Finally, we provide an overview of the infrastructure we built for reliably serving audio to millions of language learners every day. Using this framework, we show that Amazon Polly has provided a superior experience. We also describe our quantitative and qualitative framework for choosing voices to ensure high-quality material for our users. In this post, we outline why we chose to use TTS instead of human recordings. To some, this approach might seem counterintuitive: shouldn’t people learn by listening to a native speaker? Duolingo uses text-to-speech (TTS) to provide high-quality language education. If exposed to incorrect pronunciation, learners develop their listening and speaking skills poorly, which compromises their ability to communicate effectively. When teaching a foreign language, accurate pronunciation matters. In their own words, “Duolingo is the most popular language-learning platform and the most downloaded education app in the world, with more than 170 million users.” I completed several levels of Portuguese then arrived in Lisbon and needed help finding my accommodation and realised I had no idea how to say ‘Where is this street?’ however I could say ‘The sauce boils’.ĭuolingo is good for convincing yourself you’re making progress in a language but until you get out there and try and speak with real people, there will always be something important missing.This is a guest post by André Kenji Horie, a software engineer on Duolingo’s Learning Team. In my first lesson of Hebrew I was asked to learn the phrase “Is love coming?” Huh? My main problem with Duolingo is that it doesn’t teach the most useful words and phrases. Have they actually tried using what they learnt in the real world? People enjoy the courses because they get a kick out of scoring points and viewing their progress, but they’re just progressing through the Duolingo method. Their courses are well-loved because the gamify language learning, but I actually feel they’ve gamified it too much. Duolingo is very popular but I have my reservations about how effective it really us for becoming genuinely proficient in a language. Should we get excited about the possibility of Duolingo offering Arabic? I would like to create a Duolingo-like course for Arabic, so if you want to find out when that is available, please leave me your email address.Īnd if you want to learn to read Arabic using an easy method, check out Lesson 1 of Arabic Reading Course. I’ve been running for 6 years and I’m planning to expand to other areas of Arabic learning (outside of just the reading and alphabet). Duolingo have 11 languages ‘in beta’ or ‘hatching’ and Arabic isn’t even one of those. I hate to break it to you, but I don’t think we’re close. Have you got another theory? Comment below or email When will Duolingo start offering Arabic courses? As Will Ward puts it, “try to rent a flat using Modern Standard Arabic and people will look at you like you’re speaking Shakespearian English in Tony Soprano’s New Jersey”. Many Arabic language courses focus on ‘Modern Standard Arabic’ but this dialect is only used in formal situations such as news reports and political speeches, so Duolingo perhaps know it won’t cut it for being useful for everyday usage. Perhaps Duolingo don’t know which to choose and don’t want to offend any particular region by not choosing theirs. There are courses for languages that use different scripts, such as Hebrew and Russian, but they’re much less user-friendly because you are thrown right in at the deep end and shown words in the new script, which are difficult to memorise when you have no frame of reference for the pronunciation.Īnother reason might be the vast array of Arabic dialects. The rigid Duolingo template doesn’t currently feature a method for learning a new script. What could be the reason for Duolingo’s reluctance to jump on the Arabic language bandwagon? Despite this, there is still a real lack of good Arabic learning resources. For example, since 2002 the number of people studying Arabic in American universities has tripled (according to the MLA). The demand for Arabic learning has increased dramatically in recent years. It’s not even in Duolingo’s list of ‘incubator’ languages that are currently being worked on. Duolingo users have been posting on the site’s discussion forums asking for it for years, but to no avail. However, Arabic, the world’s 5th most spoken language, with around 280 million native speakers, does not feature. There are currently 27 available or ‘coming soon’ languages, including some quite niche languages such as Indonesian (43 million native speakers), Hungarian (13 million native speakers) and even Irish. Read a review here.ĭuolingo is arguably the world’s most popular online method for learning a foreign language. 2019 Update: The Duolingo Arabic course has finally launched.
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