Related: The 3 Entrepreneurial Traits Kids Should Learn for a Successful Life The company's CTO and co-founder is Severin Hacker, who began working with von Ahn as a PhD student at CMU. Users can visit to see when the next courses will be available.ĭuolingo is the brainchild of Luis von Ahn, a Guatemalan entrepreneur and MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant winner, who teaches computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She says that they have received about roughly 30,000 applications from bilingual contributors around the globe who want to help make up the Duolingo curriculum. Related: Saxbys and Drexel Team Up to Promote EntrepreneurshipĪs for the next languages in the queue, Gotthilf says the goal is to one day offer every language in the world. The app also offers English instruction for speakers of 18 other languages including Russian, Japanese and Polish. Guatemala is also using it to test the English proficiency of their English teachers.Įnglish-speaking app users can choose from French, Dutch, Danish, German, Irish, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish (the most popular with more than 25 million users). The governments of those countries reached out seeking ways to use utilize Duolingo to teach English in their public schools, says Gotthilf. classrooms follows the implementation of Duolingo pilot programs in public schools in Costa Rica and Guatemala, where high-proficiency English teachers are scarce. 'A lot of teachers have told us that students see it as a reward for their work.' The app has also proven to be as effective as a semester-long university language course, according to an independent study conducted by City University of New York and the University of South Carolina last year.

Gotthilf attributes the app's success, and its growing base of over 50 million users, to three main reasons: the exhaustive A/B testing that goes into every aspect of the app (from whether to teach verbs or adjectives first, to how many tears Duo, the green owl mascot, should shed over lost lives), the fact that it is 100-percent free and that it's fun.

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