Duolingo is a Free, Crowdsourced Language Learning App (Video)

This is an interview with Duolingo engineer Franklin Ditzler. He's not a smooth marketing guy getting all rah-rah about the company and what it does, just a coder who enjoys his job and seems to like where he works and what he's doing. Note that Duolingo is a free language teaching tool, and they seem determined to keep it free for language students by selling crowdsourced translation services to companies like CNN and BuzzFeed.

Duolingo founder and CEO Luis von Ahn is an associate professor in the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department, and was one of the original developers behind reCAPTCHA. Google acquired ReCAPTCHA in 2009 for "an undisclosed sum," a bit of history that led TechCrunch to speculate back in 2011 that Google would buy Duolingo within six months -- which didn't happen. But don't despair. It's still possible that Google (or another big company) might absorb Duolingo. We'll just have to wait and see -- and possibly improve our foreign language skills while we wait. (Alternate Video Link)

Comments

Example

[CanHasDIY]

Just came across an example of one of my complaints:

During the German lesson, I was asked to translate "Ein Mann trinkt Wasser." I accidentally wrote "The man" as opposed to "A man" or "One man."

Now, since I already have a basic knowledge of the language, I knew why I was wrong immediately; but would a person who's not already familiar really learn anything from the following "tip?"

You used the definite "The" here, instead of the indefinite "One".

Huh? That's just confusing, especially considering that we're talking about the very first lesson in the German group; someone who is not familiar with words having different modes (i.e., most uni-lingual Americans) would find that extremely difficult to understand.