We don’t do much market research
(thought we probably should!).
32. What has been one of your greatest teaching experiences?
I really enjoyed teaching 15-251, “Great Theoretical ideas in Computer Science.” It was usually taken
by 200 students every semester, and was usually the hard class they’d ever taken in their lives. As
such, I enjoyed being machiavelically evil. Here’s an actual student evaluation that captures what the
class was like:
When you dedicate so much time, and so much of your grade, to a single class, working on a single
assignment, all to appease some diabolically cruel professor, you stop thinking clearly. You become
paranoid. Von Ahn has become something like Big Brother among us students. We are wary of doing
anything which might even slightly contradict the rules. We are --sometimes literally -- constantly
looking over our shoulders with paranoid delusions that Von Ahn could be lurking behind every
proverbial corner. This may be the image that Von Ahn wants to convey, and it may be necessary to
*control* the behavior of his students and ensure that they do not cheat; but I was always taught
that it is often ethically superior to be *respected* rather than *feared*; though it is probably
pragmatically superior on Von Ahn's part to be *both* respected and feared. I do respect him. But
Jesus do I fear him.