We are transferring what we have learned to all the other courses like Korean and Chinese,” Hagiwara says.

“We learned a lot of lessons when we designed the Japanese course. And compared with other courses, users learning Japanese have the highest active streaks, or the number of straight days using the app. The investments paid off, with Japanese curriculum shooting to the app’s fourth most popular course in just a few months, Hagiwara notes. Parting from traditional methods of starting with the language's confusing letters, the company decided to reinvent the way it teaches, introducing highly contrasting sounds together, and popular borrowed words like “bus” and “ice cream” to make the learning process easier. And unlike the textbook environment, they recognize that their students are casual mobile users - keeping things fun and light is key. It repeated that lesson again in developing Japanese, which launched in May, considering the language’s three alphabets and very different grammar structure. Screenshots from Duolingo's new Korean course. company, which had to adapt not only to different benchmarks for vocabulary and grammar but also technically developing a system to incorporate a non-Roman alphabet, as it did with Russian and Hebrew. While most language apps, especially in Japan and Korea, are built on rote memorization, Duolingo brings in words and conversational phrases from the get-go.īut designing a course for a non-Western language was something of a new beast for the U.S. One of the successes of Duolingo over apps made by local course developers is that it has the user - an English speaker - in mind. Duolingo has even created special lessons themed around K-pop and the Olympics, with the 2018 Winter Games taking place in the South Korean city of PyeongChang. That’s evidenced by more than 209,000 fans who signed up to get alerted of the Korean course, developed in collaboration with linguaphile volunteers.

I think Korea as a country is doing a good job at promoting its culture,” Hagiwara says. “If you look at Asia, Korean is becoming more and more popular.

Korean in duolingo