BREAKING LANGUAGE BARRIERS

Macarthur Award recipient, inventor, crowdsourcing guru, educator – and not yet 40. Luis von Ahn whose thinking most of us interact with on a daily basis in the form of the CAPTCHA, is a man on a mission to teach the world to speak as many languages as it

ENLISTING CROWDSOURCING TO HELP bring language to the masses is the kind of thing you’d expect of a computer scientist. Thing is, it seems to be working – and how.

It’s the idea that is driving the growth of Duolingo, a language-learning website and app company Luis von Ahn co-founded with his Swiss partner back in 2012. Designed in the form of a game, the crossplatform app requires just a few minutes of daily activity and currently has about 150 million users.

Currently associate professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, Von Ahn regards education as one of his driving forces. But why – particularly given his scientific background – language education? “Because language, unlike say mathematics, can have an immediate impact. Just knowledge of English allows you to earn 25 to 100 per cent more.” Why Swahili, and why now? The lingua franca of East and Central Africa, Swahili is said to be spoken by as many as 100 million. It has been adopted as an official language of Kenya, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And, as a consequence of the African diaspora, it is widely distributed globally. But despite its importance as a regional, cross-cultural language there were the usual practical difficulties of setting up a teaching programme. Fortunately for Duolingo, the American government’s humanitarian organisation, the Peace Corps, had started using Duolingo and was keen to lend a hand. The Corps is active in the part of the world

where Swahili is spoken and its personnel could act as on-site volunteers.

Similarly, a language such as Ukrainian was not a language that Duolingo would have picked, but it fitted the Peace Corps’ needs.

Next on the list for African languages, says Von Ahn, is probably Zulu. It’s been reported that there is interest in Afrikaans, too.

“Africa is a continent where we have less penetration now. A lot of it is to do with being slightly slower in the adoption of smartphones.”

Setting up a language learning app represented a steep learning curve. The two engineer/computer scientists certainly had the pedigree to put together the back end of the operation, but content was another thing altogether. So the two of them did the obvious thing: “We read a bunch of books on how to teach language. We were fortunate that what we came up with worked very well.”

But teaching was something Von Ahn kept returning to.

“We wanted to start teaching people reading and writing. Already, a billion adults in the world don’t know how to read and write.” But they know how to use an app. And although smartphone penetration is a limiting factor, that situation is improving.

Duolingo’s roster currently lists 88 courses. The first group of courses the organisation offers are as diverse as Spanish for English speakers and Klingon (the language spoken by the Klingons in Star Trek).

Choosing languages to add to the programme starts with how in-demand a particular language is. The first few were obvious. Many English speakers want to learn Spanish, for instance.

An important consideration is what makes learning a language difficult – and that’s not just about the language you intend learning. “What language you know matters greatly in what you find difficult in another language,” says Von Ahn. “For example, in Russian there are no articles. And ‘it’, to a Spanish speaker, doesn’t exist.” Other practical difficulties include the different character sets used for languages.

Two other important elements are the volunteers available and the difficulty of the language. Tone- and inflection-based Mandarin can be tricky to teach using visual methods.

“Smaller languages are difficult. An example could be Navajo.”

It became clear that they couldn’t go it alone. “We needed access to people who could help,” he admits.

So language courses are designed using an “incubator” method based on volunteer input. After the intial few courses were up and running, to decide on what courses to add next, Duolingo set a benchmark of 50 requests for a particular language. “Pretty soon we had 100 languages that had at least 50 requests. What we found was that, with some of those requests, people actually said they would help.” It was turning into a crowdsourcing operation.

“Now we have got about 100 000 people who want to help us.”

We each have our own reasons for wanting to learn another language – travel, for one – but the most compelling one, it seems, is economic. It depends on the country. “A country in which (there is) a clear language that is very useful for business that is not the native language. In Brazil, English fulfills that role – it is key to making money. Also Mexico.”

There are cultural reasons why many take on European languages and, with the migration of people across Eastern Europe, German is a hot topic. Sometimes, it’s done on a whim: “On Saint Patrick’s Day every year, the number of people learning Irish doubles.”

For Von Ahn, setting up Duolingo was the realisation of a dream. It helped that, financially, the timing was right. “I was in a fortunate position. I just sold my second company to Google.”

But as Duolingo grows, how can it expect to remain free? What funds it?

“At the end of each lesson, there’s an advertisement,” says Von Ahn. “That really helps.”

And the organisation is also turning its skills to an important area of potential income generation: language proficiency testing for institutions worldwide, online. “We are doing our own English language certification. It’s a business that’s worth 10 billion dollars a year.”

Typical charge for this service is $250 and Duolingo’s equivalent costs $50. “Thirty US institutions this year are accepting our certification,” he says.

A lot of what underlies Duolingo comes from his early years in Guatemala, where he was born and raised.

Born into a relatively well-off family, he admits: “I was not poor. But I saw a lot of it.” He draws parallels with Guatemala and South Africa in that respect.

For this reason, accessibility is a key aspect of his language education programme. “It is completely free – and always will be. It is important that it is free.”

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