Duolingo tunes in to Chinese learners with English course

Duolingo, a United States-based language-learning platform, plans to launch an advanced monolingual English course, seeking to further cater to Chinese learners and betting big on the rapidly growing Chinese market.

"Our aim for this course is to equip users with fluent English for both everyday life and professional settings," said Yang Danchen, head of learning and curriculum for Duolingo in China.

Compared to the previous version, the course will focus more on building immersive learning scenarios for users.

Applying a "using English to learn English" approach, Duolingo said the new course will comprehensively cover listening, speaking, reading and writing, to cultivate a native English thinker's mindset.

Since entering the Chinese market in 2019, Duolingo established its first international office in Beijing. Currently, China has grown to be Duolingo's seventh-largest global market and one of its fastest-growing international markets. During the past three years, Duolingo's active Chinese users for English learning have grown by 126 percent in number.

"China is one of the important international markets for Duolingo. From tuning into local user needs to leverage AI, we hope to help more Chinese users explore the world through language," said Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo.

The platform is a language-learning app that utilizes games to test the reading, listening, writing and speaking skills of users and provides audio and vocabulary examples related to real life. It especially caters to casual learners or those who are complete beginners who like to try different languages.

Currently, Duolingo offers over 40 languages and the app has been downloaded over 500 million times worldwide. According to its recently published second quarter financial report, Duolingo has reached record highs in daily active users, monthly active users and subscribers, with a 50 percent year-on-year growth rate of its 74.1 million monthly active users.

Xiang Haina, marketing director of Duolingo Asia-Pacific, said: "Duolingo's steady user growth is intricately tied to our business model. We are offering all courses to users for free. This 'free' approach has led to Duolingo's robust user growth and widespread word-of-mouth. Additionally, we are exploring educational areas beyond languages, including mathematics."

Duolingo has been ramping up efforts to seek new growth opportunities. Seeing the rising interest among the youth toward Cantonese, Duolingo launched its first dialect course — Cantonese for Mandarin speakers — in 2022. As of July 2023, the Cantonese course had nearly 3 million users in China, ranking third in popularity in the country, surpassed only by English and Japanese.

As Duolingo brings languages to Chinese users, it is also committed to promoting Chinese to the world. Duolingo's data showed that over 9.8 million active users are learning Chinese on its platform and the language is ranked eighth as Duolingo's most popular courses.

According to the company, its revenue is mainly from subscription fees, advertising and its Duolingo English Test, which gained a huge following among Chinese students.

The Duolingo English Test (DET) is used as proof of students' English language proficiency for applying to universities overseas. It has changed traditional English testing norms by offering tests at a quarter of conventional costs — anytime, anywhere. Currently, over 4,500 top global institutions accept the test, including 99 of the top 100 universities as ranked by US News and 14 universities in the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities.

"China is an important market for DET," said Wang Chen, marketing head for DET in China. "Our goal is to transform the English testing landscape, making it a bridge rather than a barrier, empowering numerous Chinese students."