<story><title>Duolingo becomes first VC-funded $1B Pittsburgh tech startup</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/03/google-funded-duolingo-first-1-billion-start-up-from-pittsburgh.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>orliesaurus</author><text>They have users... but the tool(app), other than being really cute and well made, is super basic...
You can&amp;#x27;t expect to be fluent enough in a language JUST with Duolingo, at most you will be able to read a few sentences and spit out a few basic sentences and words.&lt;p&gt;Is that enough? Definitely not. Not for me at least.
They basically give you the &amp;#x27;hello world&amp;#x27; of a language.&lt;p&gt;I speak 5 languages (learned through school and life choices) but when I tried to learn a 6th on Duolingo I felt like the experience was not good enough for me. A tutor or a class would probably be mandatory and using Duolingo just for re-affirming some basic concepts would be a nice to have, like a companion app..but they have to be able to let teachers create their own lessons.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>newguy1234</author><text>This is the big problem in edtech. If you want to gain tons of users in edtech then you just need to make a bunch of very basic type materials which allows users to not get frustrated (and leave) and allows the platform to create lots of easy to develop content. For anyone serious about edtech, this is a problem because only having a basic understanding of a subject is pretty much useless. At a certain point, you need high-quality (college-level equivalent) type content. For edtech companies, that content is both harder to make and thus more expensive. At the same time, the userbase interested in that level of material declines rapidly.</text></comment>
<story><title>Duolingo becomes first VC-funded $1B Pittsburgh tech startup</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/03/google-funded-duolingo-first-1-billion-start-up-from-pittsburgh.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>orliesaurus</author><text>They have users... but the tool(app), other than being really cute and well made, is super basic...
You can&amp;#x27;t expect to be fluent enough in a language JUST with Duolingo, at most you will be able to read a few sentences and spit out a few basic sentences and words.&lt;p&gt;Is that enough? Definitely not. Not for me at least.
They basically give you the &amp;#x27;hello world&amp;#x27; of a language.&lt;p&gt;I speak 5 languages (learned through school and life choices) but when I tried to learn a 6th on Duolingo I felt like the experience was not good enough for me. A tutor or a class would probably be mandatory and using Duolingo just for re-affirming some basic concepts would be a nice to have, like a companion app..but they have to be able to let teachers create their own lessons.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>guptaneil</author><text>I agree that Duolingo is not sufficient to become fluent in a language, but I’d argue that no app could be. Immersion is generally the only way to become fluent.&lt;p&gt;Having said that, I’ve found the learning experience on Duolingo varies wildly depending on the language. French, for example, has an excellent curriculum with stories and live conversations with bots. Dutch or Hindi on the other hand are extremely lacking.</text></comment>