Comment by beardedwizard 3 days ago
The trick to competing with Duolingo is to _actually_ teach people new languages that they actually learn, rather than giving away the illusion that they are learning a new language on Duolingo.
Yes, it takes commitment to master a language. In the case of Japanese, which traditionally takes the most weeks to master when coming from English, we made Japanese Complete based on frequency analysis to help speed up the process of acquisition. With 777 kanji carefully selected by frequency you can get 90% coverage of kanji in the wild. This is about a third of the "daily use" set of ~2200 kanji so the process is greatly accelerated. If you're interested in seeing what 777 kanji look like, I recently created a small kanji quiz game that quizzes by English meaning words [0].
there is an underserved audience that wants an engaging way to learn a language and are disillusioned with Duolingo already
Duolingo is for people that will never travel for more than a weekend once every other year, and its fine that its entertaining for them or their last minute crash course to feel less ignorant. Lately I've seen it used by people that want to feel closer to their roots.
But I don't think people actually engaging with other cultures and going abroad to do so are still using this. On the other hand, LLM's are really good at slang and colloquialisms, something neither Duolingo or an in person teacher will reveal to you.
> there is an underserved audience that wants an engaging way to learn a language and are disillusioned with Duolingo already
I'm just very unsure whether it's possible to design an effective language learning program that is "engaging" in the way that Duolingo users want it. At the end of the day, you should feel engagement from using the language (and seeing yourself improve) and not from external gimmicks.
True but then I remember that most people are just paying for the feeling. There's millions to be made actually teaching people stuff (learning is hard) but there are billions to be made making people feel like they are.
That said, I do think betting against Duolingo will pay off long term. But the put options are so expensive... probably better to just short the shares
> rather than giving away the illusion that they are learning a new language on Duolingo
I disagree that it's an illusion. People are learning a new language when using Duolingo, but 5-10 minutes/day means it will take a long time before they are proficient. Someone else linked to the state department website showing 550-690 hours of learning required on the English adjacent languages.
Is it?
At the end of the day, whether it's effective or not, Duolingo sells the feeling that you are learning a language to people. Winning a competition with Duolingo means doing better at making people feel like they are learning a language -- the strategy to win against Duolingo probably involves watering down the learning even more, to better sell the feeling.
A good way to think about it is look at some organization that wants to be effective at actually teaching its employees a new language, like the state department:
https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-lang...
20 hours a week of intensive instruction.
Spanish 30 weeks Cantonese 88 weeks Turkish 44 weeks
This is what it actually takes.