Luis von Ahn: "How we use technology to teach better"

I am the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo. We're the most popular language learning platform in the world. I think the main things I talked about were some of the things we do to make Duolingo as engaging as it is, and also how we use technology to teach better. For us, it's really important to be able to say that because we don't charge for teaching Duolingo, it's entirely free. We actually want to teach a language, so we spend a lot of time measuring how well we teach and improving how well we teach. We use the data from all of our users to try to improve how well we teach, and I spoke a lot about that. I think that's the key to being a successful entrepreneur. Great. If you could tell me a story about Duolingo and your journey as an entrepreneur. Duolingo started between four and five years ago. I was in a very fortunate position in my life. I had just sold my second company to Google, and I wanted to do something related to education because I've always had a passion with education. Now, education is very general, so I decided to concentrate on language education, which is very big around the world. There's 1.2 billion people in the world trying to learn a foreign language. What we started with is, can we teach languages? The language learning market is very interesting because most people that are trying to learn a language are trying to learn English in order to get a job, and they're usually of low socioeconomic conditions. At the same time, most of the ways they were to learn a language before Duolingo were very expensive cost about $1,000. This was kind of ironic. Most people trying to learn a language were trying to get out of poverty by learning a language, but it cost $1,000 to do so. We wanted to have a completely free way to teach languages, and that's what led to Duolingo. We launched it. It is now the most popular way to learn languages, and we are about doubling our users every year. It's been a great ride. You mentioned your passion for education. What was it exactly about language that made you say it's a big area? Languages are very interesting. They're one of the few things that people learn both in school and outside of school. If you look at most things like math, people only learn math in school. It's very rare that somebody learns math outside of school, but languages is both learned in school and outside of school, so that was nice. The other thing about languages is that they can have a direct economic impact, particularly learning English. Somebody who learns English in a non-English speaking country can earn between 25% and 100% more salary by just knowing English. It's very nice that it has a direct impact. Again, comparing with math, I very much love math, but you usually don't learn math to have a direct impact. You usually learn math in order to learn physics, in order to become an engineer or something. There's many steps, whereas languages has a direct impact. Reading and writing is another thing that is similar to that, and I think we're probably going to do literacy after languages, but the reason we started with languages was because it's a large market and it can have a very direct impact on people. It's very cool. Talk a bit more about that direct impact. What are some of the most amazing examples that you've seen with users of the language? We have a lot of really amazing examples. For example, in the recent refugee crisis, we're seeing a lot of Arabic speakers in Europe learning the local languages. This is an interesting tidbit where the most learned language in Sweden happens to be Swedish, and it's refugees who are learning Swedish. That's very interesting. Another interesting tidbit, there are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the US than there are people learning languages in the whole US public school system. That's another cool one. Another one is we have more people learning Irish on Duolingo than there are speakers of Irish. That's another one. We have ten times as many people learning Irish on Duolingo than there are native speakers of Irish. There's a lot of really cool stats about this. What language are you learning right now? Portuguese. Portuguese, and why? I've always had a thing for Brazil. I like Brazil very much, and it was actually very interesting. I gave a talk in Brazil, and at the end of the talk, and there were about a thousand people in the audience, at the end of the talk, I made a mistake. People asked me, what language are you learning? I said Portuguese, and they said, oh great. But I had just started learning Portuguese with Duolingo, and they said, great, we're going to ask you all the questions in Portuguese, and you're going to answer the questions in Portuguese. This was the first time I ever spoke Portuguese. The first time I ever spoke Portuguese was in front of a thousand people. I understood 100% of the questions, and I answered very brokenly, very broken Portuguese, but I was able to answer, but I was very nervous because it was the first time I ever actually spoke. Quite an exam there. When using Duolingo, sometimes as a user, you come across some very funny sentence factors. One of the learning coffee is, what are some of the funniest sentence factors that you come across? There are a lot of really funny ones. I mean, one of the ones, you know, we have the funny ones because a lot of times we're trying to teach you a given word, and you only know a certain set of other words, and there's not much we can construct other than a very funny sentence. So, I mean, there's one that I always like, which is something like, behind the bed lied the body of her husband, or something like that. It's like really weird. Yeah, yeah, there's a few of those that are just... I like in the Swedish course, there's a lot of... When our courses are built by volunteers from all over the world, the Swedish course was being built at the same time as the Norwegian course was being built, and I guess there's a huge rivalry between the two. And so, in the Swedish course, there's a lot of insults to Norwegians. They're funny insults, but they're not... And same in the other way around. So in the Swedish course, you learn things... Like when you learn the word for lazy, you learn, you know, Norwegians are lazy. And, you know, you just... It's very funny. So let's talk a bit about humor in languages, which is from the range of 20. What are some of the ways that you see humor being used differently across the world? Or is it similar? Yeah, I mean, we don't do much with humor on Duolingo. I mean, the volunteers that make the courses sometimes add different things. But yeah, I think wordplay is something very different between the different languages. We try to keep that away, wordplay, we try to keep it away because it's hard for beginners. So we try to keep that away, but we do see a lot of humor in the sentences themselves being used. Just very strange situations that they depict. Cool. So let's talk a bit more about the community. And actually, can you tell me a bit about the role of the community? Yeah, the community, we have an amazing community. First of all, the fact that all our languages are added by volunteers. So we don't add languages. We make a platform and then volunteers add the languages. That is amazing. We love our community. They are very passionate about adding new languages. And the reason they're doing it is because they believe in free language education. And we have about, so to add a language to Duolingo takes about 500 hours of work, of human hours. And we have about 50,000 people who have applied to Duolingo to do this. And before they apply, we say, are you really, really sure? Because it requires hundreds of hours of your work to do this. And people do it regardless. And I think they believe in our cause. Great cause. So one month ago, one of the languages added was Klingon. Yeah. So can you tell me how many people are learning Klingon right now? We haven't launched it. We're working on it, but we haven't launched it. We're also working on High Valyrian from Game of Thrones. Actually, the guy who created the languages for the Game of Thrones is creating the High Valyrian course for Duolingo. So we're going to launch that. A lot of people ask us why it is that we do these constructed languages. For example, it's strange that we teach those, but we don't yet teach Japanese. We probably should teach Japanese. And the reason is because those are easier to teach. And so that's why we're doing it. And there are big followers of Game of Thrones or Star Trek and their languages, so we've been adding them. So for the future of book math and Duolingo, where do you get your inspiration from? How do you take it to further? We're trying to have a big impact on the world in terms of things we teach. We're trying to really teach people languages. We may start teaching other things, so we're probably going to start teaching literacy. There are a billion adults in the world that don't know how to read and write, and we think we can do something about it. About 50 million of them have access to a smartphone, so we think we can do something about it. Our inspiration, we get it from our users and from what are the things that people actually need to learn. That's where we get our inspiration.