Duolingo

Duolingo is an American educational technology company that produces learning apps and provides language certification. Duolingo offers courses on music, math and over 40 languages, from popular languages such as English, French, and Spanish to less commonly studied languages such as Welsh, Irish, and Swahili. Other services include the Duolingo English Test certification program; Duolingo ABC, a literacy app for children. The company uses a freemium model, with its optional premium service, Super Duolingo, being ad-free and offering more features. As of February 2023, Duolingo was the most popular language learning app in the world based on monthly downloads, with almost 13.4 million users downloading the app that month. A systematic review of research on Duolingo from 2012 to 2020 found comparatively few studies on the platform's efficacy for language learning, but identified several studies that had reported relatively high user satisfaction and enjoyment and positive perceptions of the app's effectiveness. Subsequent studies have concluded that Duolingo is effective for language learning and the acquisition of vocabulary. History The idea for Duolingo originated in 2009 by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn and his Swiss-born post-graduate student Severin Hacker. Von Ahn had sold his second company, reCAPTCHA, to Google and, with Hacker, wanted to work on a project related to education. A driving motivation was Von Ahn's upbringing in Guatemala, where he saw how expensive it was for people in his community to learn English. Hacker (co-founder and current CTO of Duolingo) believed that "free education will really change the world" and wanted to provide an accessible means for doing so.