Duolingo ( DEW -oh- LING -goh ) is a freemium language learning platform that includes website and language learning applications, as well as digital language ability assessment exams. Starting November 2016, language learning websites and apps offer 68 different language courses in 28 languages. The app has about 200 million registered users worldwide.
Video Duolingo
Histori
The project began at the end of 2009 in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn (reCAPTCHA creator) and graduate student Severin Hacker, and later developed with Antonio Navas, Vicki Cheung, Marcel Uekermann, Brendan Meeder, Hector Villafuerte and Jose Fuentes.
The inspiration for Duolingo comes from two places. Luis Von Ahn wants to create another program that serves two purposes in one, which he calls the "twofer". Duolingo initially did this by teaching its users a foreign language while they translated simple phrases in the document, even though the translation feature had been removed.
Von Ahn was born in Guatemala and saw how expensive people in his community are to learn English. Severin Hacker (born in Zug, Switzerland), Duolingo co-founder, and Von Ahn believe that "free education will really change the world" and want to give people an outlet to do it.
The project was initially sponsored by the MacArthur Luis von Ahn fellowship and the National Science Foundation grant. Additional funds were then received in the form of investments from Union Square Ventures and Ashton Kutcher, A-Grade Investments.
Duolingo started its private beta on November 30, 2011, and compiled a waiting list of over 300,000 users. On June 19, 2012, Duolingo was launched for the general public. Due to popular interest, Duolingo has received many investments including a $ 20 million Series C investment led by Kleiner Caufield & Byers and a $ 45 million Series D investment led by Google Capital. Duolingo has 95 staff members, among them many Google employees, and operates from an office in the Pittsburgh East Liberty neighborhood.
On November 13, 2012, Duolingo released their iOS app via the iTunes App Store. This app is free to 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 educational app in the Google Play store. In 2017, the company has a total fund of USD $ 108.3 million. Duolingo received a fifth round of $ 25 million in July 2017 from Drive Capital, with funds directed towards creating initiatives such as TinyCards and Duolingo Labs.
Maps Duolingo
Business model
Duolingo has a freemium business model and uses ads on both Android and iPhone apps. The Duolingo course includes periodic ads that users can remove by paying a subscription fee. To earn money, Duolingo initially used a business model sourced from the crowd, where content came from organizations (such as CNN and BuzzFeed) that paid Duolingo to translate it.
Starting in 2017, Duolingo runs ads on both mobile and desktop apps.
Language courses
Course for English speakers
As of April 11, 2018, 28 courses are publicly available in English, three of which are languages ​​built (including two fictional languages). Ordered by the number of learners, they are:
Five courses for English speakers are under development (sorted by percentage progress towards completion):
The language in beta is available on the website but not in the app. Duolingo currently offers 2 fantasy languages, Klingon and High Valyrian.
Duolingo offers language courses for speakers of languages ​​other than English, but all available languages ​​offer at least English as a course. The Catalan and Guarani courses are exclusive to Spanish speakers.
Course available in other languages ​​
Starting on March 6, 2018, the following languages ​​are available for non-English speakers:
Infrastructure
Duolingo uses many services in its Amazon Web Services product suite, including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, nearly 200 virtual instances on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). The server backend is written in the Python programming language. A component called Session Generator is rewritten in Scala by 2017. Frontend is written in Backbone.js and Mustache. Duolingo provides a one-page web app for desktop computer users as well as smart phone apps on Android (both Google Play Store and Amazon Appstore), iOS App Store) and Windows Phone platform. 20% of traffic comes from desktop users and 80% of mobile app users.
Investor
Duolingo is funded by Union Square Venture Partners ($ 3.3 million in 2011), New Corporate Associations ($ 15 million), Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers ($ 20 million), Google Capital ($ 45 million), A-Grade Investments, Ashton Kutcher, and Tim Ferris.
Game elements
Duolingo mimics the structure of video games in several ways to engage its users. There is a gift system where users get lingot, in-game currency that can be spent on features such as character customization or bonus levels. There are public leaderboards where people can compete with their friends or see how they accumulate against the rest of the world. The level system Duolingo uses is XP (experience point), a numerical system that represents the skill level of the user. The badge at Duolingo is an achievement gained from completing a specific goal or challenge.
School usage
Duolingo provides "Duolingo for Schools" with features designed to enable teachers to track their students. In 2012, Duolingo's effectiveness study published with the authors concludes that the use of Duolingo for Spanish studies is more effective than just classroom learning, but this effect is lacking for more advanced learners. One of the reasons put forward for this is that the direct translation method mainly used by Duolingo is more applicable to words and phrases that are simpler than complex ones; the simpler can be translated in a more precise way from one language to another and thus more conducive to Duolingo's direct translation method.
Recognition and rewards
In 2013, Apple chose Duolingo as its iPhone App of the Year, the first time this award was awarded to educational apps. Duolingo also won Best Education Startup in the 2014 Crunchies, and is the most downloaded app in the Education category on Google Play in 2013 and 2014. By 2015, Duolingo is announced as the 2015 award winner at Play & Learning categories by Design to Improve Life.
See also
- Computer-assisted language learning
- Language education
- Pedagogy language
- List of flashcard software
- List of language self-study programs
References
External links
- Official website
- Extracts from Q & amp; A with Duolingo founder about their plans for 2017
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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