The app’s highest level of achievementallows the user to express themselves in a limited way in familiar situations - in that they will be able to communicate though they will not be fluent. His ambition is to develop a service that is as good as having a one-on-one tutor. The large drop-off rate – which includes Bill Gates, who said in the Reddit interview that he gave up without giving a reason – is a by-product of online learning, says von Ahn. Of Duolingo’s 70m registered user, about 15 million are active every month. In the UK, around 2.5 million have signed up. The average graduating senior from the United States does not really know how to add fractions which is also ridiculous for something that literally every single day of your life for 12 years you had to do … they could learn how to add fractions in probably a month.” “Even in developed countries, even here in the United States, people have to study maths for 12 years and at the end they barely know how to add fractions. “There are one billion adults in the world that don’t know how to read and write and we are in the 21st century, and that is unfathomable to me.” Von Ahn says education around the world could work much better. It requires you to have a data plan for your phone … but it is the closest I know how to get equal access.”īehind the company lies the belief that there is something broken with educational systems around the world, in that students can often leave school with limited knowledge despite 12 years of learning or that teachers can find it difficult to focus on a mixed-ability class of students.īy using algorithms to estimate how well users work on an exercise, people who fare better will get different questions than those that find experience difficulty in the Duolingo classes. “My main philosophy is that everyone should have equal access – and unfortunately not even Duolingo is equal access because it requires you to have a phone. In the case of education, something amazing happens when everyone can have access to the same education,” he says. “It has a lot to do with where I grew up because I did grow up in a very poor country, in Guatemala. Having grown up in Guatemala, he wanted to develop an educational opportunity for which those without money could learn a language, advance their chances of getting a job and increase their income potential. Luis von Ahn uses Duolingo on his iPhone.

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