The resulting app asks users to answer multiple-choice questions and type in phrases. Since he was a computer engineer, not a teacher, he did what computer engineers do: he used algorithms to test users’ experiences on various exercises. Was it better, for example, to learn plurals before adjectives or vice versa? Von Ahn decided that there was only one way to find out: see how students responded and see what worked and what didn’t. He concluded that no one really knew what worked or how people really studied and learned a new language. As he told attendees at a recent Quartz conference in New York, each book he picked up claimed to offer the best system for learning a language. He consulted “French for Dummies,” enticed by the promise of attaining fluency in no time flat. Von Ahn knew nothing about the language education business when he started Duolingo three years ago. The thirst for language education is enormous: currently there are 1.2 billion people learning another language, but while Americans and Canadians may want to learn a new language for travel or as a hobby, non-English speakers in the developing world - some 800,000 of them - have a more compelling reason: they want to escape poverty, get a better job and make more money. “It has a lot to do with where I grew up because I did grow up in a very poor country, in Guatemala,” he told The Guardian ,“Something amazing happens when everyone can have access to the same education.”
Instead, he decided to try his luck educating people who were struggling to better their lives. After selling two companies to Google, he had enough money to retire. He achieved a measure of fame (and a good chunk of money) for co-inventing the CAPTCHA security system - the often difficult-to-read letter and number sequence computer users are required to duplicate to prove that they’re not a bot. (Rosetta appears to be targeting Duolingo in an online ad which declares: ‘Rosetta Stone – More Than Just a Free App.”)Ī computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, von Ahn, 35, is considered to be one of the pioneers of crowd sourcing. (Online Rosetta Stone membership runs about $200-$300 a year.) So they made Duolingo available online for free.
The founders of Duolingo - Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker - were inspired to create a language program because they believed that “free education will really change the world.” For many people, existing programs like Rosetta Stone and Open English (a South African system) were too costly. Learn a language online by playing games for free - that’s the selling point of Duolingo, a startup designed especially for people in developing countries, many of whom are learning English to improve their job prospects.
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