Language learning app Duolingo makes waves in the Chinese market

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Intended to help Chinese speakers learn English, Duolingo has launched both simplified and traditional Chinese versions.Featuring an interface in simplified Chinese and a wide variety of American English lessons, the app surpassed 1.5 million downloads after its first week on the Apple store. The company currently offers English lessons for French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Romanian, Hungarian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian and Hindi speakers.
“Their goal is in bringing free language education to the world and impacting the largest number of people whose lives could be greatly improved by having access to learning a new language - and this often means English.”

I download it and tried it for 5 minutes, it sucks. I wonder why so many people use it and also left a 5-star ratings reviews. Their goal obviously is strive to become famous and earn lots of money from advertising.

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It’s good to a point. People love it when they get started, and you see huge numbers of people signing up and saying they love it. But there is a big dropoff, too. Right now, NONE of the people I have friended there, have stuck with the program. I know one person who finished the spanish tree. Finishing the tree takes a long time, and gives you a good grounding in some basic words, but WILL. NOT. LET. YOU. COMMUNICATE in the language to any appreciable degree. I am telling my friend he needs to come over here to LingQ to get actual proficiency with Spanish.

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And LingQ needs to make our app a little appealing for beginners, some easy victories to encourage them until they can understand the power of structured listening and reading the way we do it. Thanks for the comment.