If you want to know “How Duolingo Creator Turned Learning a Language Into a Game”, then read on to learn more about it. So let’s start.
DuoLingo App Link in app Store
Leaning into all of the latest trends, we came across an oversized bright green owl that has flown across all social media pages, and we found out that it’s the mascot for Duolingo. Luis von Ahn co-founded the biggest online language learning platform in the world, and his executive career began far from any tech hub. He is 45 years old, and his single mother raised him in Guatemala, where she instilled the value of problem-solving from a young age.
Von Ahn started Duolingo as a gamified application to teach English; he has since expanded into more languages, and with the help of ads and subscribers, he is now running a public company worth more than five billion dollars.
Luis told the media that back in the days when he was 8 years old, computers were hard to use, and he did not even have a mouse but just a keyboard. It came with a user manual, and he himself figured out how to use it. With time, he got particularly good at it, good enough to eventually wind up at Duke University.
After that, he went to Carnegie Mellon University to get his doctorate, where he would help create a way for websites to tell the difference between humans and bots.
He also invented CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, but Von Ahn wanted those efforts to go beyond fighting spam, so he invented reCAPTCHA, where every time you type a word in the CAPTCHA web form, it would help digitize books.
So how did that come to be? In 2009, Google bought reCAPTCHA to help digitize books, which meant that Luis really did not have to work anymore, and he just wanted to do a project that was related to his passion, which has always been education.
Two years later, Von Ahn, along with his Ph.D. student at the time, Severin Hacker, launched Duo Lingo. Von Ahn says that each exercise in Duolingo is about 15 to 20 seconds, and a lesson is about two minutes. Duolingo offers 100 courses across more than 40 languages for free.
Von Ahn has also used this language app to learn French, Portuguese, and Japanese. So, what motivates Von Ahn the most is the positive impact on the world, which is an enormous number of users learning on Duolingo.
Von Ahn is now running experiments by testing all the time to see and create new ways to teach most effectively by updating their courses to tweak the content to help users learn better.
The co-founder has introduced a daily streak feature to encourage daily use by offering a more updated leaderboard through which users are able to see their friend’s daily progress.
Von Ahn said that the country he grew up in was a poor country where people living there barely learned how to read and write; therefore, he wanted to do something that would give equal access to education to everyone.
Duolingo’s reach went well beyond Van Ahn’s hopes, with more than 74 million monthly active users this year, which was 50% up from the year before. Von Ahn says there are users in every single country, from refugees to billionaires like Bill Gates.
Today, Duolingo is no longer just a language learning platform; instead, they are expanding into math and music, and part of its mission is to make education accessible, so Duolingo relies on ads and subscribers to offer the basic platform for free to all users.