Duolingo’s Next Move? Teaching Your Kids How to Read

 

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet

Getting adults around the world to compete in Bronze to Diamond leagues for kudos from an adorable green-feathered owl was not enough for Duolingo. Now, the language-learning firm is coming for a whole new market with a new app that it claims will help children as young as four years-old to learn how to read and write – and it is all, in true Duolingo style, for free.

Duolingo ABC will launch as a test in the UK before rolling out to the US and in other languages, and will be initially aimed at helping young children learn the script of their native language. But the long term vision, explains Duolingo’s founder Luis Von Ahn, is to create a version of the new feature for adults – potentially helping the 775 million people who cannot read worldwide.

“There is a huge demand globally, and mostly in developing countries,” says Von Ahn, “but illiteracy is an issue even in the UK. We can make a real dent in this market.”

For now, though, the app will be designed with a young, English-speaking audience in mind. Working with literacy experts, Von Ahn assessed the difficulties of mastering the English script – “how do you explain that ‘T’ and ‘H’ put together sound like ‘TH’ in English?” he asks, stubbornly pushing his tongue between his teeth – to develop a learning process that is engaging for his future little users.

The process sounds simple enough: Von Ahn patiently explains that first, the user will recognise the letters, then the words, then the sentences and finally the paragraphs. Duolingo ABC will use a variety of approaches to teach children to read. These include phonemic awareness, focussing on the individual sounds in words; phonics, which deals with the relationship with written symbols and spoken sounds; and also work on fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

But it’s not all about the academic procedure. To make sure that his new public effectively learns how to read and write, and even enjoys the process, the Duolingo founder also chose to invest a lot of his time to work with game designers. “We learned a lot from gamification when it came to teaching a second language in Duolingo,” says Von Ahn, “and a lot of these learnings we applied to teach people how to read. The main challenge in both cases is to keep people motivated.”

 

Whether you are a Duolingo aficionado or a casual learner who opens the app every so often ahead of a holiday abroad, you will know that its design is indeed closer to Candy Crush than it is to a grammar textbook. It offers incentives in the form of points and rewards; it puts you in direct competition against other users in leaderboards; and it sends you messages of encouragement every few minutes. “And progress bars,” adds Von Ahn. “As soon as you see a progress bar that is half full, you just want to fill it up.”

This gamified design is crucial, and keeping the tool fun was one of the main challenges in creating Duolingo ABC, he continues. (The app is set to launch in coming months, although an exact date has not yet been given). And that’s not without reason: while making sure that users keep coming back is certainly important to achieve Von Ahn’s educational vision, it also is key to sustaining Duolingo’s current business model.

That’s because one of the things that Luis Von Ahn is famous for is his promise that he would keep education free. Users don’t pay to use the current app, and they won’t pay for the new literacy tool either. In that, Duolingo sets itself apart from all other digital language-learning companies: its main competitors Rosetta Stone and Babbel start at $179 (£145) and $6.95 (£5.60) a month.

So how is Duolingo monetising itself? Well, it all comes down to the old saying: “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.” In other words, advertising. And this is why the more it expands its user base, the healthier Duolingo will be financially.

Blair Hanley Frank, technology analyst at ISG, explains that, as Duolingo successfully applied the mobile game formula to language learning, it ultimately brought in a large base of users. “And Duolingo’s user base are people with strong signals of buyer intent – in the case of the language learning tool, for instance, they are likely to spend on international travel,” he says. “Those are all valuable eyeballs to advertise to.”

This was not always the model imagined by Von Ahn. He launched the company in 2012 with a provocative idea: that he would capitalise on the output from his users’ learning process to translate content for clients. Essentially, the sentences clumsily translated by users in the app would be checked against other students’ and used as a sellable translation if shown to be correct.

The idea was good – but unrealistic: “Translating for the web was a bad business to be in,” says Von Ahn. “We would have needed a ton of contracts to start making revenue.” And so, plan A was scrapped in 2014. A couple of years later, ads were introduced, followed in 2017 by monthly paid subscriptions… to stop seeing ads.

In 2016 post, Von Ahn said: “I don’t like ads any more than you do.” Yet the strategy has paid off: this year, the company made $86m (£70m) in revenue – more than double from 2018. “They have a solid model proving that it is possible to build a robust business that is ad-supported and doesn’t charge customers,” says Hanley Frank.

Von Ahn, however, defends that the new literacy tool does not fit into this strategy. “We don’t know yet how this ties in with our business model,” he says. “Our strategy is to get lots of users and then figure out how to make revenue. What will probably happen, like with Duolingo, is we will only start making money after four years of experimenting.”

Von Ahn says the company won’t start charging customers any time soon. “This is a mission-driven project,” Von Ahn says. “We want to make language learning and literacy accessible to all. If we started charging people, half our user base would drop.”

There are lessons that can be learnt elsewhere within the industry. Babbel, for example, started as a free language course in 2008 before switching to a monthly subscription model because ads weren’t enough to create revenue.

This might be why not everyone believed in Von Ahn’s vision. He mentions that many investors advised or predicted that he would one day have to make his users pay for his service – “so we had to be picky and find those who believed in our idea.”

In that sense, Von Ahn’s new literacy tool might be part of his plan to test and find alternative sources of monetisation that align with his vision while the company is wealthy enough to invest without knowing exactly what the financial plan is.

“We already have enough revenue that we can invest in something without knowing exactly how we will monetise it,” he says. “So in terms of future prospects, our main thing is to continue teaching languages, and now literacy, for free.” This might strike as an unusual stance among fellow Silicon Valley start-ups; but Duolingo was created in Pittsburgh after all.