Duolingo

Duolingo
Duolingo-image.png
URL duolingo.com
Registration Free
Created by Antonio Navas, Brendan Meeder, Hector Villafuerte, Jose Fuentes, Luis von Ahn, Marcel Uekermann, Severin Hacker, and Vicki Cheung
Launched 30 November 2011 (2011-11-30)
Current status Private Beta

Duolingo is a free language-learning website and crowdsourced text translation platform. The service is designed so that as users progress through the lessons, they simultaneously help to translate websites and other documents.[1][2] As of May 2012, the site offers Spanish, French and German courses for English speakers, as well as English for Spanish speakers. They plan to add Italian, Portuguese, and Chinese.[3] Duolingo launched in private beta on 30 November 2011, and has accumulated a waiting list of more than 300,000 users.[4] As of 19 January 2012 (2012 -01-19), the service has translated over 45,000 sentences.[citation needed]

The project was started by Professor Luis von Ahn (creator of reCaptcha) and his graduate student Severin Hacker, and then developed also with Antonio Navas, Vicki Cheung, Marcel Uekermann, Brendan Meeder, Hector Villafuerte, and Jose Fuentes.[1][5] The project was originally sponsored by Luis von Ahn's MacArthur fellowship and a National Science Foundation grant[6][7] and is mainly written in the programming language Python.[8]

References

  1. ^ a b "Meet Duolingo, Google's Next Acquisition Target; Learn A Language, Help The Web". TechCrunch. http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/12/duolingo/. 
  2. ^ "Translating the Web While You Learn". Technology Review. http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37487/. 
  3. ^ "How The Creator of CAPTCHA Will Translate The Entire Internet". FastCompany. http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678985/how-the-creator-of-captcha-will-translate-the-entire-internet. 
  4. ^ "We have a blog!". Duolingo Blog. http://blog.duolingo.com/post/20142464554/we-have-a-blog. 
  5. ^ "The Duolingo Team". Twitpic. http://twitpic.com/4sjlpm. 
  6. ^ "Online Education as a Vehicle for Human Computation". National Science Foundation. http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1054630. 
  7. ^ "Learn a language, translate the web". NewScientist. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328476.200-learn-a-language-translate-the-web.html. 
  8. ^ http://www.quora.com/What-language-is-Duolingo-written-in

External links